Just a quick question cause I don't know if it's a bug.

If I set an object to 'global', like my mouse / keyboard object, then I should automatically see them whenever I create a new event, right?

I just created a new 'Title Screen' Layout and don't have any of the global objects in the new layout. If I copy and paste the object from another layout, it won't work either.

Hey guys,

Thought a thread like this would make sense to showcase solutions for problems that most likely all Construct users will go through at one point or another.

1.) Pause Function:

Let's start with something simple, a 'Pause' function for the game, which - if the 'Pause' variable is at 1 will freeze the game, show a 'Pause' image and pause the music. If it's at 0, it'll unfreeze the game, hide the 'Pause' image and resume the music. Pretty simple:

<img src="http://thomasmahler.com/files/construct/images/PE%20-%20Pause_01.jpg">

Then, in your controls event sheet, you'd simply set up an event that'd drive the 'Pause' global variable like this:

<img src="http://thomasmahler.com/files/construct/images/PE%20-%20Pause_02.jpg">

Et voila.

26) Could we also get an update for the progress bar? So that we could set our own graphics for it?

Say, we wanna have an experience bar or a health bar for enemies. Typically, you'd have a left side of the bar and a right side of the bar - and then you'd have a graphic that'd scale from 0% to 100% or vice versa based on values that are based on what the player does. Could be as simple as a 1px black line that scales form 0% of the bar to 100% based on the exp the player collects.

Right now, I can't even change the color of the inside bar. That'd be a cool thing to have.

Thanks for the advice guys. I haven't yet found the perfect way for starting, advancing (like, making it faster by pressing a button) and ending dialogue, but I'll write up the solution once I got it.

25) What I'm thinking right now, reading the other thread about the text object...

Wouldn't it be cool if we'd have a couple more options in it? Like, imagine your typical adventure game. Right now, I invoke dialogue like everyone else I guess.

If character overlaps another character and keys is pressed - make text fields visible, write text: "Blabla" at 1 letter per 30ms

Now, firstly:

what if my character has multiple dialog boxes?

Wouldn't it be a lot better if we'd extend the parameters dialog box for the write text action so that we could:

a) have bigger dialogues - right now, it's sorta constrained to 2 lines, which is a bit limiting, so the dialogue field should adjust to the text I put into them.

b) have an option to add multiple text fields into one 'write text' action - same thing as with the timeline. So we could have a simple event with a single 'write text' action and the character could still tell me a whole story, spanning multiple dialog boxes?

c) Couldn't we somehow add a 'is finished?' option to the Text Object? Also, it'd be cool if we could have an option so that we could automatically change the '1 letter per XX ms' option. So we could set it globally: If global variable 'Dialogue' is 1 and action button is pressed: Set Write Speed to 90ms (default would be 30). Then we could add a: If text is finished and action button is pressed - either go to next dialogue box or if there isn't one, finish dialogue.

I know I haven't completely thought it through at the moment, but maybe it'll still help. Try to follow me here, my way of setting a dialogue up would be like that:

a) Character overlaps another character.

b) Character presses the action button to start the dialogue. The dialogue consists of two dialogue boxes.

b.2) Character can press the action button again to speed up the write speed.

c) Dialogue 1 is finished - Character presses the action button to start the next dialogue box.

d) Dialogue 2 is finished - Character pressed the action button to complete dialogue.

So if we could set this directly in the WriteText action, it'd be awesome. We could set a characters dialogue with multiple dialogue boxes and add a: "At the completion of the previous Dialogue Box, send a 'is finished' call." at the bottom, so we could set a: If Write Text is finished and player presses the action button, set global variable dialogue to 0.

And with the global variable 'Dialogue' we could set it to display Text Boxes if it's set to 1 and kill them if it's set to 0.

I'm a bit tired right now and I know that I haven't thought it through completely, but I hope that made sense. It's a bit of a pain right now to organize dialogues and it'd be cool if that could be simplified and streamlined. Dialogue is freaking important for a lot of genres.

I think this is one of the best Construct Creations I've seen so far. It's real fun. Could need a little more gameplay though, maybe extras or other things you can shoot or build up in order to get through a level. Maybe you could add an option where there'd be a limit of boxes you could use in a level to get through it - right now you can simply blast away boxes and getting throgh the level is a safe bet that way. It's no challenge.

Also, the drawings are sometimes really off - like, in the first cutscene, when you suddenly see the guys eye - that looked really weird.

Other than that, this is really cool.

Maybe we should create a thread where all the finished Construct Games are listed and sorted / updated dynamically?

12) Here's a video explaining my problem:

http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/const ... veling.avi

I used the Wonderboy Test thingy for it.

