Some electronic components (specially capacitors and coils) begin to make noises under some conditions due long usage cycles (when their life cycle is near to it's end). How old is your graphics card?

In case it's not that old, it may just be defective components.

I'm pretty sure all (or nearly all) DX9 compliant cards are capable of using compressed textures. And if that wasn't the case, I'm pretty sure the drivers should have fallback mechanisms to send the texture uncompressed. It's all a matter of checking it out.

I'm not convinced DDS stays compressed in video memory because I thought it's impossible to read from compressed formats efficiently on the GPU - is there documentation somewhere which says it really does do that?

It stays compressed in VRAM and decompressed is made on the fly because the hardware has specific native support for the DXTn compression formats.

To reduce the amount of memory consumed by textures, Direct3D supports the compression of texture surfaces. Some Direct3D devices support compressed texture surfaces natively. On such devices, when you have created a compressed surface and loaded the data into it, the surface can be used in Direct3D like any other texture surface. Direct3D handles decompression when the texture is mapped to a 3D object.

Documentation on the MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb204843(VS.85).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb204842(VS.85).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb206307(VS.85).aspx

DXT compression isn't loss-less, but if it were possible to add the support to either use loss-less PNG or lossy DXTn for an specific texture and use it when needed, it'd definately be a great improvement over the current VRAM usage.

Damizean

Wow! Thank you so much!

One question. Does ATI Radeon support this DDS format? Because as I understand it's NVIDIA own format...

It has been included in the DirectX specifications since DX6.0, it should be supported by any graphics card compliants with the specifications. Anyway, I'm talking about the possibility of using them in the future, it's not implemented as of yet.

When you run the game, DirectX loads the PNG files effectively as uncompressed BMP files, because textures cannot be compressed in VRAM. So the source file format affects neither the .cap file size nor the runtime speed or VRAM usage.

I'm sorry for being a little late here, but you can use DDS textures for compressed textures, as they remain compressed even in the VRAM with no cost in perfomance whatsoever. The graphics card have built-in support for them since 2004, and seeing how rapidly the perfomance is consumed, perhaps it would be a good idea to look at it...

What is it

Effect : Refraction effect

Author : H�ctor Barreiro Cabrera

Minium Pixel Shader : 2.0

Description

This effect refracts the objects underneath it through the use of a normalmap texture. This effect is useful for distortioning images to make effects like glass or water refraction. The key difference with the distort effect is that this one the distortion over each axis is controllable through the normal's color channels.

The channels assigned to each axis are the following:

- Red   : X
[ul]
	[li]Green : Y[/li]
	[li]Blue  : Z (unused)[/code:3pvs1iil][/li]
[/ul]
From there, the color applied on the normal map will determine the amount to displace. 127 (0.5) means no distortion, 255 means the pixel will be displaced to the right, and 0 means the pixel will be displaced to the left.

The amount of displacement is also configurable through the parameter in the effect's properties. It will tell the shader how much the pixel will be displaced when doing a full displacement, and it will be interpolated accordingly.

For a more info on how the normal maps work, refer to the example and/or google for "Normal mapping".

[h2][b]Download[/b][/h2]
[url=http://www.aethermachine.com/construct/shaders/Refraction.fx]Download the effect.[/url]
[url=http://www.aethermachine.com/construct/shaders/Refraction.cap]Download the example (Made with Construct 99.4 beta).[/url]

Disclaimer: The example images contained within the example file were not made by me, but downloaded through a Google search. I claim no rights about the images, they belong to their authors.

[h2][b]Screenshots[/b][/h2]
<img src="http://www.aethermachine.com/construct/shaders/Refraction_1.jpg">
<img src="http://www.aethermachine.com/construct/shaders/Refraction_2.jpg">

Hmmm, actually, I've messed with the loops problem some more, and it's quite weird: When I summon the "Player_Sensor" loop, all the other loops wich start with the same name are executed aswell...

That may be the reason the runtime threw the recursive loop error.

Edit: Let me upload the file with the problem somewhere.

Edit 2: While trying to reproduce the problem on a separated code file, there were no problems with the loops. Weird :e. I'll upload the original file.

Here it is

Hello there Scirra friends <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_biggrin.gif" alt=":D" title="Very Happy" /> I've been toying out with Construct since I've found it out (two days ago) and I'm facing a little problem.

Right now, I'm porting to Construct the core of my Sonic Worlds engine (made in MMF2) and I'm facing some troubles setting up some of the basic routines.

I manage collision detection by a serie of method summons to reposition sensors acordingly to the ground alignment, having each of them an specific method name, and a master one that I use for summoning them all at once.

At first, I've tryied to implement this by the use of functions, but stragently enough, when nested functions were called, the runtime wouldn't even get to create the game window, just quit without any sort of warning. However, I tryied to workaround this and go for the MMF way and use loops.

I've noticed, you've implemented a loop name recognition system for preventing recursive loops. However, due some sort of glitch, loop names aren't correctly recogniced, as the fact the error thrown by the runtime:

I have two differently named loops (called "Player_Sensors" and "Player_Sensors_Main", for example). Once I try to summon the Player_Sensors_Main loop from the Player_Sensors loop, it throws a recursive loop call error.

I would've tryied to look at the source code, but I don't know where the code that manages the loop statement is, or neither how the general engine works, so I'd be grateful if you could find out the problem <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" />

I'm pretty sure that if I get this done soon, it could help to grow Construct's fanbase for other people.

Also, I have two other questions, but not necessary to reply about them now.

• How do containers work?
• Isn't there any Movement SDK? Or the source code for the platform movement plugin?

-Thank you!

By the way,