Ashley Thanks for the info - That all makes sense. if you are rotating layers/layout does that make a difference?

— - I suppose you are right. I have a lot of wants wrapped up in how I chose to layer my game. Thanks.

Arima - I am running multiple force to own texture layers. (do different blend modes affect a layer the same way as a webgl effect in terms of cpu usage?

This is my current layer list, it is running fine so far. I think my computer was performing poorly when I was doing some stress tests. I am running the following on an i5 with 25-40% cpu usage. This includes calculating physics as well:

layout effects + post processing including scaling and rotating

GUi

light effects (screen, dodge, or other effects used)

BackGround (destination over)

Climate effects

Liquid (using various shaders)

Foreground parallax

Light effects and illumination (multiply/forces own texture)

Explosions, fire, lasers, and other nonsense (additive blend mode)

Tilelayer (foreground)

TileLayer (active)

TileLaye (background)

Background parallax 1

BGP 2

BGP 3

Hey everyone,

It seems, that increased layer numbers in projects increases the load on the cpu while running the game. I made a test in which I compared the same game but where one instance had many layers and one did not (3 compared to 15).

I have generally used layers to help me organize objects. This results in no more than a few extra layers. But now I am working on a large project and need many layers. Even though they are not doing anything as far as I can tell it is still increasing cpu usage (3layers 25% cpu)(15layers 65% cpu) intel i5.

anyone have some tips or insight when dealing with layers?

It would be nice to have organizational layers that do not have any effect on how construct2 runs - it would only be an editor thing.

that's brilliant... I always cursed as I manually stitched it all together via phot0shop. This is a very good idea

I was thinking it would be nice to be able to search for multiple things at the same time in the event search tool.

For example, say I have a player that has 200+ events associated with it. Scattered throughout are applications of force. If I want to change those, whatever aspect, I have to go through all the players events anyway and search doesn't do a whole lot of good. I could search for player and get 200 results, or I could search for force and get 500 results. But if one could do Force AND player it would be a lot easier to hunt down events.

Just a thought.

I figured out what was wrong! I was applying dt to impulses that controlled the player. impulses are not time based so when I tweaked them to get what I wanted out of them while applying dt they became much weaker when the fps increased to 60.

I still want to know why the game all of a sudden switched fps though, it does seem like a computer thing... and is there a way to set max fps?

Hello everyone.

I don't know what forum to put this in so it went here. This is like a bug but I can't reproduce it and so can't put it in the bugs forum.

So... there I was, making my game, not making any changes to my events, just my layout, when I hit run the game. the main player no longer behaves as he should. His jumps became lower (but not all the time), and his animation is too slow. I feel like it is a dt issue, but thats the funny part- The game is frame-rate independent and has been working perfectly fine for two months. I thought perhaps somewhere I made a mistake and so I reverted the project back to an earlier known version, destroying the last week of level building progress. This did not fix the problem either! (so I suppose I can restore my level progress)

Basically, the game simply stopped functioning as it is supposed to. It was working 5-12-2014 fine in the early part of the day, but not later in the late evening. reverting to older known working instances of the project did not help. I am at my wits end and have no idea what to do or look for.

Does anybody know something that may help? Has anyone experienced this before? I need to make one final note. Along with the game not working the way I expected it to, the game also started running at 60fps. All my projects always ran at 40 (it seemed to be capped there) but now they all run at 60fps. I am wondering if something internal in construct changed that would cause this and thus throw dt off - which doesn't make sense either. The game is fully frame rate independent. Of this I am certain. I made it so several months back and and it has worked like a boss until yesterday.

Thanks everyone for the input so far!

