When you're developping a game, you enter the world of tricks and faking.

It's just not a straightforward process.

The only time I worked on a game with full, non modular assets, was on a friends point&click game.

But we still used a trick: we made video sequences that looped and we layered a HUD on top. Changing a view was merely just reaching another point on the video and looping through a range (like from the 30th second to the 45th).

The year before I learnt the lesson. Another friend was making the same kind of point&click but with Sprite animations. The project (it was multimedia fusion 2 but it's not relevant here) went up to 1.5Go and took like 10 minutes to open.

And at least 1 minute or 2 to preview it. The Ram used, I think, went up to 800Mo.

All that because there were a lot of 1024x768 sprite animation.

If you're curious about the calculation it's rather simple. A pixel has 4 channels R,G,B,A and each Chanel takes 1byte (8bit, 256 levels).

So a 1024 x 768 image will take 1024*768*4 bytes which is exactly 3Mo.

This friend of mine had like 4 camera view with looping animation(to create some kind of mood...) and when I say animations, it was 3D animated render and composited on after effect. So making tonnes of frames was pretty cheap. And there were between 50 and 150 frames. On top of that, there were some state changes, which means, an entirely new animation loop each time.

So the project probably had up to 250/300 images.... Here are your 800Mo of Ram. (And of project size since, I think multimedia fusion 2 store images as raw bitmaps).

Now, for a better example that kind of speak for itself, you have Rayman Origins.

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23551572/misc/rayman-repetition.jpg" border="0" />

And I'm probably missing tonnes of things.

I wouldn't be surprised if some part of the land in the background were used for the foreground (or the other way arround)

But anyway, you can see that this image is build by duplicating the same assets. They are resized/mirrored but also the hue,saturation and lightness are tweaked as well as some blurring effect to fake out of focus objects.

What I suspect as well, since it's made with the ubiart framework. is that the curly plants might be distorted sprites to create a bit more variety. And also, you can see those plant on other levels but with a more purple hue.

And that's only what I discovered. They are definitely more tricks that allowed them to lower the memory footprint and so increase the amount of graphics in the image.

A good 2D game artist has to think of modularity. It's not easy, it's even, often, painfull for the artist. But that's the price of real time rendering (:

septeven

J't'en prie (:

septeven

I think you can create the datalist node outside of the jQuery(document).ready() call

That's just when you append it to the canvasdiv node that you have to be sure it's been loaded.

You also just need to wait to set the Attribute of the element.

In short your behinstProto.onCreate can look like that:

     behinstProto.onCreate = function()
     {
          /** Load properties **/
          this.myProperty = this.properties[0];

          var self = this;
          this.wordsArray = [];

          this.datalist = document.createElement("datalist");
          this.datalist.id = "datalist" + this.inst.uid;

          /** on cr�er une array contenant la liste des mots **/
          self.wordsArray  = self.properties[0].split(",");
          var wordsArrayLength = self.wordsArray.length;

          for (var i = 0; i < wordsArrayLength; i++)
          {
               var word = document.createElement("option");
               word.value = self.wordsArray[i];
               jQuery(word).appendTo(self.datalist);
          }

          jQuery(document).ready( function() {
                    /** on r�cup�re la textbox concern�e **/
                    var textbox = self.inst.elem;
                    textbox.setAttribute("list", "datalist"+self.inst.uid);
                    /** on ajoute l'�l�ment datalist au projet **/
                    jQuery(self.datalist).appendTo(self.runtime.canvasdiv ? self.runtime.canvasdiv : "body");

               }
          );

     };

Link to .capx file (required!):

destroyInstanceSound.capx

Steps to reproduce:

You can drag&drop the red sprite to hear the effect of the 4 positionned sound

When you click on a blue sprite, it is destroyed and the sound they "emit" should stop.

Observed result:

Only if you destroy the instance with the highest IID will you stop all sounds.

Else the positionned sound are still playing their sound on position.

Expected result:

When I destroy a sprite, the associated positionned sound should be destroyed

I looked into the audio plugin.

The cause of this, is that when getAudioBuffer is called it will return the same AudioBuffer for the 4 sounds.

So in getAudioInstance, this AudioBuffer will see it's playTagWhenReady property overwritten by a new tag each time until the last enemy instance.

