Actually, Maya is very well designed. It's clever, the UI is still pretty good even though it's over 10 years old now and you can do so fucking much in it. Node-based design, it's very expendable, you have MEL or Python as scripting languages, its polymodeling toolset is halfway decent, the mental ray integration isn't too bad...

Arima: What are you using instead now? I have to switch back to Max in a couple of weeks, I'll probably miss my Maya config, but Max has a much better modeling toolset anyway - especially with release 2010 (polyBoost integrated, yay!).

But considering that is WORMS , not TONKS , and that it's also probably copyrighted.

Anyway , had a shot at a theme , it's kinda more cyber-apocalypse , or something. I don't know :S

http://filesmelt.com/Filehosting2/downl ... le=TMT.mp3

Go listen

Obviously, he shouldn't just rip that theme and use it, but get inspired by it

Aeal: It's cool, didn't want to piss you off. I just thought your plugin isn't what you suggest on the thread. I always thought you were talking bout layout variables.

right there: account. identity. community. nuf said? achievements are what people make of them. they're far from virtual. they affect the game on a different level than just code.

That's clear, but I just wonder that it got that important for gamers.

Like, I understand why a doctor would hang his certificates on the wall - if some guy cuts me open to play with my intestines, I wanna now that some other medical dudes think that he's the right man for the job.

So it makes sense for real events and real issues - but have you ever really walked through your friendslist, checked someone elses achievements and been like:

"Dude, WTF, WOW!!!!! BatFucker2010 actually managed to deliver 30 headshots in one game in Gears 2! That's so awesome!!!111"

?

Like, seriously? I guess it depends on the person, but I never looked at other peoples achievements, since I don't even care about my own. It's just interesting that so many people do care about them. I guess Deadeye and me are in the minority when it comes to that though.

Just to clear this up:

Aeal: Your plugin isn't really well designed. It's the same thing that deadeye suggested, it's just an object with private variables - so that doesn't make a lot of sense. I could use a sprite, use my own icon and fill it with a private variable.

What I was thinking about is a local variable that's based on your layout. So you'd be able to click on your project and set global variables and you'd be able to click on each layout and set local (layout) variables.

Rich: A workaround is not just something you do in order to steer around a bug. A workaround is also a solution you use, because a certain feature that you want is not implemented in the application yet - so you come up with your own little idea that might work, cause the program is complex enough.

I'll give you one example - In Maya, you were never really able to store assets properly. So people just started creating 'groups' and deleting all the shit in it, so they ended up with a completely empty node and filled that node up with custom attributes (like private variables) - tada, we got an asset node.

Now, in a recent release, Autodesk actually created a feature called 'assets' that handles this for you without the workaround that's using empty nodes and it's a lot more comfortable because it aids the user as well. It's easier to set-up, it's easier to organize, it is its own entity specifically designed for a certain task that users used all the time anyway - but they had to fake a method up until that point.

We have global variables. If I have 300 levels and I want to use a variable for each level to control a certain event, I could just use a layout variable and wouldn't have to clutter up my global variables.

[quote:31h9775w]The only caveat is that initial values for hash tables/array can't be set; this can be remedied via some very simple additions to the SDK. If a dev wants to take it on I can send them the sources for either.

I'd fucking love that!

I wouldn't go as far as calling them retarded, but you definitely have to be an obsessive son of a bitch to fall for achievements. On the other hand, they would certainly help to teach your hardcore users certain lessons. Like, I'm thinking about Super Mario Kart on the SNES right now (best Mario Kart ever, but that's beside the point).

There, an achievement could be: "Win championship without ever driving against a wall" - If someone's out to get all achievements, you can bet your ass he's going to become pretty darn good at playing the game, trying to get that achievement. It's just not a very hard thing to integrate from a developer point of view and it's certainly an interesting phenomenon that achievements gained such a huge popularity.

Deadeye: Your highscore example isn't quite accurate, cause there it's more like the exp in an RPG - you get to a certain number of points and it will have an effect on you (getting an extra life). That's not what achievements are all about. Achievements are just tokens that are being activated once you reached a certain goal in the game - but they don't really have any effect on you in the game, they're external.

Deadeye: There is no 'problem' with using a buffer sprite if you think about it that way, but it definitely is a somewhat hacky way to do it. Because it's a workaround by definition. We don't have local variables, so we use bufferSprites to simulate local variables = Workaround.

If you use global variables for things that are global, why shouldn't it make sense to implement local variables that'd apply to layouts only?

Sure it's good that Aeal has done it, I just wanted to emphasize the point that this IS a workaround and someone who's completely new to Construct (and as it seems a lot of new people are joining now), using buffer sprites to store local variables would probably not be the first thing on their minds - So you have a steeper learning curve, cause you need to know this workdaround in order to make use of a local variable.

Maybe I'm a little too worried about this, but I've seen this same thing happening with Maya, where Alias (and now Autodesk) started explaining workarounds to their users that at first seemed perfectly fine, but once you start repeating this method over and over again, you'll end up with a huge chunk of workarounds for things that could be implemented natively, so that it would actually make a lot of sense. If you always know 10 workarounds for various tasks, good for you, but in an application that's decidedly non-techy, it's probably not what you want to do looking forward.