I'm pretty sure this is a simple hotspot / spacing issue, but I can't seem to figure it out - what's the problem here? I set the hotspot to be centered in the import frames dialog box and tried to lign it up in the sprite editor - but no avail. If my character attacks, he automatically travels back a few pixels all the time.

Man, Construct has already improved so much during the short time I've been using it, it's really getting better and better.

Hope you guys settle the misscommunication issues and the power-play shit - for a project like this to work you guys have to work together as a team and believe in the product. Construct is already pretty doggone powerful and I'm sure with the community you have here it could quickly become the most powerful (if it isn't already) 2d game-creator engine out there.

Keep pushing, guys, I'm pretty confident that we'll see some very cool results in the upcoming weeks / months.

I love the concept of it. I'm currently working with couple of buddies on a mod that's a mix between horde and desktop tower defense and class based teamplay.

I think the problem is that they just put it in as an extra, saw how good of an idea it was, but didn't have the time to really push it further. You have the 10 waves in all the multiplayer maps, but it grows old pretty soon'ish. Every player in the team is just doing the same, killing enemies. You can help one another, but there's not lot of variety in the end. The enemies are also not that different from one another, they're just the same enemies that you know from the single player game, so a little variety would've been neat.

And from a level design point of view, you'd have to design the maps so that the floods can really take away your space if you let them swarm out - say you have different sections and they can 'flood' a section so that you can't get your ammo there anymore, etc., they'd really have to be designed with Horde in mind.

But that's what Gears 3 is for. Epic is really good at taking a simple concept and fine-tuning it while packing it full of extreme details and graphic extravaganza.

All in all, Horde was probably the best new addition in Gears 2, but it could've been pushed much further, I think.

24) For the platform behavior, wouldn't it be cool if we'd have the option to freeze the players position temporarily? So for cutscenes, we'd not have to use a couple of actions, but just this one. It'd freeze the players position to where he's currently standing and once the cutscene is over, we'd use an 'unfreeze players position' action.

Simple.

Would also be useful for dialogs, etc.

I think the site should be extended so that indies could also sell their games on these sites. One of the problems with indie-development is that people seem to think that indie games have to be free of charge.

I think we'd make much more progress if indie developers would also be payed for their work - Look at the iPhones AppStore. If there's money involved, developers will hopefully deliver something that's not pure and utter crap and customers will be happy enough spending a couple bucks for something that's really well developed. Look at games like Cave Story - I wouldn't have a problem paying 15-20 bucks for a title like that.

So maybe you guys should focus on both these things - free games and commercial indie games. For every commercial game there should be a demo version like on XBLA, so people could try everything and decide on what they'd want to spend their money on.

Hey guys,

Small update, didn't have much time. I think moBlur is on in this compile and there should also be music in there now. Man, can't wait til we're able to organize the resources more properly.

The camera system is also changed.

http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/corrupted_01.rar

(careful, it's like over 20 mb with the music and it's set to full-screen 720p)

Ashley: Full-Screen works if I set it to my LCD TV, but not on my main monitor. It supports 720p, but it tries to switch the resolution and then crashes.

Controls are the same as ever. Run around with the arrow keys and jump with Z. Up for talking to... boxes

I currently spend more time with pre-production, design and stuff instead of building it, which is good I guess. But it's a lot of fun to see things building up that way. I love the whole workflow, I can draw the stuff directly on my tablet pc in the native res, send it over to the workstation and rebuild everything in Construct.

Would be cool if you guys could tell me whether or not it runs better now, using full-screen and 5x moBlur.

DevS: Btw, when moBlur is on, a lot of the transitions won't work anymore.

This is a bit unrelated, but I guess it'd help too:

Can we get an iTunes-like effect for fading in and out of music tracks? So, a couple of seconds before the current track stops the volume of the track decreases until the volume is at 0 when the track ended. Then, we reverse the same effect for the new track. A couple of seconds into the next track, we raise the volume of it until it's at 100% again.

That way, we'd not have problems with a track ending - pause - another one beginning, it'd be a much subtler change.

It'd be cool if we could also have the option for 'ducking', whichs means that we could have a sample in a channel and set the ducking for the main music track. So, if I get to the boss and he says something or starts screaming, the main music track decreases it's volume up until the sample is over. I guess Wikipedia explains it better than I do:

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

This'd be cool. It could help making the whole music stuff very dynamic, so we'd enter a boss area, he'd start talking or whatever and the current music track would decrease in volume, thanks to ducking. Then when he'd start attacking, we'd fade into a new music track for the boss fight without any abrupt endings. It'd be like the visual transitions, just for music.