Would drop shadow work?

Inaccurate information. Thread to be deleted.

Thanks a lot Mr Wolf, that was extremely clear, I will apply what you said.

And about the graphics, they are just placeholders, for now I'll just concentrate on programming and gameplay, when I have that finished I'll create more art.

Ok, cool then

Hello forum.

I have been using Construct for a day now and i am pleased with it, but i am having some problems with it.

1. Decreasing RAM.

My RAM looses 1MB every few seconds, even after i free it (using MaxMem). And letting Construct run too long makes my system unstable (Around 40%)...But this happens with Hammer as well (Half Life 2's Map Editor) and i think it has something to do with my system.

2. "The instruction at 0x00000000 referenced memory at 0x######## The memory could not be 'read' "

Ohhh, i hate this one, it makes Construct crash, along with my Source games. This might also be related with the problem above, thus it just being my system...

Any ideas?

Thinking more about it. Have you considered doing a proper memory test? You can find various utilities to do this via Google. It could well be a bad memory stick. That or your drivers need updating, and DirectX reinstalling.

Edit: Maybe also run a test of your hard drive/s especially the one your swap file is on. Could be a bad block that happens to be where the swap file is located, resulting in it becoming corrupt, and more likely to happen after as you say, construct has been running a while, giving it time to have been swapped back and forth as you did other things. Though I think the memory issue is more likely, that or drivers.

It could also be a problem with the PSU not being powerful enough for the system, but that's not as likely in this case.

It's more likely a problem with the FPS counter. I remember reading someone else was having trouble with it reporting wildly inaccurate results recently.

Anyway... post your .cap!

I thought it might be to do with the fps counter too, but I'm not so sure. For some reason I've always been able to hear a high pitch noise (barely noticeable but it's there) when frame rates are very very high, such as 4000fps or something. Which it does in the 2000x2000 version, but not the 16x16 one.

Anyways, here are both the caps. Though as I understand it, this is repeatable and happens to others when they try it too. Though of course it's not as noticeable as nobody would use such large tiles or images normally. I only noticed it because I was doing a very over the top example for a tutorial, on why tiles are better than single big images. But now I'm all like, Santa isn't real?? lol.

16x16 version cap

2000x2000 version cap

Didn't bother uploading the 128x128 example with the funky tiling issue, as I recall that's a known recent problem.

Yes its a trade off, 16x16 may not take up much memory, but then your using the processor to generate the texture. 16 x16 is not good for tiling, it eats up frame rate, and it makes up patterns, even though its seamless.

It's a pretty big trade off if you ask me. The tiled background object is meant for this kind of thing, but not at the expense of such a frame rate drop. And this is just one tiled object.

<img src="http://nfpa.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/06/03/elvis.jpg">

Davo was sighted in town only yesterday.

Why is this strange?

Its still going to draw each texture each frame, you've just varied the size. So instead of drawing one texture, your drawing 70 each frame.

It's strange because a none pow2 texture, at the horribly large size of 2000x2000 has utterly NO effect on frame rates.

While a 16x16 texture, tiled and therefore SUPPOSED to be using less resources, as is the point of tiling and the tiled background object. Kills frame rate almost completely.

It's like a religious person realizing there's no god. All those times we've told people to use pow2 textures and keep them small. Besides less VRAM usage, why bother. The big shit causes less damage to frame rate than the small optimized stuff, lol! Does that not seem utterly backwards to you?? Does to me!

Isn't there some kind of hash thing you can use to add security? I haven't tried it myself so I'm not sure.

You can use Lucid's 's' plugin (Python stuff) which has encryption options, as far as I know.

The layout object is (I think) bugged a bit right now.

You should be fine with a hidden/visible layer method though, and using timedelta and timescale to pause the action when the menu, inventory etc. is open.

Ok, so I was making an example of why you shouldn't use huge none pow2 textures. When I noticed the following.

The examples have unlimited frame-rate mode on intentionally.

First example:

2000x2000 png on a tiled background (or sprite for this first example, it makes no difference as it looks the same) at 2000x2000 size.

<img src="http://steamgauge.com/misc/construct/images/tilebug1.jpg">

Notice the frame rate. The VRAM can be ignored as it's obviously going to be 16mb

Second example:

16x16 tile png on a tiled background (tiled background only this time obviously) at 2000x2000 size.

<img src="http://steamgauge.com/misc/construct/images/tilebug2.jpg">

Notice the frame rate. The VRAM can be ignored as it's obviously going to be 0mb for a single 16x16 tile.

Third example:

128x128 tile png on a tiled background (again, tiled background only) at 2000x2000 size.

<img src="http://steamgauge.com/misc/construct/images/tilebug3.jpg">

Notice the frame rate AND notice how it's not tiling correctly. Bare in mind both 16x16 and 128x128 are pow2 sizes.

But most importantly is the HUGE drop in frame rate when doing it correctly, yet next to no difference when doing it wrong. Now I can understand tiling a 16x16 image would use some resources. But effecting the frame rate this much?

Also copy/pasting (not cloning) the 16x16 tiled background doubles the fps loss each time. (As does cloning but that's more likely to be expected).

This has been tested by others in chat and it's happening to them too.

Version 0.9.83

Are you going to replace the graphics for original ones and not freely available ones? Can't really expect people to pay for something that contains 90% freely available stuff.