Again, I'm not out to piss on anyones boots or introduce egos here, I just want the app to grow into the right direction. Maybe the way I see it is bullshit as well, but I do think that this is a clear case of "Hey, it'd be cool to have this feature natively in Construct, so we don't have to use a workaround all the time!"

Do not want it. This is just another source of data (we have PVs, Hash Tables, Arrays, Global Variables at the moment, it's much enough). And it'll take some more ACE entries.

Wow. I won't ever understand this idea. Just because there are workarounds for a problem doesn't mean that the problem is fixed (and your suggested workarounds are far from being as convenient as a local variable).

Say you have certain effects that will only apply to a level (layout) and that you'd like to take control of by using a variable - since you might not want to use a global variable for every single level you build (the bigger the games become that we build in Construct, the more painful it'll be to do everything with gvs), and you want to keep the game logic 'logical' (maybe so that someone else could understand it as well) a local variable would be perfect.

We had a similar argument on the chat yesterday as well. There's this notion here that the solution to a problem (if a feature doesn't work or the app isn't yet feature complete or production ready) is not that important if there's already a workaraound available.

I think that it's very short sighted to rely on your users using workarounds for problems. I've seen that over the years happening with complex 3d apps, where some things are now really hard to learn for students, cause they just don't get the workaround that was introduced 3 years ago to 'solve' a problem that was never fixed because it would've been too complex to do at the time. So since the problem was 'somewhat solved', the developer never went back to solve it properly - probably because fixing bugs isn't sexy on release lists.

Just because something is theoretically possible doesn't mean it's practical. Construct, just as 3d applications, is (going to be) a complex piece of software that a huge chunk of people with no technical background will use to create amazing stuff - and that's the beauty of it. But the more you ask them to use workarounds that often need you to think in very technical terms, the more you alienate users that are probably more interested in just making their art come to life.

It certainly has. But are our NPCs really that much smarter now? In Mario, their AI was based on a simple loop - walk, if you hit a wall, turn around and walk some more, Repeat.

In Oblivion, each character has certain tasks that he's been given based on the time in the game - and you can talk to them, so they'll tell you different things. If you attack them and drain a certain amount of their hp, they'll attack you. But is that it?

I can take Oblivion as a good example of how AI can utterly fail:

In the Dark Brotherhood storyline, there's a quest where you have to kill all your comrades. They're all in a multi-room cave, separated by doors. So, I started the quest and did this: One guy was at the lunch table, eating an apple.

So I thought this'd be a good time to kill him off. Nobody else was around and that guy was peacefully chomping his apple, which meant that it would've taken him at least a couple of seconds to get into his combat mode to fight back - enough time to let a shitstorm of fireballs rain on his head. That's exactly what I did and it worked beautifully. He was still eating his apple as I started to firefuck his brains, dealing major damage. A couple of seconds later he lay dead on the table.

Nice, I thought! One man down - Only three more to go.

At that second, another comrade came in - apparently he was hungry, too. My first thought was: "Shit, now he's gonna see what I just did to his buddy and he's gonna kill me" (I'm talking about the fat, armored Orc) - But, thankfully, he didn't care much about the corpse and his fried brain being splattered across the table. So he went to the cupboard, took out a piece of cheese and rested his arse at the table as well, peacefully eating it while his buddies brain was still smoking.

That's the problem with open world games - as a developer, it's impossible to create events for every single situation that might happen in the game that the player might do - You already need dozens of events for each character to make them believable, it's currently impossible to keep the believability if you have a couple of hundred NPCs to deal with.

I believe we'll have AI Engines in the future - just like Physics engines like Havoc became mighty popular, having an engine that'd somehow deal with that shit and that could be implemented into various other engines while not losing a ton of performance would be great. But right now, all of the open world games are filled with puppets, mindless idiots instead of something that could fool me as human beings.

Fable 2 is another great example, cause it's a game that was just released. The population there just doesn't cut it. I'd rather center the game around one little town with 10 citizens that really could be believable rather than simulating a whole country with 500 citizens that are all stupid as shit.

Too late. Now we want to see you spoon!

I think you should look at that for a theme:

Always LOVED this shit for Worms

Okay - I'm trying to genuinely find something out here: I never understood why Achievements took off like that. Like, I never cared about Achievements at all, doesn't matter what platform we're talking about. As Microsoft first announced achievements, I thought you'd get something (like Microsoft Points) if you achieve a certain thing in a game - but that obviously wasn't the case, so it's just a value that's either 0 or 1, locked to your account. If you would've been able to gain like 400 MSPoints if you play the game for 100 hours, I would've at least understood what the fuzz is all about, but right now it's a 'virtual achievement'.

I mean, exp systems and levels and stuff aren't anything different (well, although they do have a direct effect on you in the game), I just wanna know what the achievement hunters feel when they're trying to become perfect at a game by getting every single achievement there is - why do you do it? What's appealing about it? Do you really feel like it adds re-play value? Would you think less of a linear game that doesn't have achievements?

I never really cared for HighScores either. Developers used to include highscores in a sort of agenda for every 8 and 16bit game, but they seldom had any meaning - I think Achievements are probably the improved version of HighScores.