In the interest of better optimising my game I was reading this article which says

Also, to avoid adjacent image's colors "bleeding" or "fringing" across to other frames, Construct leaves a 1 pixel space between all frames on a spritesheet. This means it won't be able to fit four 128x128 images in a single 256x256 spritesheet, so try to ensure Sprite images are just below a power-of-two size. The optimal size is two pixels less than a power-of-two size, e.g. 30x30, 126x126 or 254x254. (Note however that Tiled Background objects do work best at exactly a power-of-two size.)

Now I seem to have somehow missed this memo and have been creating all my pixel art as power of 2 sizes, everything from my resolution to my grid is set up around this. It's a pixel art game, so it probably isn't the end of the world if it's not optimised the best way possible, but am I understanding this correctly, that for instance my 32x32 character will essentially take up double the space on a spritesheet than if it was 30x30? It just seems a bit unintuitive. That's on me for not reading the docs though.

How are others handling this for art assets? Is it much of an issue, or should I just continue as I have? Bearing in mind the game is fairly animation heavy. If I use the auto crop tools each animation frame is cropped to a different size anyway, so maybe I don't need to worry so much and just let construct do it's own thing?

Yes, that slows down or speeds up the music, but it doesn't alter the pitch unfortunately.

Playing with the timescale results in timestretching of the audio which retains the pitch. I'd like to be able to manipulate background music so that if it is pitched down it plays slower and if it's pitched up it plays faster. There don't seem to be any options to play music files at different frequencies and no pitch shifting or vibrato effects (both of which would be a really welcome additions to the audio plugin). Anyone got any hacks to do this? I want to create a sort of warbly wow and flutter type effect.

One thing I've found useful for me working on a large project is keeping all of my global variables in their own event sheet and separating them into sections with comments/titles. Commenting stuff is pretty important, I ignored it for years, but the more complex your project gets the more you will wish you did.

+1 to better multi monitor support, I do find it quite clunky using construct on multiple monitors, basically having to stretch the window across 2 screens and then align everything. It might be functional enough, but not great. Have a look at how something like Reaper (the DAW) allows for window customisation, it's gamechanging. Are these limitations due to it being browser based?

Thanks so much, I will study this!

Thanks both of you for the insights! The array idea is definitely interesting I will have a play around with it! Thank you

Hi all, my game has different surfaces such as grass, rock, metal etc and I am wanting to play different footsteps as the character runs across these.

My levels are large, varied and are primarily built using tilemaps so my first thought was to create a colour coded tilemap placed underneath my collision tiles and check if the player is overlapping a particular index in that and then play the sounds as needed. I like this method because I can just paint in areas and they will match up easily with my artwork. I haven't put it into practice yet, but it got me thinking - is that actually the best way to do this?

I would have to constantly be looping through the tilemap indexes right? Or would I simply be saving myself time if I had several sprites and stretched them as needed across areas and then made them invisible at runtime? Would this be more or less performant? Does anyone have any experience or insights on the best way to do this from both a performance and maintenance perspective, bearing in mind that we are dealing with large layouts here. I realise for small projects the performance difference may be inconsequential. Thanks for any guidance!

Seconding this, - ignored raycasting for a long time and when I went to use it did not find it particularly intuitive out of the box - some visual indicators even just as a preview effect would be awesome.

Take a look at the Kiwi Story game in the examples, it has an enemy with this patrolling behaviour.

Thanks dop2000 - so were you able to just automatically convert that are you saying? Did you need to modify anything to get it to work? I get this error every time. At any rate, I am grateful for the updated file you posted, thank you!

Hi all, I am looking at an old example of lightning done by brunopalermo from this thread I think it's a cool example and am interested in playing around with the effect. You can download an example of the file here. As it was made a while ago though it uses the old depreciated function plugin. I've tried to convert it using "replace with built in function" but it throws an error:

the types for parameter(s) 0, 1, 4 could not be determined (deduced types any, any number, number any)

I'm just trying to understand this, and see if there is a way to convert it to the new functions.

Is it throwing this error because it can't determine if some of the function parameters are strings or numbers and it doesn't like this? From what I can tell they all appear to be numbers.

I notice if I remove the 2 function calls in the else statement it will then convert o the new function, but of course the effect then no longer works - and I'm afraid I don't understand enough of it to know how to fix.

Thanks for any insights!