awesome. I really didn't want to have to even think about compressions

thanks rich

i see

thanks ash

I guess you could make a bigger heightmap to compensate, but that'd just make it even slower

question, btw, since everything gets decompressed it runtime anyway, does that mean compressing a sprite before loading it into construct will just make it uglier without being more efficient, like if I use jpeg compression on an image, 100x100 pixels, or make it a png 100x100. will it just end up being the same amount of vram at runtime?

it's weird that it's called sam, or maybe not so weird

that was the name of the commodore 64 one

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth

first off, thanks deadeye for your awesome tuts

just as a side note

the most technically advanced, fun, and just plain awesome platformer I've ever played by far is littlebigplanet for ps3. god that game rocks

you dont need to be so protective of your work, after all you did get this idea from a cap i posted.

no disrespect, but I didn't get the idea from a cap you posted

I've had it for quite some time, even before I heard of the euphoria engine

what I did get from the cap you posted, however, was the realization it would be worth trying in construct, so thank you for that

another thing I got from the cap you posted was from watching the exe itself, not looking through the cap

but the idea that hips should move based on when the feet intersected the ground and that the motion curve shouldn't be limited to the reach of the limbs, so thanks for that, too

but perhaps you're right, at least at this point I shouldn't be so protective

honestly though, as this project progresses, I will be more protective, I eventually plan to sell my finished product

I don't think it's too crazy not to want it to be open source

here's the cap for that:

you may notice some disabled controls, or missing conditions and such, that's because I stripped it down in the end when I realized I'd be starting from scratch, and I just wanted it to be able to prove the walking running thing to me, and how feasible it is

I didn't even finish making the ground detection, as you'll notice the height of the character changes as the speed does

did you use beziers to animate it? or something different?, and what do you mean by animation package?

I used an ellipse. the new version will be two cubic bezier curves, one for the forward motion, one for the back. I want to be able to adjust the animation for a wide variety of scenarios, and I want it to be able to change based not only on terrain, but other outside influences.

as for the animation package. I originally had controls on the feet to adjust the length, width, and position of the ellipse, and the position of the hips, and the direction the torso was pointing, which made it obvious you could get nice animation for anything from pushing pulling heavy objects, crouch walking, long jumping, creeping, even swimming, just by adjusting those controls. but just to get walking and running to automatically blend based on speed, I had to tweak numbers, run it again, tweak speed conversions, run it again. it would have been faster if I had text on the screen at runtime that told me all the settings as I tweaked them, but still wouldn't be fun to have to enter everything into the program manually. aside from that, I realized it would be ridiculously annoying to do similar thing with other motions you might want to make, such as punching and such, if you wanted them to be bezier controlled, and flexible.

the animation package is going to be a separate program that will have a timeline. you go to frame 20, move everything where you want it go to frame 30, do that there, and it will tween for you. you'll be able to tweak the speed with a bezier curve, meaning if the animation should speed up as it's going from position 1 to position 2, you'll be able to adjust the rate of acceleration deceleration. mainly though I want it for animation loops and transitions. so you can create this walking animation, create the running animation, create a crouching animation, a jumping, a pushing, a pulling, etc, and give them all parameters and ranges. so walking and running is one animation that varies, the parameter will be speed,

jumping will still have this same speed parameter, but the added parameters of where a jump can start (probably a foot on ground type thing) , pushing and pulling will have a weight parameter, etc. you'll be able to test blending between one animation and the other, and test out physics, if I can get that to work well. you export the file, and load it into construct. then in construct you use private variables to control all those parameters, and the animations themselves will be automated for you. I also want the saved animation file to contain any other important information, like what sprite sizes to use for the model, how many limbs, character names, etc.

as far as the terrain solver and slowness. I guess I'll be feeling those headaches soon enough

I have a few ideas I hope will work, though, I guess we'll see

as a last resort though, I wouldn't be too disappointed if I had to have premade types of terrain, that vary in height only at certain distances.

edit: lol my response with the exe being posted at 3:52 am.

right

too bad crazy bump doesn't generate heightmaps then

I wonder if there's a tool that can convert a normalmap viewed from straight on into a heightmap

hmmmmmm

they both worked fine for me

For a novice, I think well.

yes, pretty good. keep it up

there's alot more amazing things you'll discover about construct

> How do you initialize the value?

>

> Also, you don't have to use + and str() to display text; just use &, which concatenates strings; it will automatically convert numbers to text that way. So,

> "Character's HP is " & Characters(3,0)

>

> Okay, I just realized it. The Array is 1-indexed; the 0 is out of bounds, it doesn't exist. Rows and columns begin at 1; you should be setting it to (3,1), not (3,0). Actually, you can skip the second number and it will automatically get the first row.

>

Oh wow, that did it. Didn't realize it was 1-indexed. That got it working.

That needs to be included in the Wiki, I don't know if I can add that in myself.

just glossed over my elegantly simple reply, didn't you?

just kidding

...you did though

well, it was much better than I expected

last time I heard one built in, it was more of the Commodore Amiga/ Stephen Hawking kinda sound

I think construct is like having a full time team of programmers who do all the annoying crap for me, and I'm just free to program gameplay mechanics and such, and basic ideas that get fleshed out for me

if I really did have a team of programmers and recording studio staff that could implement ideas i have, I bet I could make a kickass concatenative speech synthesis engine, with emotions that could be changed and blended mid sentence, and adjustable inflection and breathiness. it's really pretty strange no one has done it yet.

my nerdy thought for the day

oh right

sorry, I knew about that part

but if you can't use normal maps, because you're going to be animating a heightmapped character using rotation and bones and ik, or an object that has physics

I know you can't rotate a normal map anyway, so there isn't a choice

but I'm wondering if there is any reason why a normal map would be visually superior

or do I just need a better way of making heightmaps

the cap shows what I'm about to say

click me to download cap

but

system - is number (sprite.angle) between (135) and (225)
system - OR
sprite - compare angle (less than) (45)
system - OR
sprite - compare angle (greater than) (315)[/code:2iro1rpi]

thanks