Awesome stuff! It's great to hear work has already been started! Any rough estimation how long it would take C2 to be complete enough to make full games? A year or two perhaps?

The path movement plugin has rounded paths, what about something similar for the RTS plugin? This would make movement much more natural. By setting the blocked speed to the same as the regular speed, it sometimes moves around corners in a smooth path. The RTS plugin could really be made amazing with some improvements. Maybe a MagicRTS plugin if you get what I mean

Hmm, I didn't think of the multiple instances of RTS. I did think of the movement angle thing, though. The problem is, I'm not exactly sure how RTS plugin works and I don't think it is as simple as that.

From my testing, the Rotate Object option seems to affect how the RTS plugin decides its course. It doesn't seem to be only visual. Otherwise, if I changed the rotation speed, the object wouldn't choose a completely different path. It needs to account for the rotation and the speed of that rotation in how it moves through the path.

I've also seen that depending on the settings chosen, it can be very easy for the object to go crazy or hit into things or get stuck going back and forth in one pattern or all sorts of things. Even at default settings, it isn't immune to problems. Also, if you rotate one of the obstacles, it usually causes big problems with the movement and the path chosen.

Anyone know how the path is actually generated?

BTW, I'm trying to use this for flying enemies in my platformer and besides it not always choosing a very good path, I can never get it to be very smooth either.

The cell size options for the RTS plugin are quite limited. It would be very useful to be able to set custom cell sizes.

It would also be great to have an action to toggle "Rotate Object" at runtime.

I will soon be releasing a complete guide to using Construct. Here�s a sample of the chapter topics:

Chapter 3: Missing or broken features and how they benefit you (includes bonus section �Why Save/Load really works�) Chapter 7: Creating an MMO: It�s not as hard as you think (includes bonus MMOFPS tutorial) Chapter 9: Inventories: Don�t you wish you knew how! Chapter 12: Arrays, Hash Tables, INI: Why they�re too special for you Chapter 14: How to encrypt a save game so that NASA can�t crack it Chapter 15: Randomly generated terrain (includes bonus section �Randomly generated games: The future of game making�) Chapter 18: Make an RPG in 3 simple steps Chapter 23: TimeDelta: It wants to be your friend =) Chapter 27: 3D in Construct (includes bonus 3D game plugin)

Stay tuned!

I'm just about finished eventing mine and I just noticed this

Edit: Hmm, from glancing at your .cap, it works completely different than mine. I'll look it over a bit more in detail tomorrow.

Even if someone will create a platformer pathfinding plugin, I'd still like to have a plugin specifically for doing A*. It would be useful. I'm not sure how it would gather the data on nodes and their connections, but I know someone can come up with something.

fake it, going for some A* system would work well for sure, but its definitely way more complicated than it needs to be. keep it simple.

It depends on the game. If you had an enemy in Castlevania that would chase you throughout the entire castle (or a pretty large area), you'd probably need A*. Other than situations like that, there might be simpler methods.

Also, I'd like to mention, a "one size fits all" plugin would probably have issues with "fitting all." The A* would work for everyone, but everything else could vary quite a lot in how it needs set up for each game. I'm not sure how it'd work with the non-A* side of things.

^this

I was talking in chat about this, and suggested Python as a possibility.

There's tons of stuff existing for sorting, and there's probably a lot for A* as well.

But the thing is that wont take into account your movement.

Yes it could find this node to that easy as pie, but how would it know when to jump, and at what speed?

There are ways to solve that, but with terrain in certain configurations, it gets tougher and requires a lot more work to set up the nodes in such areas. It's quite dependent on the layout of the level. I'm thinking A* might be the simplest part of the actual pathfinding.

Back to "one size fits all," since everything varies so much per game (e.g. platformer behavior vs custom movement), I'm not sure how well anything but A* itself could be turned into a plugin. There'd have to be a ton of planning on what EXACTLY it would and would not do. It wouldn't be a magic bullet. Even if a plugin was made, some things are so closely tied to individual games that an A* plus doing all the other events separately would be needed in plenty of cases. It is similar to how custom movement is still used in some platformers instead of the platformer behavior, except it would be an even bigger difference.

Those are some great ideas, Candescence! It's actually a lot more features than I was thinking of. I was thinking of a plugin that only handles the A* search and you get numbers from (which nodes are next in order) and I was going to implement the AI part myself. Of course, if it could work as well as the Infinite Mario AI, I wouldn't need to do that ... Also, Infinite Mario AI doesn't even use nodes (which is seriously impressive,though I wonder how something like that would work in non-linear levels).

For nodes, I think it would be great to have a way to visually connect them in the editor. As in, you could draw a line between them (like with the line object or a sprite) and the program uses that to gather all the connections data.

Recently I've been trying to come up with a good method of pathfinding in a platformer game. A node-based system seems like the best way and I have some ideas on how the nodes would work, but for the actual searching of which nodes need to be reached to get to the goal (A* and the nodes doing their work), I think a plugin would be far better than events. C++ is much faster for this than writing it all in events. What I'm doing wouldn't require very many nodes though, so if it could be done in events fast enough and someone has any advice on how to set up A* and nodes, I'd appreciate that, too.

you can also make the menu on a diffrent layout as long as your level has nothing set on layout startup. I do this because i hate timescale ^^

How do you set everything back the way it was when you return to the game? It's easier to just set timescale to 0. It's the most simple pause method available and works quite well. BTW, why do you hate timescale?

Just to make this more clear to anyone else who reads this:

Some keyboards have problems taking input from specific groups of keys when pressed together. You may have some combinations of 3 keys that won't register one key, some combinations of 4 keys, etc.