Tokinsom's Recent Forum Activity

  • It seems that setting the "Fullscreen Quality" project property to "High" automatically sets the internal resolution as high as possible based on window/screen size.

    This can vastly improve the visuals of your game, but it can also be very taxing on the GPU for 2k or 4k displays. There are diminishing returns beyond a certain point, anyway.

    Ashley That said, would it be possible to let us set the internal resolution ourselves in order to find a proper balance between visual quality and performance? Ideally this could be turned into an in-game option so players can find that balance themselves. At the very least, an option to cap the internal resolution to a multiple of the viewport size would suffice.

  • I'm not sure if you realise, but scheduled audio does not actually usually work with audio categorised as music. These tracks are normally backed by <audio> elements, which don't support sample-accurate playback - only Web Audio buffers do, which is how audio categorised as sound is played.

    On some platforms for various reasons like compatibility we actually ignore the audio categorisation and play everything as sound anyway (i.e. via Web Audio buffers). I've never seen or heard of any particular negative consequence of doing that, so I think it's fine to do that in your case too if you need sample-accurate playback of music tracks, and audio categorised as sound can be played with unlimited overlap.

    No I was not aware of this, and am now doubly confused. I thought the whole point of audio scheduling was to eliminate the potential 16ms+ "seam" between audio loops (which the built-in loop option is NOT immune to) as well as consistently repeating sounds like in the audio scheduling demo found in the start page. So then, how on earth are you supposed to seamlessly loop music outside of the method I've proposed above?

    As for workarounds, considering this particular game is strictly for desktop PC & consoles (chowdren) would it be okay to put my music tracks in the sound folder and play them as such? I considered this earlier but I thought it would instantly load every music track into memory instead of "streaming" on the fly, but perhaps that's some old web-based C2 logic I'm wrongly applying here?

  • Ashley I've done this before with mixed results and would ultimately consider it a workaround/hack. Having the tail mixed into the start is really obvious in some cases. Also, what of tracks with a one-off intro? If the tail of the looped section is baked into the beginning then you get the tails of both the intro & the loop stacked on top of each other. Alternatively, if the entire track is 1 file with a "loop back point" to skip the intro on successive plays, then that similarly cuts the tail of the looped section. All in all it's a hassle and the results are not perfect nor flexible.

    My composer and I were both excited to utilize audio scheduling and not have to bother with all of that, and everything is already coded with track tags, files, segments, durations, etc. in a JSON file so we can basically structure and loop music tracks however we want, flawlessly and without "tricks". This even allows us to change up song structure on the fly e.g. dynamic boss music based on its remaining health! All we need is the limitation of two identical tracks playing simultaneously to be lifted, and we're golden! I implore you to give it some consideration.

  • Most if not all music tracks will have a "tail" or "remainder" at the end consisting of reverb, delay effects, decay of an instrument, etc. or maybe the composer simply wants some sustain at the end of the track that overlaps the following loop a bit.

    As such, the loop needs to start playing at a specified point shortly before its previous one has ended, resulting in a bit of an overlap. This can't be done with the Audio object's built-in looping.

    However, this can be done with audio scheduling. Problem solved!

    Or so I thought... It appears that Construct doesn't allow you to stack playback of identical music tracks, so when I go to play a new loop just before the end of the previous one (as to not cut off the remainder) it instead replaces the previous loop and...yep, cuts off the remainder.

    This isn't a problem when using 2 different tracks (e.g. having a one-off intro track overlap the beginning of a different, looping track) so I don't understand why we can't also do that with multiple of the same track, unless it's some sort of safety measure to prevent people from doing this on accident (in which case there should just be a parameter to define how many "stacks" or "layers" of the same track can be played simultaneously - this would actually be very useful for sounds!)

    Anyway, hopefully I've explained this well enough. Ashley would it be possible to allow this or add an option to do so? I can file a suggestion if needed. The only workarounds are to have a duplicate of the same music track with a different name and then alternate between the two, or play the music tracks from the sound folder...but obviously neither of those are a good idea lol.

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  • I've been asking this question for years and have never gotten a solid answer, nor has it somehow ever seemed to be of much importance to other users. It's the first instance of an object you ever make, it's the one in the top-most layout, yes it can be changed, no it cannot be changed, etc.

    It's infuriating when you end up with your "default instance" somehow magically inheriting the properties of some random other instance instead of the first one you created, or whichever you want. This not only becomes the one created at runtime, but the one properties are inherited from when placing a new instance in a layout from the project bar.

    I suggested a "make default instance" button years ago but it never happened.

    All this time and I too still don't fully understand the inner workings of it :')

  • Agreed this would be very useful, but not sure if it's possible. Add it to the suggestions platform or tag Ashley?

  • Very useful. I just recently opted for spriteswapping instead of 8+ color replace shaders due to performance issues on many instances, so this might allow me to do that after all.

  • And dictionaries inside a dictionary!

  • I tried construct3.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C3-I-470

    Some of these things have since been fixed, but not the big ones. A "default dark" theme is still missing and would be welcome.

  • Ah, wonderful! I switched to the stable channel a while ago so I hadn't seen that yet.

  • With the new scene graph feature, I was hoping to be able to assemble a heirarchy of objects in an "object bank" layout, then create that as needed during runtime via a single event.

    For example, an invisible dummy object would be the parent to a bunch of other objects that comprise a pause menu, or perhaps a large complex enemy with multiple parts / unique instances. So "create dummy object" would effectively create my whole pre-assembled pause menu or complex enemy on the fly during runtime, and destroying the dummy would destroy the child objects as well. (Yes, I know containers create / destroy their partnered objects at runtime but this is different.)

    Is this not possible or am I just missing something? It looks like hierarchies made in a layout only pertain to those exact instances.

    I suppose this would be more akin to Unity's prefabs but wasn't that sort of the point with the scene graph feature to begin with?

    Still not ideal but you can change "main" in package.json to load a specific version.

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Tokinsom

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