zenox98 - why does it sound so absurd? Sure keyboard is fine, but sometimes you are far away from it and just want to tinker with things. And it's not JUST for being lazy, it's a lot more comfortable to use in many occasions. It's a small improvement for hopefully small effort. I don't see why it should be scoffed at just because it's not a major feature.

Hey guys,

When the day gets a bit long and I'm winding down for bed, I find myself using the mouse almost exclusively while I watch something on another monitor. And I think it would be cool if you could alter the values in the properties tab by clicking on the number and scrolling the wheel up and down. As it is now, it unselects the currently selected value and just scrolls the properties tab up and down.

It's far from important, but it would be nice and is hopefully not much trouble to implement :)

srealist - I just watched a quick video and yeah, it looks great. With lighting a strong possibility and multiplayer apparently on the way I am running out of things to ask for!

As for particles, I read Ashley once talking about how he couldn't do rotating on particles due to the way particles are optimised. He went on to say that if you want other effects you should just use sprites. So I'm guessing there are similar issues with your stated particle effects. It would be pretty easy to event those effects from sprites, albeit rather heavy in processing.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what the modules will be like though, that he mentioned in the blog post. Then we could see many various ways to handle custom particles, amongst other things.

TELLES0808 - Thanks for sharing, that is great news! I think my artist will weep with joy if it gets working.

jayderyu yeah I getcha, but I don't mind if it only really works well with Spriter. Spriter usage with this will bring about some really beautiful games. We could start to see some stuff that is not only great to look at, but also very easy to make!

My mind is already racing with what I could achieve on a mid-range machine or console - awesome camera work zooming past bushes as some guy powers up, messing around with timescales as he unleashes a fireball that lights up the whole forest, with particle sparks flying about. All in regular gameplay and automated through functions. I quad-want.

TELLES0808 sorry but I don't know anything else about it yet. The best part though is it's already over its funding limit, so we are definitely going to see a nice new tool for the industry :)

If anyone else could explain a little more about how it works or manages to have a chat with the guy (the Melbourne indie scene is very easy to talk to), let me know. I am still in Nam for a while, so it;s hard for me to do anything (never complaining about Australian internet again!).

Hello,

I was just linked to a kickstarter by a fellow Melbourne dev. It's about creating dynamic lighting for 2D art and looks pretty darn sweet. You can check it out here.

Now I'm interested to see if it can work with C2. It says it can work with most programs that have custom shaders, and that they will make the shaders for the program if necessary, but my tech knowledge is limited so I'm not sure.

Maybe Ashley could make an enquiry? Mixing dynamic lighting with Spriter would be simply incredible.

I'm just wondering if anyone has tried Intel XDK New yet? I was meant to try it, but I have been in Nam for a while.

The old Intel XDK was grand apart from a black screen glitch, so maybe they have fixed that. It might be worth checking out before getting too involved with GC.

OlivierC - Of course you use functions, but still how you use them adds up! You still need to know when to call which function and state your paremeters. Say for example you have on mouse clicked + is overlapping character: call function. First of all, you should only ever have to write that once and not for every character, which is obvious. But then also what if that character is unresponsive at the time? You don't want to have to add another condition saying 'is character responsive', so be sure to include that in your function.

And the more you get into it, the more little quirks may appear like timers - do you want them to stop when talking to someone? Just when talking to a specific person? And how do you event your speech? For every window of text you don't want to have to write 'is talking + talk page = X: call function that sets text to X'. Sure you will often have to refer to these, but making a neat way of housing all speech for a character under 1 set of conditions makes things easier.

So all I'm really saying is never get satisfied with how trim you get it, because there is always more to consider and easier ways to implement things. For my game most text doesn't require a single event, which makes life tremendously easier for the level designers/writers. But still I am always looking for new ways to add short-cuts that can reduce the need for events, or at least the number of actions and conditions and actions for more complex scenes. It's infinitely more important if you expect a lot of people to work along side you as you don't want to have to spend time teaching them how it works.

But about the XML/JSON, I had always thought you need an internet connection? I must say I haven't looked into it too much, I got turned off early on when there were still some issues with them. Maybe you could elaborate for me?

Sebastian - ah okay, thanks for that. I don't suppose you would have any idea how to implement dynamic lighting like that in C2? I know it's possible as I've seen a few demos using it, but there was never a capx. To have shadowing and lights working like that, alongside shaders and spriter, would lead to some really amazing and versatile visuals!

Could it be that it's not power-of-two? I get that warning when importing sprite fonts.

digitalsoapbox - That seems like a really neat trick! But do you know if it uses more memory (as the canvas object being a large single object would take up more normally than a bunch of little tiles)?

I have one project that could really benefit from this, but the layouts are quite large, so if the memory usage spikes it would be a huge issue.

OlivierC - Oh, I was meaning the effect of the light coming from the windows being displayed on the floor sorry ^^ Is that an effect you made or part of the image? For changing the colour of the character, I would actually prefer the lighting example that comes with C2. We use that extensively in our current noire project to great effect! It makes it highlight only the parts that are under the light.

As for text, I took the selfSwitch idea from RPG Maker and that will make it easy to define what streams of text they will use. But, how you go about setting self switches and referencing them can get a little murky. And mainly, how many conditions and actions it takes to initiate and end speech is a huge factor. There is a lot of speech to be done in a game like that, so if you can set it in 1 action and 1 condition, you will do that chunk of the game 4x faster than 4 conditions and 4 actions. Then in the latter case, you imagine you spend 30% of your development time writing text, you just added 90% to your production time. Sure it will not literally take up 4x as long to simply copy/paste/drag those parts around, but the room for error increases and it can sap morale when you need to do it for extended periods of time, both big time wasters.

I am actually really interested in seeing how everyone handles text (and all other RPG elements really) in C2, as there is no real standard I have seen so far and these are the things I have worked on most extensively. Also, like mindfaQ asked, how did you handle movement? I use pathfinding, but my issue is that they never end up exactly where you click or get as close to the wall as possible, which yours seem to do.