I couldn't quite find why the C2AudioInstances's tag does the same but they do (probably in request.onload in C2AudioBuffer's constructor).

Then, when the stop action is executed the 3 first tags won't be recognized.

So none of the positionned sound will stop.

Browsers affected:

Chrome: yes

Firefox: probably

Internet Explorer: probably

Operating system & service pack:

Windows server 2008 r2 SP1

Construct 2 version:

r124

Blood Type:

O+

Joke level:

-InfiniteYann2013-04-09 20:51:19

I'm not sure if it will be usefull, but I made

some days ago.

If you can get any XML formated document, you should be able to parse it however you need to with the plugin.

jbmoyer

I made it myself, and yes it should be exactly right to the second.

Here it's exactly 15h43 and the image says "in one day and 16 minutes" which is perfect :D

If you had a false estimation it might be because of me. I made a mistake in the php and it was off by +1h after the daylight change.

So yeah now it's correct (:

Yeah new vid \o/

In this one I'm exploring the XML plugin. How you can access a given nodes, how to loop through them, check for attributes, etc.

Have fun, and don't by shy with feedbacks :D

Nope won't work.

You have to see the event like a filter or as I like to visualize it, a colander

Fighter Is overlapping Fighter will eliminate all Fighter objects that aren't overlapping at least one Fighter object other than itself.

Then Pick Fighter instance 0 will elimitate all other objects.

So Pick Fighter instance 1 afterward will just invalidate the event since it will return false (you don't have the instance 1 anymore in your colander).

So in short... you can't really use them like that in your situation.

However you can use the IID shortcut

You can do

Sprite(0).team != Sprite(1).team

+ Fighter: Is overlapping Fighter:
    // First we build a list of IID
    -> Array: Set size to (0,1,1)

    + System: Foreach Fighter
        -> Array: push back Fighter.IID on X axis

    // Then we need to pick all to be able to use the IID instead of the picked indexes
    + System: Pick all Fighter
    + System: Repeat Array.width times
        Local number A = 0  // IID of the first term of the comparaison
        -> System: Set A to Array.At(loopindex)

        + System: Repeat Array.width times
            Local number B = 0  // IID of the second term of the comparaison
            -> System: Set B to Array.At(loopindex)

            + System: A != B
            + System: Fighter(A).team != Fighter(B).team
            + System: distance(Fighter(A).X,Fighter(A).Y,Fighter(B).X,Fighter(B).Y) < Fighter.Width * sqrt(2)
            + System: Pick Fighter instance A
                -> Fighter: set State to "attack"
                -> System: Stop loop // here since we found a match we stop the inner most loop

works for me

I was too lazy to reproduce exactly what I wrote before.

I used string parsing instead of dictionary look up but the principal is the same.

Instead of a dictionnary.Get('elf_4')

I do a list = dictionnary.Get('elf') and then tokenat(list,4,newline)

same idea

Which made me write a little function to keep things clear.

basicNameGenerator.capx

Joannesalfa

name = dictionary[race&"_"&floor(random(6))]&dictionary[race&"_"&floor(random(6))]&choose("",dictionary[race&"_"&floor(random(6))])

I would build a dictionary of phonemes like:

dictionary['elf_0'] = 'aeg'
dictionary['elf_1'] = 'am'
dictionary['elf_2'] = 'ama'
dictionary['elf_3'] = 'dir'
dictionary['elf_4'] = 'nor'
dictionary['elf_5'] = 'ri?'
...
dictionary['dwarf_0'] = 'dah'
dictionary['dwarf_1'] = 'lon'
dictionary['dwarf_2'] = 'mor'
dictionary['dwarf_3'] = 'ren'
dictionary['dwarf_4'] = 'tero'
dictionary['dwarf_5'] = 'war'
...
dictionary['human_0'] = 'rob'
dictionary['human_1'] = 'ali'
dictionary['human_2'] = 'dove'
dictionary['human_3'] = 'fha'
dictionary['human_4'] = 'vyre'
dictionary['human_5'] = 'quo'
...

name = dictionary[race&"_"&floor(random(6))]&dictionary[race&"_"&floor(random(6))]&choose("",dictionary[race&"_"&floor(random(6))])

reminds me of what I wrote a year and a half ago

http://www.scirra.com/forum/big-report-ideas-problems-after-the-c2-contest_topic45653.html (in 2/ syntax coloration)