Fillrate can be a big bottleneck on high desktop resolutions and weak gpu's, so I've been looking into ways to force resolution switches to deal with it. The best resolution switch program I was able to find was Display Changer so I wrote a little launcher program to set preferred game resolutions without having to mess around with .bat files. You can get it here if you want to check it out (PC only nw.js builds):

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/70562654/Launcher.zip

Place 'Launcher.exe' and 'launch.txt' in your game folder, open launch.txt and set 'Prototype.exe' to whatever your game.exe file is called. The next lines are resolutions you want the game to be run in:

Prototype.exe (replace with name of your .exe)

1366 (target resolution width 1st priority)

768 (target resolution height 1st priority)

1024 (target resolution width 2nd priority)

768 (target resolution height 2nd priority)

800 (3rd priority)

600 (etc)

640

480

The launcher will try to run the game in the resolution on top of the list. If the graphics card or monitor can't do it it'll try the next one instead, and then the next one etc. If none of the resolutions are available it'll settle for running the game in native desktop resolution. There's a maximum of four resolutions you can include in the text file but you don't need to put that many in there if you don't want to. Include three, two, or one and it'll work just as well.

You'll also need to download Display Changer and place dccmd.exe in your game folder. Link here:

http://12noon.com/?page_id=80

Some problems:

No proper switching to window mode. The custom resolution will stay in effect until you quit the game. Same with Alt-Tab.

Display Changer license fee for commercial projects is pretty brutal: 500$.

So I've been thinking about trying to write my own. Maybe even go for a fully customizable launcher window. But before I look into it more I'd like to know is there any way for C2 nw.js builds to communicate with external apps, through a plugin or otherwise? For instance, if the browser object does a 'Cancel Fullscreen' then it would be great if the launcher app could get informed about it so that it can restore the desktop resolution until 'Request Fullscreen' is run again.

Um yeah... Just tried again on my laptop and now it doesn't work for me either. It did work fine before but I've done a windows repair and some driver re-installing since then. Very aggravating. This whole node-webkit deal, I'm getting less and less happy about it :-/

Here's the thread I got the idea from btw:

https://superuser.com/questions/645918/ ... rd-optimus

Try to add this to package-win.json and package-preview.json (in Construct 2/html5/exporters/nwjs/):

--disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds

Chrome doesn't like some nvidia gpu's and will revert to integrated when it detects them. But this worked for me. Humongous difference!

Tom Ashley:

Pleeease fix the logout time, I can't spend five minutes typing a reply without getting logged out and having to type it all over again!

Here's a sub-optimal solution that you probably thought of already

Keep the entire song with intro and all in a single file, then when it's done playing you start looping the second file that doesn't have the intro. At least you won't get a skip shortly after the song starts.

Hm.

I agree it's an important thing. Music playback's got to be the most neglected part of any gamedev middleware :-/

snip

I agree with all this. Got to say, reading about some problems make me feel like I live in a different universe or something. I can vibe with the sentiment that C2 feels limited because of certain assumptions about what users need and what they don't. The recent parallax discussion for instance springs to mind. But I don't see why we couldn't recreate Mario, or any kind of platformer gameplay we like, with the platform and solid behaviours and some events to supplement them.

It's too much work to try and re-create the Mario gameplay so instead I'll do a shameless pimp and provide a small example of a Metroidvania/old-school Prince of Persia platformer situation in C2:

This is all platform behaviour, solid behaviour, events, and a couple of extra collision boxes to check for types of surface and positions. So I wonder, how complex does anyone need their platforming stuff to be that they can't achieve it with the functionality already in place?

I think the gradients you're using crashes hard with the line art. Imo gradient tools and photoshop filters in general tend to make things look cheap: You can tell it's a computer that did the work and not a human being.

If you're going for a comic look with line art and colors filled in I recommend you have a look at Darkest Dungeon. Check out their dev videos, I remember at least one of them have the artist go through how he does some of the inking and coloring for the characters.

Beyond that, be mindful of color hue, color values(brightness) and color ramps. Colors, when not handled right, can pull your artwork down in all kinds of ways. For one, saturated colors will always draw attention to themselves. You have a lot of saturation in your background which competes with your player and enemy sprites for attention. That's not good. The interactive objects, *that's* what you want the player to pay attention to.

Except for neon-lights and other self-illuminated objects we rarely see full-on saturation in the real world. In fact, the less an object is illuminated by light, the less color-saturation it will seem to have. When you're out at night you've no doubt noticed that things seem to be a lot less colorful than in broad daylight. That's because our eyes don't pick up colors nearly as well with poor lighting. The darker colors in your art should reflect that: Cooler colors (red -> purplish, green -> cyan etc) with less saturation. It's also a good idea to vary your color ramps according to this principle. Have a look at these:

Dull, unrealistic:

More interesting to look at, closer to reality:

This is literally one of the easiest things you could possibly code yourself O_o;;

Hehe, yeh it is. I figured out how not long after I posted and forgot all about this thread

For people who wonder:

Set Platform Vector Y to -Object.Platform.JumpStrength

Sure, coding in a double jump manually wouldn't be too hard. However the double jump feature is already built into the platformer behavior, would be nice to be able to simply reset it.

Yep, would be a handy and natural fit for the behaviour.

+1. Would be very useful.

Fisholith made an example here:

Thanks

Oh that works great! Thanks so much for the help

The way window size works right now is it includes the window borders when you set resolution. So if I set window size to 320x256 in Windows 7 it'll fit the window borders inside that resolution so the actual game window is only 304x218. Problem is, window border size varies between OS'es, Windows versions, and theme settings so it's impossible to make sure the game always runs at the same resolution in windowed mode. If I run the same 320x256 res in classic mode for instance, the game resolution is suddenly 312x218.

It would be great if we had an alternate window size setting that made window borders expand to fit the game resolution instead of the other way around.