I think there's some things that can be done to make substrings easier.

Perhaps a 'For each substring'' condition so you can loop a string easily. Substrings are highly useful for custom data storage, it'd be good to get them as simple as possible.

Yeah, though it may be easier to use the new HTTP object, you could essentially make a chat with PHP/ASP.

It's not really the optimal way though so Python sockets is still the better option until an Online plugin is developed.

It's worth noting that either way, you're going to need a host for the chat (be it a PHP/ASP server, or a PC which handles the custom chat host). Unless of course it's P2P, but that's not really a 'chat' .

Hello and welcome to the forum,

In the near future, there should be more example games, I agree though that the tech demos should be opensource. You can check out the examples in the Upload forum, or the Creations forum where some people release their .cap for others to learn from.

In addition, the Templates which come with Construct (New -> Template) should help you learn.

Rich

This may be helpful:

http://69.24.73.172/scirra/wiki/index.php?title=Events

If you insert any object, it won't do much if you don't set up some events to modify it (or python scripting).

In this case, Bar Chart displays an empty chart when inserted. To make it load data.txt, I created a Start of Layout condition, so when you open this layout data.txt is loaded. You could simply insert the bars using the Insert Bar action with preset data, or data from another source.

Text Manipulator is another plugin which performs handy operations on strings. In the sub event for Start of Layout I use a loop to add as many bars as there are items in data.txt; the code is admittedly nontrivial especially if you haven't done much string parsing.

TextManipulator2.GetSubstring(";", 0)[/code:1mg7qowh]
This expression extracts the text before the first instance of a ';' in a string.

If we take:
[code:1mg7qowh]10;Item 1;233;11;11[/code:1mg7qowh]
This will be 10. 

[code:1mg7qowh]TextManipulator2.GetSubstring(";", 1)[/code:1mg7qowh]
Will return 'Item 1', the name of the bar.

If you have further questions, feel free to ask.

It's 2 events and I explained the data format .

Essentially it loads a file and then for every item (every '|') it finds, it parses out the relevant data and adds it.

Substrings are parts of a string which are separated by a character, in this case | and ;.

Once we split it into strings of |, you then retrieve the text before the first ;, before the second ;, etc.

You could use Python sockets; a quick google finds several socket tutorials .

There isn't any limits on objects, no. It's purely what your PC can handle .

I posted an example in the Uploads forum.

Here's a quick example of loading some formatted data into the Bar Chart.

The data.txt format is:

10;Item 1;233;11;11

#1 Item data, or height of the bar.

#2 Item name.

#3 R, G, B.

A | is after each item to indicate a new item.

WOW.

That is a really amazing combination of bumpmapping and 3d box.

Seriously impressive.

By the way, it didn't slow down on my laptop's builtin crappy GPU.

Yeah freezes for me too..

Ashley will hopefully look into this soon.

Happy birthday