there is no test mode that i know of

which is something they seriously need to add.

The example capx called pin chain style shows the possibility of linking 6 blobs to each other in a chain and having them move with another object. How can I have multiple instances of the master object and blobs? Currently the example only allows for one set of master and chain, is there a good way of duplicating the set without having to have separate clones of all of the items with different sets of events?

Would it be an issue for it to be rolled out for a quick update?

Zebbi

You can lay things out in the layout editor from a top down/side view. Generally I recommend you do it with sprites and have those call functions to build your map out of objects at start of layout though. Sadly the construct 2 SDK is limited for the editor, so I could only make it simple where you are looking at the map from the positive Z axis towards the negative Z axis, and get a proxy of what you're doing from rough images of the bounding box/sphere rather than an actual rendering.

Do you have an ultra basic example of how to get started with a functioning first-person perspective walk through of an area build out of sprites/backgrounds that are rendered in 3D?

Yes you can. To what extent, I don't know the limits, but you can make wolfenstein, doom, duke3d, daggerfall, etc. clones and simpler. There was something about texture alphas not rendering a particular way when overlapping some other alphas as the renderer draws sprites last. Changing render order with the C2 layout can prove useful as well.

Search this thread for details.

Thanks, I'm not being lazy you understand, I just couldn't see anything in the examples that gave a clear indication as to what kind of engine could be made with this plugin. I might try models in the future, but for now I just want to try something very simple using the layout editor.

Hello fellow C2Q3Ders,

been learning and putting together the following project:

http://luonnu.fi

(currently optimised only for 60Hz displays)

My coding skills are very limited and as most I'm learning as I go.

Progression has been as intended with minor bugs, but after a few recent builds I've come across heavy instability and resource consumption.

I'm using immovable physics objects for solid mapping and using triggers to hide and show various areas during player map progression. Basic translation for player movement.

It seems as if the build is causing an unnecessary amount of calculation hogging up resources.

Is this a common feature from using too many physics objects? A limitation of Oimo physics? C2? WebGL? Three.js?..

Or have I just managed to screw up the code somehow?

-360 objects

-80 events

-CPU usage ~50% (i5 3,4GHz)

-4.6mb image memory

Zebbi:

As an old Quake engine mapper I use the C2 layout as my top view and just change the Z height per object. A bit like the old build engine, just without a visual 3D representation until running the code. Different layers for different sections allow editing overlapping segments and toggling in-game visibility. I'm sure there are more effective methods.

http://luonnu.fi/AAA_screens/Luonnu_editing.jpg

That's an interesting example! Can the engine be used without needing 3D models, but textures and sprites in a 3D area? I can model, but I'd like to start off small and just do some 2D designing that's shown in 3D.

Zebbi , I think you could make a simple fps game if you wanted, but you'll need to at least get comfortable with concepts related to 3d. There's plenty of useful information about that sort of thing online. It might be difficult if you have no clue about how 3d stuff works, but it's fun to mess around with stuff and learn.

Loving your Croc3d prog, really fascinating tool. I'd love to use that to make some pieces to use with Q3D, but not sure how difficult that would be.

Zebbi , I think you could make a simple fps game if you wanted, but you'll need to at least get comfortable with concepts related to 3d. There's plenty of useful information about that sort of thing online. It might be difficult if you have no clue about how 3d stuff works, but it's fun to mess around with stuff and learn.

Yeah, it's just the examples don't really give any insight as to how I could use the layout editor to actually map anything out or position stuff, it looks like you'd need to use advanced 3D expressions to set everything up and it looks really, really advanced. Yes, there's plenty of events you can use but it all needs math expressions to use effectively as far as I can tell. Is there any way of using the layout editor to do some basic mapping which could then be turned into a basic raycasted 3D space? I'm not trying to use models or anything so far, just sprites in a map that's projected into 3D would be great.

Here's something I was working on last year:

It's a pretty capable plugin- but you can run into small issues with it here and there. Hope Quazi irons them out.

Small issues are okay, just roughly what can I expect with it? Ach, for £15 I can find out myself without worrying about wasting much

Can this plugin do a simple sort of FPS game from the 90s? Clickteam have a brand-new P3D plugin I'm messing around with for fun and you could do some nice wolfenstein clones with that, I'm not looking for anything fancy but I'm looking for enough to make a complete kind of thing with. Also, is it easy enough to do things with the events for basic stuff without needing maths or expressions? Again, totally simple sort of game-types I'm thinking of here.

Zebbi

I suppose that would be helpful. I have an example earlier in this topic that did that somewhat. I don't have an exact example using this effect though. Currently I don't use effects at all, and I haven't used rex's behavior. In a nutshell it's because webgl is slower on my machine if used and I need to modify C2's runtime to actually be able to use it, so I don't.

I have had a go at non effect version, a week or so ago, which may or may not be useful. It uses the paster object instead, but it does follow the pattern where the game map is defined on the "map" layer. That is where everything is moved around and everything from there is mapped to a 3d perspective.

The events have three parts to it. The "position objects" section, which would be similar to what rex's behavior does, except it also calculates the relative angle of other objects so the correct frame is used. The "ground render" section is what the mode7 effect does (however there's a math error in there I haven't tracked down yet). Finally the "control" section controls the movement in a custom way that I liked.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/542 ... ce3d2.capx

Rabbit trail aside, that was after a week of tinkering and I'm at the point where I need to rework the math to correct the ground texturing alignment. Even with the effect and the behavior there would be work to match things up imo. Even though this is thought of as pseudo 3d, in reality it requires full on 3d math with perspective transformations.

A very useful reference is here:

http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/mode7.htm

Thanks for the example, I noticed there's some events in yours that aren't as obfuscated as they are in rex's, is it possible for me to mix and match to be able to make for the cleanest possible example of these plugins?

Zebbi

If the objects are in a container, the other would be created automatically. And yes you could just use variables instead of a second object if you wanted.

Basically you can set it up any way you want. The ideas I have should work, or the ideas you're presenting would also work. In the end you only need one object type that is positioned on the mode7 plane. Anything else is purely for convenience or just to make other things easier to do.

Having two objects in a container for instance makes collision detection actually possible. Consider if you had only objects on the mode7 plane, how would you do collision detection? You could try using the overlapping conditions, but really you'd get bad results. By having another object in a top view perspective, you can do collision detection with them in an easy way, plus all the movement behaviors can be used there.

Would it be too cheeky to ask for you to mock-up a quick capx to show how this could work, I could embellish it to see how far I can take it but I'm having a bit of trouble getting my head around collisions with container objects.