R0J0hound: Fantastic, that works. Thanks a bunch.

AR TeamOne: Using Rex's plug-ins from page 5 in conjunction with the "car" or "bullet" behaviours would get you half way there. There are several ways you could make racing NPCs follow a track - maybe try setting up checkpoint objects around corners, and have the NPCs aim their direction towards the next checkpoint.

Problem description

The "Schedule Next Play" audio function appears to only work with audio files imported as sound, not music.

Example CAPX

dropbox.com/s/498bnlxyig3awra/audioschedule.capx

Steps to reproduce

1. In a new project, import an audio file as music.

2. Automate it to play it after a second or so with "schedule next play".

Observed result

Upon running the project, the audio file plays immediately. "Schedule next play" seems to have no effect.

Expected result

There should be a scheduled pause, as is the case when a sound file is used instead.

System details

R266, Windows 10, tested on Chrome, NW, and Firefox.

As an aside, I'm using this to seamlessly flow an "intro" music track into a "loop" track (because "on audio end" leaves a small pause). It works fantastically... aside from this minor problem of having to import all my music as sound.

Right now, AJAX requests are exclusively for dialog, but I might use them for save files in the future, so sure, I'll make that change.

I'm running a stress test now. I'll update if I can find anything unusual.

Update:

After running a test with tens of thousands of AJAX requests, I haven't been able to create a spontaneous error. This is a good thing, I suppose - it means the problem is probably with my code, not with AJAX.

I did notice one thing - the speed of AJAX completions skyrockets when the window is out of focus, I guess because the game loop is no longer confined to the framerate. Not too surprising.

Sure, here's the important bit of code. Request the file, stick it into an array, then if the level calls for it, immediately call the function that parses the array. I think, when the request fails, "on any completed" doesn't trigger at all.

A stress test is a good idea. I'll set one up later.

For in-game dialog, I like to use separate text files which I load through AJAX at the start of a level, save to an array, and then parse line by line.

This works perfectly 99.9% of the time.

But on very rare occasions, the requested text file simply won't load. For my current in-development game, I've added an "on any error" condition so that I can see if a request failure happens in the future, but given how rare and seemingly random the error is, it might be hard to test for. I might go months without seeing the error again.

Bearing in mind that my game is offline (NW.js) and that I'm not doing something silly with file names or weird file contents, my questions are:

1. What might cause a file requested through AJAX to return successfully most of the time, but occasionally fail?

2. Is there an alternative way to load text files that never results in failure?

Just a quick update of what I've learned from fiddling around:

1. For me, Electron has the same recording problems as NWjs. This wasn't surprising since the problem lies with Chromium, not NWjs.

2. Reverting to the oldest version of NW listed on the Scirra site (v0.11.5, Chromium 38, 5th January 2015) fixed my issue of a black screen when recording through OBS. That's a relief. If this matches other people's experiences, then that means that simply using an old version of NWjs can make a game more streaming/recording friendly.

Would anyone happen to know which Chromium version started the more severe screen recording issues? I'm guessing it was around 50.

Apologies for reviving this thread. I don't want to retread something that's already been discussed extensively, but I wouldn't mind clarification on a few things.

1. What are my options for making an executable more likely to be stream-friendly? I saw some suggested additions of "--single-process" and "--in-process-gpu" to package.json, but they didn't make any difference for me.

2. Has anyone tried recording an Electron application? I might give this a go myself if no one else has.

3. Recording works fine with Firefox, which makes me wonder if there's a NWjs-like application wrapper for Firefox. I'm guessing not. (Why not? Firefox is open source, right?)

4. I remember managing to get OBS to work with little issue on an older version of C2/NW (some time in 2015). Was there a particular NW version that started the black screen issues, or has this always been a problem?

I'm a little eager to solve this issue because I'm balls-deep in the development of a game that I think would benefit greatly from streaming. I'm aware that it's a tricky issue though, and it's clearly not Scirra's problem to fix.

I'll tell you why I made the switch: I discovered that Windows magnification settings would cause regular text to be displayed at "incorrect" sizes. I needed my text to look absolutely consistent between computers, and I couldn't find a way to make text objects ignore the magnification settings, so I figured it would be easier to just switch to sprite fonts rather than have unreadable text for any players who had the setting turned on.

I don't think this is a big issue, especially since only a tiny portion of players use Windows magnification, but it's worth considering if you suddenly see enormous text on someone's computer.

Edit: rephrased for clarity.

No, that's fine. I just wanted to congratulate you - not many people your age manage to make it so far into developing a game. Keep it up!

I played your demo up until the Flappy Bird section, but had to give up around there. I think you need to make sure that the player has enough time to react on each screen, otherwise they'll end up dying before they know what they're in for.

I notice that your profile says that you are 9 years old. Is this accurate?

This plugin works nicely. I just tried making an isometric dungeon by putting down an object for every wall, door, and floor in the appropriate isometric position, and it turned out great.

Is it possible to return a new seed after editing a level?

If you're asking whether you can return a new seed after putting down a few custom characters, then no, that wouldn't be possible due to the nature of how seeds work. However, you could use the "for each cell" event to iterate through the data and dump it to a JSON file, and then load the custom dungeon with the "load from JSON" action.