I realise my little 'for' loop accuracy thing doesn't actually increase accuracy, it does however lessen the jump of timedelta based custom movments at low fps

I think i've suggested this before, but either nobody read it or i didn't make myself quite clear enough

I feature i think would REALLY help and save tons of time in the animation editor would be an option in the import frames dialogue that creates a new angle X big every X frames imported.

So say, i make a 3D rendered walk cycle sprite, i want it to have 8 directions so when i render the animation, i just render all 8 directions in the one big long animation, that way the hotspots are all in the right place when i import it.

BUT the problem with doing it this way in construct is that i have to manually enter every angle for the animation, then import the big long animation with all the directions into the one angle, and cut each direction out and paste it into the proper angle it's supposed to be in.

Sure it's not -too- much work for an 8 direction sprite, but for a 64 direction one (which unfortunately i like using) it's a nightmare.

The whole process would become mind-numbingly simple if when importing my big long animation i enter something like, 'every X frames, create a new angle of X degrees'

Then in one action, my giant 64 direction animation is all filled out with every direction's animation working properly AND it has all the hotspots in the right place!

What a great idea!

It's not so difficult

You got iso down? Can you show me? Also how do you fix the layering problem?

Yeah I looked at that to see how you did it a while ago, but i ended up using my own method (albeit quite similar)

I kinda want to make the Z ordering using families, that way i don't have a huge list of events just dealing with overlapping. Although what you made there still is quite good

The only drawback with using families is events such as, if Blue is overlapping Blue, i find, using any other picking events and/or action after that tend not to work so well

Yeah, i've got pretty much all the basic code down for my iso-ish engine, EXCEPT the one problem i'm having is proper Z sorting when using different height levels. If you're making an iso game where you cannot jump and there's only one flat play area, then the 'for each (ordered) by Y coordinate acsending - bring to front' works perfectly.

But my main problem is sorting the Z orders of objects that are higher than others, if i could find i way to sort by TWO (or more) criteria so for example:

For each terrain (ordered) by Terrain.Y THEN Terrian.Value('Height') - bring to front

if that was possible i'm pretty sure ALL my laying problems would be solved in one event!

Once that problem is solved, i'll be able to start working on concept and art and actually turning it into a game (Although I'm still having problems making physics objects move faster at the same ratio that timescaling slows down, but that's another topic )

So yeah, I could give you some pointers, but i'm no expert either lol, you're probably up to about the same spot that i am

i'm pretty sure collisions update between frames

so with your animations, you want to basically control when the animation goes to the next frame?

I haven't worked much with animations on construct yet cause they seem kinda broken and the features i need aren't really in it (yet?), but would you not be able to say, always set animation frame to some variable, and when you want it to progress, just add one to the variable?

I could have interpreted you wrong though

Also i realise it's quite a roundabout way of doing things, a 'next frame' feature would be handy in some cases i expect

I don't know if this is any help, but if i'm ever in the situation where i need a little more accuracy in my movement engines, i make a little 'for' loop

Make a global varible called like, 'MovementAccuracy'

change the sampling to linear

And then at the start of layout (or change initial value) set it to the amount of accuracy you want

I usually set it to around 50, the higher it is, the more accurate you will get, although i'm not sure the cpu load it would have if you made it too high

Then do something like this

when right arrow is down

--for "Move" from 0 to global('MovementAccuracy')

== Set Player.X to Player.X + 200 * (timedelta / global('MovementAccuracy')

(the -- indicates a subevent)

(the == indicates an action)

Basically, the 'logic' runs 50 times per tick (or however many you set your global to) as opposed to once per tick, but you still get to use timedelta and use all your cool motion blur and timescaling stuff!

Apply that to your jumping code or moving code or whatever and it's pretty much pixel perfect

I had an example running at 1 fps that only went one pixel out

Or another method i suppose would be having variables like: "JumpStart" and "JumpMaxHeight" and make it so when the player jumps, the jumpstart records the Y value at 'ground level' and set jumpmaxheight to the jumpstart minus however high you want him to jump.

Then if the difference between the player's Y and jumpstart goes beyond jumpmaxheight, manually set the distance and code in the falling. Although i suppose this method would be a little harder if you weren't using a custom movement, and for REALLY low frame rates it might still require the use of that 'For' loop i just mentioned

I hope i made myself clear

I was doing something similar to that method, it didn't -exactly- work as intended, but i don't need any last name business, that was just an example to illustrate, what i need it for is that layering problem i have a thread about in the help forum

It's quite the halting setback

Hey, this request relates to the problem i've been having with the Z layering with my pseudo Z axis bizzo.

If there's already a way of doing this please ignore (and then tell me how to do it! )

So like if it was a database you could sort by say, age THEN by last name.

It would sort the people ordered by age and for each age they would be listed alphabetically.

So is it possible to do the same thing with the 'for each (ordered)' event? Cause I'm sure that would completely fix my problem

On a side note, what do commas do in the expressions? because adding a comma in the for each (ordered)'s expression thing then followed by some other critera doesn't come up as in incorrect expression, except it doesn't seem to change anything

Anyways construct rocks!

yeah that looks ok, not really the look i'm going for though, in any case i'm gonna leave the lighting and sprites till i get this layering problem 100% fixed, right now i'd say it's at about 90%

the '* 2' certainly helped out a bit although i'm not entirely sure how.

So if anyone has any more ideas i would gladly welcome them?

Am i even doing this the best way it could be done?

Yeah those boxes are just old sprites i made for something else, i just threw them in for something to use, and the player is just a placeholder as well, once i get a character made in lightwave/blender/truespace (whichever i decide) i'll render animations and walk cycles in ALL 64 DAM DIRECTIONS which will take years to get working in construct (hence my animator bar suggestions a while ago )

Anyways yeah, these are all placeholder type sprites and the only two glitches i can find in the Z layering are jumping in front of the tower and jumping when behind the big box

I don't really know how to fix those ones.....

Any suggestions from the almighty devs?

Also, deadeye, what are you doing with the lighting there exactly? it does look pretty cool, i was thinking of eventually making just some generic semitransparent shadow objects that i could put in different places like walls and floors to give more depth and realism to the scenes

dynamic lighting had occured to me too but i dunno how well it would go down as it's not really a top-down/side-on type view

Dave, I dunno how but you seem to have fixed my problem with the exception of jumping in front of the tower i made in it and jumping when behind one of the big boxes, it acts a little funny...

The collision thing, as far as i'm aware, is when the player overlaps the obstacle just as the player's bottom variable falls below the obstacles top variable, which shouldn't be possible in theory as the collisions are reset if that happens...

Also a similar thing happens with disabling the collisions, when the player is pushing against a wall and tries to jump over it, he stands on top of it but cannot go any further than the edge, as though collisions are still active, if you get a run up however that problem doesn't exist

I was going to make a little loop that pushes the player out of the colliders when he shouldn't be there, but i found with that loop, when pushing against an object from the LEFT ONLY, the player constantly gets pushed out and twitches

I also made the detector things stay on the ground because the collision objects aka, 'footprints' of the obstacles are always going to be on the ground

I'll post a more up to date cap right now, i've cleaned a little of the code up and got rid of a few useless detectors.

Here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?eymiwbyml2y

Thanks for the help everyone! we're slowly getting there

Soon i can start the real work....