alastair's Recent Forum Activity

  • If you can't find someone to do it, it's often best to try giving it a go yourself.

  • I don't feel the game should be any easier, most of the deaths I've had so far seemed reasonable. However since the level layouts are so random I've found that the difficulty and flow varies considerably from game to game, sometimes you have really safe and easy spots but then other times there is much more intense moments.

    I've played 30 games so far, the main thing I'm not enjoying so far is the speed of the game -- I prefer a faster pace in action/arcade games like this. What contributes to this slightly slow feeling is: climbing speed feels a tad slow, especially when it seems like you spend most of the time doing it (even if it was just 10% faster lol). The in-between screens that aren't actually the game feel like they take too long (startup/gameover etc.) when I just want to keep playing the game, especially considering that people are going to be playing and dying over and over.

    I am really enjoying the atmosphere though and trying to reach greater heights! The enjoyment of discovering new areas etc. The hatchery, and the doors that take you too weird areas are really cool.

    Also do some of the random items do anything special (like the boots/gloves/wand), or are they just meant to be tossed around?

    This death made me laugh. Could I have used those exploding potions against them?

    <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1024727/scirra/m29.png" border="0" />

  • These are my first impressions after a few games, I haven't yet grasped or mastered the game's entire system yet so I won't offer all of my thoughts as they are still developing, but I think my first impressions are still valuable.

    The input/keyboard system doesn't feel very good. The controls don't feel streamlined enough, some of the inputs just feel meaningless and it weakens the immersion of the game, most notably how the shop has 4 keys to buy when you use none of those keys elsewhere and how there is a button to cycle through the inventory but does nothing else. I think the reason some the controls are bad is because you didn't want to pause the game while the inventory/shop are open, so you created additional inputs. Of course as you play more you also adapt to the way the input works and it doesn't become too much of an issue, but I still think it could be better.

    My suggestions/thoughts about how it might be improved:

    - The potion amounts in the inventory menu are unnecessary, the amount of potions is already displayed with icons in the bottom right corner of the screen. Couldn't the life bottle be shown there too?

    - Is the inventory screen needed? If not, the 6 slot icons could be in a line at the bottom or something, which you can cycle through. If yes, then maybe it would be best to disable movements etc. so you can just use the arrow keys to move around the inventory (this saves having to have a cycle button) and also maybe an item description could be displayed as you cycle? I think I had a glove at one point but don't know what it did. A similar thing could also be said of the shop/witch.

    - I don't feel that having to hold left or right against a wall is necessary, I think while you're next to a wall you should automatically attach to it. Since you'll still slide down anyway, but just means you don't have to press left/right while also pressing Up. Is there ever a time where you don't need to hold left/right next to a wall anyway? Maybe it's just a D-Pad issue as holding 2 directions on a controller D-Pad is dum and sometimes doesn't work (i.e., you fall a lot by accident even when your trying to hold left and up) lol.

    The graphics are enjoyable for a resolution so small, there's tons of nice dynamic lighting effects and most things are highly animated. So far the small sprite sizes didn't cause too much difficulty in discernment, only sometimes when enemies overlap other things. The colour choices are all pretty pleasing. The effects for everything is satisfying and impacting: the subtle movement dust effects, the double jump violet glowing state, the fall effect, the screen transitions, etc. are all fantastic.

    I got a runtime error just after I tried starting a new game, this happened after I'd already died a few times though. I'm assuming this is a layout change bug or something with Construct though. Also is it possible to put all those .wav files a in a folder rather than have them swarming around the .exe file?

    I liked how the levels were different each time I went in, although one time there were balloon-like objects that took me to the top of a few areas really easily and it felt like I was cheating!

    Is it possible to have some video options? Like different scales/sizes, also are you able to put an option for that depixelize effect in as well (I'm really curious about how it would look!)?      

    By the way this is how I mapped my controls to my USB snes pad, if anyone has a better setup show me!link

    Even though a lot of this post I spent criticizing it, I am enjoying this game so far! <img src="smileys/smiley4.gif" border="0" align="middle">

  • There's no way to set the frame rate in C2, it will try and run at 60 fps everywhere it is played.

    Are you sure? I don't see why it should be capped at 60. Many gamers use 120hz screens, so it would be cool if it could over 60 for them -- especially if that Hz becomes more popular in the future.

    I was excited but now I'm let down, as it only seems to work with the popular but low quality d-pads controllers like the Xbox 360 one. I hope that it'll allow for more inputs later.

    I wonder if once these gamepad API things are in the "normal" browsers we'll see some more consistency between them, but that doesn't really seem likely considering other browser differences at the moment.

    Same results as you for Xbox controller on Chrome/Firefox on Windows 7.

    Buffalo SNES USB gamepad: in Firefox it said "Gamepad connected" but then no other text appeared. On Chrome, I get no response at all.

    My PS3/PC arcade stick works well in Firefox (ID:e8f-310d-GAMEPAD 3 TURBO) but like the SNES one it gets no response in Chrome. Don't feel there's much point in listing the inputs, as there's a lot of arcade sticks and many of them are custom built.

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  • Response to first question:

    scirra.com/forum/performance-tips-question_topic48873.html

    Performance wise non-power-of-two textures are no different than power-of-two textures. It was the same with CC.

    The reason for power-of-two textures was purely for memory efficiency.

    In CC non-Power-of-two textures were reported by the runtime to take as much video memory as the closest 2^X texture would take. Most graphics cards now can handle any sized texture as well as 2^X textures. Whether the texture is re sized up to a 2^X texture in memory or not is hardware specific.

    R0J0hound is right, the texture size affects memory usage and not runtime performance.

    The power-of-two thing is annoyingly complicated: on desktop, you can probably forget it completely, almost all desktop computers now can support non-power-of-two textures. However, mobiles and tablets have weaker, simpler hardware and might still internally use power of two, but you can't easily tell, because the graphics card can make the support invisible (it will pretend it's using a non-power-of-two even if behind the scenes it's using power of two). TBH, I'd forget about it, it's a pain - just test your game regularly to make sure it works on mobile and you'll be fine.

  • Ashely's attention for C2 is 2D.

  • Thanks Rojo.

  • bump

  • There seems to be quite a few topics that posted in within a day, and some of those are pushed back a page. I think it's also nicer to be able to see maybe 3 or so more topics per page on the forums.

  • I'm pretty sure he'll add collapsible/expandable events eventually, as it's an essential feature and was in Construct Classic too.

  • scirra.com/manual/134/performance-tips

    ize, angle or opacity of sprites/tiled backgrounds has no effect when hardware acceleration is in use

    So does that mean, the practice of using 2^X sized images no longer matters like it did Construct Classic? For instance using multiple 256x256 sized images rather than a single 400x250 sized image?

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alastair

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