Ashley True, it would cause edge glitches in some cases, but the artist could keep those to a minimum if they know the limitations. Right now, I use a method I haven't seen discussed on the forum yet. I replace all tiles in a tilemap with a single sprite and set its animation frame to that of the tile ID. The frame in the sprite is the same as the tile map except that it overlaps adjacent tiles by one pixel. because I want to use pixel graphics I enlarge them by a scale of 4 that way linear as opposed to point doesn't mess them up. The result is ultra clean pixel art that I can rotate and scale arbitrarily. It takes a lot of time at the moment, cutting up a tile map, enlarging the border so it has an overlap of 1px plus a 1px transparent border. But I can make some code to do that via .net It is not without its limitations of course. You have to know exactly what tiles can go together or you get some weird seaming still. It, unfortunately, is necessary in my game. I need scaling and rotation of the entire screen. I want to use tilemaps because they are a quick way of making a scene for the game, though, at this point I only use block 0 and another script auto-maps the correct tiles.

At this point, I am okay with this workaround, but I figured the workaround could be made more efficient if construct helped out with the process. I know it is less efficient, but I figured its no different than a game that doesn't even use a grid (like aquaria). Can I get away with something of that nature and scale?

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TLDR: Ashley, is it too inefficient to not use the tile map but have a series of objects instead? Or will this be bad on lower end machines. I am targeting pc and so could care less about mobile. I already have to many things I need to make mobile not an option. Also, Thanks for the great work on construct! I have thought along time about the time map and can't think of a solution that is perfect either. It is a very complex problem.

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Joannesalfa - you can get full screen quite easily with the tile map object like this (this does have some limitations/weaknesses depending on what you want:

1. Set the project to use crop

2. at the start of the game check the window size

3. Depending on how you want the game to scale (inner or outer) and what the minimum playing field is you do some math and arrive at a zoom level or scale factor (0-n) rounded to the nearest whole number (whether you go up or down depends on what you want and how you calculate it)

4. Set the layout scale to this number and viola.

The weakness of course is when you end up with a scale of near n.5 - you either have to cut a lot off or add a lot to the game giving a very wide range of potential screen sizes to work with.

I'm glad you took the time to make this. I was having a lot of trouble using revolute joints too. I thought it was broken but the image point stuff is true.!

Hey everyone,

My name is Ruskul. I am an artist and programer. I have worked on various game projects and decided I wanted to make my own. I tried out construct 2 and bought the license within a week. I had been mostly using xna and c#, but was sold on construct almost right away. (time to learn xna -> months compared to a few weeks to learn contruct2). I spent 3 days and already had more progress done on my game than I did after several months of programing (not that that time was wasted... it translates very well to construct 2

cheers

Thanks, Arima.

I will take your advice on the editing the tilemap. It seems to me that the level editor would be quite hard to make, I didn't even know such a thing was possible in construct... How does it affect the files and actually produce changes in the layout you are working on? Any tips on where to begin with something like this? I would really like to make changes in game , as the game I am making is a precision platformer and it gets difficult switching back and forth all the time between running the game and tweaking the level.

Also, I have a side question: do you know, Is it possible to create a sprite map the same as the tile map and have the tiles indexed on there so that a tilemap could be replaced quite easily with sprites in the other sprite sheet? Would I have to use frames in an animation where the frame corresponds to the tile index?

custom plugin that gets info about the users monitor

Ruskul Right on, This is a beautiful set up as far as people not having to code at all and other games have tried block code type interfaces. The problem is that it is way harder to try and comprehend how another individual has interpreted the way code should be layed out rather than see how it physically looks and works together. This is great but it would be much easier to understand if the block titles were a bit more precise in places. For instance the invert action. This is common in graphic editors but trying to see it as an or for is can be a bit of a stretch to most folks and these types of issues run throughout this editor. I still cannot get copy/paste to work properly (honestly I havn't tried again lately) but I will keep at it. Thanks .

True true. That is a good point.

When you copy paste, have you noticed that if you click an individual component of an event, it only copies that component when another event is selected and paste is used. If you select the whole event and copy when hiting paste it usually puts it below the event selected.... though I sometimes have to move it after pasting and then move another event when sub events are used.