I dunno. A good digital painter should be able to paint one of those backgrounds per day, especially if the design decision is already clear. I'm not a digital painter at all and I paint my stuff in a pretty short amount of time and I've seen digital and matte painters doing amazing 'sketches' in half an hour. i think saying that it's not possible because that guy needed 50 hours to re-create an old game in terms of design using new digital tools is a cop-out.

The problem is one of animation - animating high res character sprites is a ton of work and having high res sprites, but not more animation phases gives the whole thing an unfinished feel (like Street Fighter 2 HD). But I guess you could achieve very good results if you'd do it in 3d, turn off the shading and paint the textures just as you'd paint the character - and then use post processing on the rendered sprites. I'm pretty sure with a little effort it could look extremely close to what he does.

I'm very sure that you could create games like that in todays day and age and that one could make it feasible for production - you'd just have to make the right design choices in terms of look and production.

A lot of the next-gen stuff we see today is much more complicated to create in terms of pure production work. Having painted backgrounds (you could still animate the layers that make up the composition) is a very, very efficient technique and much less time-consuming than what level and environment artists are doing today for real time backgrounds, IMO.

Yeah, it looks exactly the same in Construct. Construct is using a lot of the same algorithms anyway - even the post processing, like the sharpen filter or the color correction is identical. That was the whole idea, to concept and storyboard the game in Photoshop and then bring over the assets to Construct. If you see the runtime and those screenshots side by side, you wouldn't be able to spot the difference. The runtime looks a lot better, IMO, mainly because you get that fake 3d effect through parallax scrolling and image offsetting.

<img src="http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/construct/images/lake.jpg">

And it still runs at smooth 60 fps. I love turning on motion blur, but things go crazy when you use motion blur - like, the transition effects stop working and sometimes you get severe slowdowns. Hope that's fixed with 0.99.

But motion blur adds something to it that makes the whole thing look like a painting come to life. Motion Blur going grazy and costing quite a bit of performance and the fugly text rendering are the only things that keep giving me headaches now.

The animation is still quite fake'ish with trees blowing in the wind through the use of sine waves and stuff, but it actually works better than I thought.

I'll try to make a video of it soonish

Edit: Cause someone just asked me - The bloom is actually baked into the sprites, so it's not being done in realtime. I've seen some examples of that (like the blur horizontal, blur vertical solution), but ddn't think it'd be efficient.

Since Dave liked the graphics so much, I thought I should post these:

<img src="http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/construct/images/Senseless.jpg">

<img src="http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/construct/images/oppression.jpg">

Thanks again to Shvil for making the Overlay Effect working beautifully now

We could just try it and see what happens. This could serve as motivation for the developers and third party devs.

If somebody is dedicated to make Construct X360 compatible, I'd donate 50 bucks upfront and 50 bucks when the job is done and the Construct binaries run on an X360. 100 bucks isn't a lot of dough, but we can increase that amount when (third party) devs actually get a reputation on doing a good job.

If 100 people do the same, a dev could make 10k USD on that feature. Not a lot of money, but it could be a motivational help.

It'd be cool if we could create a pot where everyone can donate and the guy who actually delivers gets the money - is that model possible using chipin?

Have you set the canvas object to 'Grab Layout: Before drawing'?

Ash: I'll try to do that in the next couple of days. I'm a bit busy with the relocation right now, but I promise that I'll think of it

Here's another one:

53) It'd be cool if we could toggle layouts like we can toggle events. If I want to skip layout 2 and 3 right now, I have to skip em using my debug key and if I want to compile a version without layout 2 and 3, I actually have to delete those layouts just to get it compiled.

So it'd be cool if we could just right click a layout and toggle it - if it's toggled, it won't be in the runtime and it won't be compiled if you export to the exe.

That'd make things quite a bit easier

You mean, you want the beast to jump at the player once it's like 10 steps in front of him?

I guess you could give your character an image point and set up an event like: If beast overlaps image point = jump.

Wild guess, that is

No, that's what the canvas object does. I only assign it to the topmost layer so it affects every layer underneath it.

A canvas object is an object like the sprite object - just create it, you'll see what it'll do. You only need 1 canvas object and assign the effect you want to it - that's all there is to it. That way, you can even emulate adjustment layers or quickly change the mood of layouts and stuff, it's a pretty great way of working. So you could have 2 different mood sets that are only based on effects and they'd still only count as one in terms of vram.

Hmm, it'd be interesting to figure something like that out. Like, what if a character walks over a a bridge and you want to see the bridges and the characters reflection in the water below, maybe with a ripple effect or whatever?

I think you could do this with an instance... someone would have to give it a try

We need a way to apply effects to the whole screen. 3D games use a big quad that samples a buffer where everything's been stored so far. Layers cannot sample other layers in Construct. Would using Canvas work?

That's exactly what I do. Create a canvas object and put it into the topmost layer. Then apply the effect to the canvas object. So you really only ever have to set the effect once.

DevS: It'd be cool if we could copy / paste a whole layer with its settings from one layout to another.

If you want the effect on other layouts as well, you just create a layer on top of everything and set it to be an inheritance layer that references the canvas layer from the other layout.

The interesting part is that we can even use this stuff for gameplay effects. Like, you can even flip the screen (including inverted controls), invert everything, use warp effects and stuff like that.

Also, because the post processing then happens on an object and isn't just something that's being done internally, you can use it in events, which is pretty awesome. Imagine your character is drunk or drugged and to heighten the difficulty, you could start warping the screen, etc.

Tom, if you've got a couple of film grain textures I could have a shot at making a film grain effect. I'm useless with art though. I guess you'd need a bunch of black-and-white textures that have just the film grain pattern on them, then I could use that with an effect to process the background, and switch randomly between the textures to give the effect of frames going by.

Funny thing is I completed 'Ico' a couple of days ago and figured out today that once you play through it, you get a couple of post processing effects to play around with.

I think the old film / grain effect works through a couple of layers. You have the grain itself, which just animates randomly (David had something like this set through a simple event in an older cap). Then, you have a couple of burns and stuff - means: black blotches and burnmarks that you barely notice, cause the film runs at 24fps. You do see them, but they're quickly gone again. And then you also see a few light stripes 'walking' from left to right sometimes. I have no idea how they're generated, but my wild guess is that that's just light shining through the roll of film. And then the film also sometimes loses its sharpness - I guess that's because the filmroll is probably moving around slightly while being played - but that's a wild guess again.

Also, there's vignetting, which means that the sides of the screen gradually become darker and darker.

Valve has put up a bit of info on what they did for Left 4 Dead on their blog:

http://www.l4d.com/blog/post.php?id=1962

Interesting stuff.

I'll try to come up with a Photoshop composition that has those layers in one simple .psd, so you could play around with it. Another thing that'd certainly help to get this old'ish look would be if we could affect the opacity of a sprite through the sine behavior - So we could let things flicker and fade in / out, etc. randomly.

Also, have you looked at the fx file they provided on that site? Maybe that effects looks cool enough already?

Look, it's really just about semantics here...

The fact is: If you're not a programmer and you take the time to learn the application, you can create games that are on par with what a programmer with a ton of programming experience can do.

And that's a wonderful thing.

I have never been able to grasp any programming language, I _SUCK_ even at simple math, yet every programmer I've shown my project to loves what I'm doing using Construct.

Let's not argue about semantics, let's just be productive, let us create.