No problem, hope it works out.

How would I launch Node-Webkit, with a command line switch enabled, on OSX and or Linux?

(I hope it's okay to ask this here.)

My situation

I have a game exported with Node-Webkit.

If I launch Node-Webkit with the switch "--disable-threaded-compositing", the game runs perfectly.

If I launch Node-Webkit without it, the game is essentially unplayable, with huge lag, and intermittent 1 to 10 second freezing.

The .bat solution for Windows

In Windows, I can make a "launchThyStuff.bat" file containing the line "gameName.exe --disable-threaded-compositing"

How would I do the equivalent for OSX and Linux?

Do I edit the exported files, by adding "--disable-threaded-compositing" somewhere?

Do I create a special .bat-like file for OSX/Linux?

I'm just not familiar enough with this kind of stuff when it comes to those operating systems, so any advice is very much appreciated.

Hey, trueicecold

I did find one way that works but it's a little derpy.

I tried a few things, so I can also tell you what doesn't work.

Local variable - (does work, but kind of inelegant)

Take the set of events you want to break out of, and put them under a blank event, just to carve out a local scope for your set of events.

At the top of the event set, create a local variable like "b_break" = 0, and add the condition " b_break == 0" to each of the events in your event set. Now, if you set b_break to 1 anywhere in your event set, all the following events will be skipped.

Stop loop - (doesn't work)

Take the set of events you want to break out of, and put them under a For Loop that runs for 1 loop. Then use System > Stop loop. Unfortunately, all the remaining events will complete regardless of where you try to stop the loop. So, "stop loop" just prevents the next loop from running.

Deactivate group - (doesn't work)

Deactivating a group from inside the group has a very similar effect as stop loop. The rest of the events in the group will continue to execute as normal after the group has been deactivated. However, after deactivating the group, the "Group is active?" condition will test as false even if you're doing the test from within the now deactivated group.

No problem. Glad I could help.

Hey mariogamer,

The layout size and window size are two separate things. (You may know this already so sorry if I'm misinterpreting the question.)

The window size might have to change to fit different devices, but the layout size probably doesn't.

If I recall, The layout size is only really relevant for behaviors like "destroy if outside layout", and for convenience while placing objects to make up your game world. As long as the layout is big enough for you to work comfortably, then you should be okay.

For instance, I tend to set the layout size to be pretty large, and most of the time I don't use all of it. The only thing an end user will see is the part of the layout that shows up in the game's window.

One of the other features of layout size that might be important, is that if you scroll your view around in your game, the game window will stop at the edge of the layout by default. You can free up the window to scroll off the edge of the layout by clicking the layout in the project panel, and in the layout's properties, you can enable "Unbounded scrolling".

Hey vancouver <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

To play a sound at an inaudible volume (essentially silent), you'll probably want to use something like -60 dB or lower. Decibels (dB) are logarithmic units of volume, so "0 dB" is actually full volume, (100% original sound volume).

Decibels are kind of a weird scale. And to make things weirder, computers use the dB scale differently than the way it's used to describe the loudness of sounds in the real world.

Computer dB

When dealing with computer audio, most programs use the convention that a sound's original (100%) volume is "0 dB", no matter what the sound is. Could be crinkling paper, could be a jackhammer, but on a computer 0 dB means play this sound file at 100% of whatever volume it was recorded at.

Decibel scale

When you *add* to a sound's dB level, you *scale* its power level up.

When you *subtract* from a sound's dB level, you *scale* its power level down.

(I say "power" rather than "loudness" because the human perception of audio signal power has its own non-linear issues.)

Adding +10 dB to a 0 dB sound gives you the original sound power times 10.

Adding +20 dB to a 0 dB sound gives you the original sound times 10, and then times another 10, for a total of times 100.

Adding +30 dB to a sound yields 10 x 10 x 10, or 1000 times more power.

And -30 db scales it down by 1000, making it 1/1000th the original power.

So, playing a sound at -60 dB is playing it at 1/1,000,000th its normal volume, which is going to be silent enough. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

For more confusion, here's the wiki page for Decibels ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel

Preload sounds

All that said, if you're looking to play all the sounds once to force them to preload, so that there's no delay the first time a user tries to play a note, then there's good news.

As of one of the recent updates to Construct 2, a "Preload sounds" option was added to the project properties in the "Configuration Settings" section. This will automatically preload all sounds (not including sounds in the "music" folder).

Playing all sounds once

If you need to play every sound once, you could create an event "Start of layout", with an action "Play sound" at -60 db for each sound.

Or, if your sound files are named with a fixed name followed by a number (e.g. "note00", "note01" , "note02", etc) then you could create a loop using the action "play sound by name", using the name [ "note" & zeropad( loopindex , 2 ) ].

The zeropad() function will convert a number to a string with a fixed number of digits, such that leading zeros are used when the converted number isn't large enough to fill the fixed digit amount. e.g. zeropad( 77 , 5 ) = "00077"

Hope that helps. Sorry for the long explanation of the dB scale. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

No problem

edit: Wow, I left the reply window open for a while, came back to type up a response, and when I submitted it, there were a bunch of other replies ahead of me all of a sudden.

Not sure if I'm interpreting this correctly, but it sounds like you're asking how you can have a platform game character change to a special "edge wobble" animation when they are standing on the very edge of a drop-off, Sonic the Hedgehog style.

For example...

This can be done either with detector objects, or with the condition "is overlapping at offset".

Detector objects

You can have two objects that "hover" to either side of your character's feet, sitting just below ground level. If you walk over to an edge, one of the detector objects will no longer be overlapping the ground. You can use a condition to check for that and then switch to the edge wobble animation.

