Just fix the tiling issue with meshes, don't need more than that for 2D games (ok maybe basic rotation, but still). Anything beyond that, it stops being a pretty cool and "reasonably" easy to understand 2D game making app that can make a name for itself in a niche area and used for decent 2D games, and becomes a low end basic 3D app for mediocre to poor 3D games up against the bigger boys the likes of which it has no chance against. At which point there's far better alternatives out there (Source, UDK, Cryengine, Unity, hell even Realmcrafter lol).

Yeah it would be nice to have an object loader (but dear god, use a format that's universally compatible like COLLADA, NOT something only MAX has exporters for!), but there should be some sort of limit on how far it would go, otherwise with every addition, there will be calls for something else, and the 2D side of things, including bugs, will begin to be forgotten and left behind.

Unfortunately with the whole 'console generation', unless it looks damn near photorealistic, nobody will want to play it. Go with 2D and you attract the older crowd who remember "the good old days" and others who appreciate creativity over how many millions of polygons are bouncing around on screen at once, as well as the casual gamer, who probably doesn't have cutting edge hardware, or is looking for a quick fun game to play while the boss is out of the office.

Stick to making it work perfectly as a 2D app (but with working meshes that tile properly, lol).

Besides, and this is just a personal opinion. When it comes to making a game in 3D. You're almost always going to be better off writing it all from scratch. Because unless you're making a sheep, chances are there's nothing out there right now that'll do exactly what you want, without a great deal of difficulty, time and expense.

They almost always use illogical backwards ways of using assets, which 90% of the time are not going to be compatible with what you use, they have far too many limitations on what you can do with them without access to the source code itself (and even then you're practically rewriting so much you may as well start from scratch) and NONE of them are as good as people think they are.

The only 3D engine I think much of is actually the Gamebryo one (Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind), but it's a cluster headache while being hit in the face by a loud annoying fat chick to get anything custom imported into it successfully.

Oh and this annoys me no end. The first thing EVERYONE who's never made a proper game before does, when wanting to use the next fancy 3D engine, is decide they want to make a *!&$"#@ing MMORPG with huge massive landscapes that stream perfectly, lol! Honestly, can you imagine if one of those ever succeeded? How empty, dull, slow and boring it would actually be.

I totally lost the point of this thread and went off on a rant, but I don't care.

1) Make each room a different layout. It doesn't matter so much for a two room tester, but with 100 rooms you'll be glad it's not all in one layout in separate layers.

2) Not that I've found, best is just to ask random questions until you get the answer you need.

3) There's the wiki, though it's somewhat outdated and probably will continue to be until v1 of construct and people start using it properly. There's also the forums.

W00t! The 3D boxes WORK AGAIN!!! FINALLY!!

On the minus side, what the heck happened to the platform behavior's slope handing? Now, when I run something up a slope, it gradually slows down as the slope becomes steeper. Sometimes, if you stop on a slope for a sec and then try to keep going up, you can't, presumably because you don't have enough force to do so. Is this the intended new behavior? Sure it's realistic, and is great in, for instance, a Sonic-like game, but it's a nuisance otherwise. (If this is unintentional, I'll go ahead and file a bug report, but I dunno if it is)

Yep, it's a bug.

How on earth can I do this? The biggest obstacle for me seems to be that I can't keep the character from jumping. What I initially tried was something like this:

MouseKeyboard: "Down" is down

MouseKeyboard: On "Jump" pressed

System: Trigger once

> PlayerFall through platforms ? Yes

But... I can't even see what sort of result, grossly wrong or not, that gives me because of the character jumping. Is there a way to do the classic down + jump way of dropping through a platform?

Platform behavior - allow down button

> For example. A point and click game. (...) But 3D would make it easier thanks to the depth, without turning it into 3D

>

Nice example. Monkey Island 4 was 3D but didn't have mouse control, just like Grim Fandango. Why? it was too damn hard to figure out what you were clicking.

So no, it's does not make it easier.

Well just cause I suggested 3D in that example, doesn't mean go the whole hog and use different control methods too. (I didn't like Grim, and pretty much swore off Lucasarts later efforts) Once their point and click games started getting all 3Dy n stuff, they seemed to become.. crap and couldn't hold a candle to the older ones that are still immensely playable, as are all the other point and click games that did the rounds back then.

What I said was use it as a way to build the scenes. Rather than an event or bunch of events saying where a bush is in relation to the character. Just use the z-depth and all that is handled by itself. Think of it as layering. Then as you point and click your character through the scene, it knows if it should be in front of or behind part of the scenery. The scenery of which is simply made up of flat sprites. Like a diorama you might have made early on in school, of flat pieces of cardboard. Only this way it wouldn't get destroyed when Jerry the token fat kid with a gland problem, doesn't see it when he sits down to eat his twelve packed lunches.

Also there's a use for the 3D Box.. make it invisible and use it as a collision box around and behind the various parts of the scenery. Nice big square blocks should play nicely with something like the RTS behavior (which seems to be the closest in construct to how the path-finding could work in such a game).

I'm talking about placing meshes next to each other like a tile map. If you place one right after another, you will get a line where the background shows through. It has something to do with 3d layering, not sure if its a bug tho...

Well that's just made meshes useless for what I intended to use them for.. Back to the shader idea *sighs*

You can add multiple meshes, but,......and its a big but, they wont line up even if the z heights are the same.

That makes both baby jesus cry, and kills kittens at the same time as clubbing seals. This doesn't apply to the way things are done in your terrastruct does it?

Wow, some very cool replies. It's good to see that when it comes down to it, many don't want it to become another 3D engine after all, and are just looking for little extra's.

