Yeah, color filter doesn't quite cut it. There's no "remove filter" option to blink an object red or something, so I have separate animations for such things.

Edit: Wait.. what do you mean with "remove filter"? The filter is white by default, so just set it to white?

This is the correct answer. If you want to blink something red, alternate between red and white. Setting the filter to white shows the sprite with it's natural colors.

Perhaps something like "dampening," where the object doesn't transfer the full amount of energy it receives. For example, a wood block would absorb more energy than a metal block, but a clay block would absorb even more than wood. A negative setting would absorb force, but a positive setting could actually add force.

With a high positive setting you could make bouncing surfaces that don't need to move to impart energy. It could stay locked in one spot, but if a moving object came into contact with it it would be knocked away. In other words an object could hit it at low velocity, but bounce away at a higher velocity. Like bumpers on a pinball table, or mortar launchers in the bottom of a tube that launch a ball as soon as the ball touches it.

I suppose it might be handy to have settings for how hinges would work as well. I think the hinge stiffness setting should be made into an editable property. That way you can easily change the stiffness and angular dampening to create different kinds of chains and ropes, and I suppose Chain, Rope, and Elastic could be added to the drop-down for material types.

I dunno, I can't really think of any other settings off the top of my head but I'm sure there are some others that could be considered for making different materials.

I don't know about allready programmed materials. It would be better to have values for friction, bounce, etc.

Actually the way I was thinking of it would be to have values for Friction, Bounce, etc. that you could fill in on your own, but there could be a drop-down list of pre-made settings that filled those values in for you. Like a quick-pick list or whatever.

Short answer: You can't really do that, at least not as it is right now. There's a "World Friction" setting in the properties for your Physics behavior, but it only has two settings. And as you might be able to guess it affects the whole world, no matter which individual Physics object you set.

Separate "materials" that you could apply to individual objects (like wood, rubber, ice, metal, etc.) would be pretty sweet, but if that's even something being considered for the future it's likely quite a ways off.

One way to get around it for now is to just play around with the linear dampening and the mass. You can get some slidey effects that way, it just takes a bit of tweaking. Don't tweak the surface you want to slide on though, tweak the object that you want to slide.

Everyone keeps saying "alterable values." They're Private Variables

"Alterable values" are what they're called in that "other program."

well its imposible realy to get the same results with a particle flow source, the flame is rendered like a sort of blobmesh which selects a colour and alpha channel opacity based on its age, the flame also has an editable coolmap which makes you able to give a sort of effect to the fade away, ill post a little exe with it if youd like itll clear things up a bit

No need, I've played with the flame object myself before. I don't know about a 'blobmesh' or anything like that but it sounds like you know better than I. I just remember it looking kinda particle-y, but that was a while back and I could be remembering wrong.

You can still play Oblivion on older hardware.

http://www.oldblivion.com/

Holy smokes, I'm definitely going to check that out

GTA:SA is another one I've been playing recently that didn't run on my previous card at all. It's running okay, but I can't run it at full quality on all the settings. Still it gets a little choppy sometimes and there are more than a few surprise fences and hedges that magically materialize five seconds after I crash into them, but it's still a fun game.

...from six years ago!

As some of you may recall from my then-constant bitching, I used to have a video card made out of scrap lumber with the words "geeforse lol" scribbled on the side in crayon. It had no pixel shader support and I was a very unhappy caveman because my fellow Constructors were going hog-wild over all these fancy effects. That is, until I got myself a brand-spankin' new (well, it was still shrinkwrapped anyway) e-GeForce 6200 so I could make my happy Construct dreams come true. What a marvel of ancient technology it turned out to be! Gentlemen must have popped their monocles and spun their top-hats over the bleeding-edge visuals it provided them back when the 6200 was first released in Victorian times.

<img src="http://i36.tinypic.com/1zpr3ur.jpg">

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is I've been a bit behind in my gaming and I'm trying to catch up. It's still kind of frustrating to find good games that run well on my card, but one I've found rather enjoyable is Morrowind.

Yeah, I know it's probably an old and boring game for many of you now, but hey, it's new to me. So here it is, my impromptu and unsolicited review of Elder Scrolls: Morrowind.

It's, uh, pretty cool. I tried running it on my old card once and the framerate was so choppy that it was completely unplayable. But now I'm pleased to report that while still a little choppy (but only outdoors at full draw distance) it's very much playable, and I've been very much playing it.

I must admit, at first I didn't see what all the fuss was about. It took like 45 minutes just to get the character creation and opening tutorials done. I wasn't much impressed. But I stuck with it, and stuck with it some more, and got my ass handed to me several times before I got the feel of the game.

It's surprisingly deep and detailed. I can't recall ever playing a game before where you didn't walk into a house and clear every little object out. It's strange to me to have a game with so much useless stuff lying around. In every game I played before this, if you found a fork, you'd be needing that fork later for some puzzle or whatever. In Morrowind, there's a freaking fork on every table and you don't ever need a single damn one of them. It's just... bizzare.

The apprehension I feel when playing is also new. I find I have to exercise restraint quite a lot. I'm used to feeling that in games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, where everything is claustrophobic and you don't know what's around the next corner or what's behind the door. But this game makes me nervous about going outside in the open, which is weird. It's safe indoors... but stray too far from town and you're ambushed by weird creepy things.

At any rate, I'm enjoying it quite a bit, and if you've never played, I suggest you do. And if you have played, suggest some fun stuff to check out or do (I taunted Stargel in Balmora into attacking me just because I liked the way he dressed. Nobody was selling black pants or a pimped-out shirt like his so how else was I gonna get those clothes other than off of his corpse? ).

Also, feel free to suggest any favorite games you may have from a few years back that my fancy new card might be able to handle. And I'll report back in another few years when I've finally had a chance to play Oblivion.

MMF2 has a special designed "flame object" ( http://www.create-games.com/download.asp?id=6857 ) to make realistic fire. Its very handy since fire is an often needed effect and its very hard to make in other ways. Its very diferent from the particle object. Sadly it brought the framerate down so bad that it was very hard to use in games.

I was under the impression that the Flame object was just a custom-made particle object that is limited to just a few specific tasks. With the right tweaking you should be able to get similar effects from Construct's particle object.

Speaking of hot spots, I'd deeply love to give the coordinates numerically, as well as having a way to 'flip' them. It's always a pain when converting animations from right to left that don't have a center hotspot.

I always just make my sprites with one red pixel on them so I don't have to fudge around with where to put my hotspots on import. It makes the whole sprite importing thing way easier, like an assembly line.

Having a couple "flip hotspots" and "flip image points" checkboxes next to the flip buttons would be handy though.

Also, upon reading someone else's thread about physics collisions, i would like to also suggest, alongside with the collision toggle on and off, it would also be nice to be able to choose WHICH physics objects affect a certain physics objects collisions, for example a family of walls causes collisions whereas a family of say the player's limbs (if you're doing a ragdoll thingy) don't collide with each other.

Now that would be lovely

you can still trick it though, by going back a little after every bullet is shot.

I thought that was kinda the point... that it's a system by which you have to be tricky to avoid getting hit.

I think I might make this a built-in expression or something, because it's very useful for gameplay and the formula is pretty complex.

Damn, I hope so I'm completely lost on the math.

Works pretty flawlessly though. I'd say a mix of all three styles would probably be good for waves of grunts or enemy ships or whatever, but if they all had perfect aim that would make for a very frustrating game. Better for bosses and mini-bosses, or smaller groups of enemies.