Is overlapping at offset

You can use the condition "is overlapping at offset", and specify an offset that would shift the character off the edge and slightly downward before checking for the overlap. If the the player is not overlapping any ground, then they are standing at the edge of a drop, and you can then switch to the edge wobble animation.

Hope this helps.

This would scale up a 100 x 100 area of your game to fit the 400 x 400 window, meaning every game-world "pixel" would actually be a 4x4 block of screen pixels.

The problems...

Now, just zooming in will make everything bigger, but if we stop here, you'll also start getting blurry pixels, pixels that don't snap to the pixel grid, and even diagonal pixels if anything rotates.

So, there are a few extra things you'll need to do...

Setting up for pixel art retro games

1: In the Project panel, in the tree view, click the root folder for your project.

(Now in the Properties panel, you should see all the global properties for your project.)

2: In the "Project settings" section, set "Pixel Rounding" to "On".

3: In the "Configuration settings" section, set "Sampling" to "Point".

That should fix the blur and pixel grid snapping, but not the object rotation or scaling issues. (I'll come back to this in a sec...)

Point Sampling

"Point Sampling" means that pixels will stay sharp when you zoom in on them, instead of fade smoothly into each other.

Pixel Rounding

"Pixel Rounding" means that objects are displayed as if they are always at integer coordinates. This means that an object with an X position of 99.8 will be displayed as if it were at X position 100. This keeps objects from drifting out of the pixel grid. This is really nice if you want to keep everything snapped to the pixel grid, but there's one catch; you can still misalign an object's pixels from the world's pixel grid by rotating or scaling the object.

Pixelation post-processing

I've run into this rotation and scaling issue in a few of the retro-style games I've made.

(In fact, my member avatar is from one of them. At the moment, anyway.)

I solve it by pixelating the game environment by the same value as my zoom factor. That is, if my zoom/scaling factor is 3, then I pixilate the game into a mesh of 3x3 pixel blocks. This ensures that anything that rotates off the grid is still converted into a single on-grid pixel with the correct pixel scale.

You can pixelate the entire game by using WebGL effects.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the replies.

DuckfaceNinja, could you explain the multiple array filters you mentioned? I'm not sure what you mean, but it sounds interesting.

So far, what I think I understand is:

It looks like "Global" objects exist across all layouts, with all their state information being globally consistent and available all the time, independent of any single layout. (e.g. Even their position in a layout will be preserved across layouts, as well as their layer number, (not name).)

It looks like objects with the "Persist" behavior, have their state information tied to their home layout, however that state info is saved on exiting the layout, and restored on reentering the layout.

Is that kind of what's going on?

Also, What happens if an object is "Global" and has the "Persist" behavior? Does that cause conflicts? Would there even be any point, or are Persist characteristics essentially subsumed by Global characteristics?

Other interesting stuff about globals I've come across:

Global or not, object instances placed in layouts don't seem to get spawned until the layout is executed, and so global object instances placed in a layout will not exist until that layout is first executed.

A global object instance, once created, and then destroyed, will not be recreated if you return to the layout that first spawned it. So, I guess the layout knows that it already spawned that global object instance and won't do it again until the game is restarted?

This seems to be the case even if in the editor, you place a global object instance in "Layout_A", then run "Layout_A" to spawn the placed global, then destroy it in "Layout_B", and then return to "Layout_A". The global object instance will stay dead.

Is there any other interesting stuff worth knowing about Global or Persist?

Hey all

I was hoping to get some feedback on an idea.

Sorry it's kind of long.

What I'm trying to build:

I am interested in making a custom particle system that uses sprite objects as the particles.

Reason being, I'd like to have access to rotation, animation, collisions, and possibly other complex behavior on a particle-by-particle basis.

I'm looking to build this in events, rather than making a new plugin.

Details:

Ultimately what I want is a single emitter object ("ParticleEmitter"), such that I could make an instance of it for every particle effect I need. I would also have several different sprite objects each serving as a particle type, (e.g. "ParticleSnow", "ParticleFire", "ParticleRain", etc).

The emitter object would have an instance variable that stores the name string of the particle object it should spawn.

And this is where things get tricky. As far as I know, in C2, there's no generalized way to use that name string to spawn an object. Every single object type must have its instances explicitly spawned with event code dedicated to that object in particular.

"Create by name" workaround:

So, I have some thoughts on how I might work around this.

For each Particle object (snow, fire, etc), I can use the Function object to create a "constructor" function of sorts. The name of the function will be the name of the object to be spawned, (maybe with a prefix like "spawn_").

With this method, I still have to create one constructor function for each particle object, but now I get to store the name of the item to be spawned as a string in the emitter. The other benefit, is that if I eventually have 30 different types of particles, I don't need to have an event with 30 switches that runs once for every emitter in the game, and does that every game tick. The function object allows me to "point" only to the code I want to execute, and only for the particles I need to spawn.

Initializing the new particle:

I will still need a way of initializing the particle object I just spawned, so that I can populate its instance variables with information from the emitter, (e.g. Lifetime, speed, opacity, etc).

I could do this initialization within the constructor function event, but I would need to know which emitter is the particle's parent, and as far as I know I can't preserve picked objects through a function call. So, I was thinking that, inside the event that calls the constructor function, I could pass the parent emitter's UID as a function parameter. Then, once I arrive inside the on-function event, I can use that function parameter to pick the parent emitter by UID. From there I can do the particle's initialization, with the correct emitter having been picked.

It would be great if I could put all the particle objects in a family and then use generalized initialization code to set up the particles using family references, but I'm not sure if I can make that work. I don't yet know enough about how object picking interacts with families and functions.

Does this make sense?

This might take a while to build, so I wanted to double check with the forum to see if there is maybe a simpler solution I'm overlooking.

If you made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read all that.