But for a lot of purposes, people only want 3d to do something like a 3d lamp post in the background, or a 3d spinning coin...the game itself is still 2d but the background is 3d...I've written an obj loader before so I might make a version of 3dbox one day that can load and render an obj...then its capable of rotating and everything..but it wouldn't be as brilliant as the engine in a program like Unity because that was build from the ground up to support 3d.

I think something like that would be just fine. To me, it's still WAY more than we had back in those days for making games (we were amazed and considered ourselves lucky when we finally got Deluxe Paint and could use 32 colors) lol. I don't want to see it becoming all about 3D though, like others say, can use a proper app for those things. Construct is and should always be 2D at heart. With 3D benefits as an extension and helper rather than a focus.

For example. A point and click game. Granted, you don't need 3D to make one of those, using lots of events you could work out where parts of the image are, and if the player is in front or behind them. But 3D would make it easier thanks to the depth, without turning it into 3D (how many loved the first Monkey Island, compared to how many enjoyed the last one that was all 3D, yeah hehe).

Or there's the way I'm intending to use current meshes, my game would be 2D, and I've no intention of changing from that, the meshes will simply be used to "pop out" the graphics in the locations and give a little depth to them. But it'll just be a visual effect only, it'll still be entirely 2D.

A simple object loader would be nice to have, but as others have said. Open this pandora's box and people are going to start expecting more and more. I suppose it's a fine line to walk.

Though even I have to admit, 2.5D like Duke Nukem or Blood, would be great fun to have

As far as I know the hotspot for any physics object needs to be centered in order for the collision to work properly. If I remember correctly this has something to do with the way Box2D works.

If you need the hotspot at the edge of the flipper for whatever reason then make your sprite like so:

<img src="http://i45.tinypic.com/i6clc9.png">

Then when you draw your custom collision mask in the layout, just place your points around the colored area like normal.

Ahhhh! Ok that makes complete sense now, I see where I was going wrong (didn't think the hotspot location would matter, but yep, that's the problem right there). Neat way to fix it too, didn't think of doing it that way either. Awesome!

> 1 ) How do you increase the accuracy of the physics.

>

It's hard to say without a .cap to look at to see what's wrong.

No need, you practically answered, fixed and showed a better way for that question below (it's cause I often test stuff using the mouse behavior for speeds sake, and that's where I was screwing up when it came to physics). A classic case of the error being between the computer and the chair.

> 2 ) Are there issues with physics objects and mouse control? Again, seems flakey for me when I use it

>

Yes. If you manually move a physics object with the mouse or a behavior or by updating it's coordinates in any way except with physics itself, then you will get weird collisions. Also, when you manually move the flipper against the ball with the mouse, the flipper has no force, so it's not actually "hitting" the ball. You're just intersecting the flipper and the ball. The ball and the flipper are trying to push out of each other, but the mouse behavior is overriding it's position.

Here's a method for moving physics object around with the mouse that may suit your needs:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/529356/dragandtoss.cap

It's got a little bit of lag behind the mouse but it works pretty well.

*sigh* So simple and yet so perfect.

Thank you so much!!!

Noticed something weird going on with custom collisions and physics

Download:Example Really simple example cap to show the problem.

The custom collision is setup correctly around the object following the mouse, but when it's run, the collision shape is somewhere above the object. The hotspot has to be where it is (think of it like a paddle in a pinball game, rotating at that point, even though it doesn't in this example).

Is this a known issue or did I just set something up wrong?

Also three questions

1 ) How do you increase the accuracy of the physics. I've seen other people's examples and objects bounce and collide perfectly, even with tons of physics objects all interacting at once, without any of them passing through each other or acting weirdly, yet whenever I've tried to do the same, objects just snap and bug out much of the time and the physics come across as incredibly flakey for me. I've set the World Solver and World Friction to their highest setting and seen no improvement. I've used objects that aren't any different in mass or size (I read about that issue on the wiki and made sure to check it wasn't that). I just can't seem to make them behave like other people can, even when I attempt to mimic what they did in their exe's. Does it need something to do with timedelta? I know it's not my machine, as like I say, others have worked fine for me.

2 ) Are there issues with physics objects and mouse control? Again, seems flakey for me when I use it, yet I've seen it in others creations that appear to work and behave just fine (one had leaves being pulled about with a mouse (which is moved about quickly) and lots of physics going on and looked flawless). So I'm clearly doing something wrong.

3 ) Tiny request, not a big deal, more curiosity really. Will there eventually be an option with creating custom collisions to drag the points around after creating them, as opposed to the current method of having to delete them all to go back to one you want to change.

That is so cool!

[quote:161ga2x4]I do agree that meshes WOULD work better, and ultimately look better. But unless someone can come up with a way to convert height maps to mesh files (which would IMO be the best method of "modeling" mesh files in construct), then for what I need, a shader like requested is still probably the only way to go.

Here ya go....

http://guicon.110mb.com/structure/index.php?act=page&id=2

Shitty host... is shitty, so here's the direct link

http://files.getdropbox.com/u/666516/terrastruct.exe

Buh.. Wah.. How.. WOW!

lol!

Dude, seriously, how the hell did you make that?? It's amazing! I take it it's going to be included with v1 of construct? Cause it should be, wow. It's perfect! I'd have replied sooner but jumped right in and got carried away trying it out. I've only looked at the mesh generation part so far, it does exactly what I hoped, and will let me load a height map in and save it out directly, without having to worry about edges matching up thanks to the 0,255 being set heights across the board (neat that you did that, so does the method I'd use to create the height maps, it just saved me fiddling with values and Photoshop batches hehe). I love that there's options for how detailed the mesh should be too.

I owe you big time for this, wow, just wow!