WackyToaster's Recent Forum Activity

  • Well, I did dig into the code and I solved it :^)

    This is a replication of the behavior code into your project. It perfectly simulates along with the actual behavior. In the screenshot mode 2 = the correct behavior. Mode 3 = how construct handles it.

    The solution is as simple as switching it around so it's in the correct order. Though I do not know if this has any unwanted sideeffects downstream in terms of bugfixes and workarounds that have been implemented previously.

  • Ohh that's it! The regex indeed does not do any picking whatsoever. That makes sense then. I knew something was weird. Case closed :)

  • Project to test yourself here

    wackytoaster.at/parachute/perftest.c3p

    I stumbled on this by accident. I have two operations. Compare instance variable and regex (on the same instance variable). To my surprise, regex consistently performs better somehow.

    With compare instance variable it settles around 95000 repeats, but with regex it settles at around 150000 repeats.

    I expected regex to perform worse if anything, not straight up 1.5 times faster! Why is that? Is my example faulty?

    Tagged:

  • Usually you have some kind of detection method using regex and a blacklist of words. This is quite a can of worms though if you do it yourself. If you have a server, you probably want to do this server-side, otherwise it could be circumvented. And it's not trivial to properly filter things out. Say you wanna filter the word ********** But what about "assh0le", "assho1e", "a$$hole". And if you filter ****** what about "assemble" or "bass". Even big companies struggle with this actually, Minecraft being in most recent memory, e.g. the "diamond hoe". But big companies usually have some kind of reporting system with the option to report someone for "inappropriate username" like Overwatch for example. Because it's almost impossible to not have something slip though the cracks.

    Hope that helps.

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads

  • I have a somewhat similar problem that I reported here. I think they are probably related.

    github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/6560

    For each family > Family action does not work.

    For each sprite > Sprite action does work.

  • Yeah, families are the way to go. Though you still might have to do several checks for each type of object because families cannot group different ones together eg. tilemaps+sprites+9patches. But it still cuts down the amount to just a handful no matter what.

    And if you find yourself writing the same actions over and over, it's best practice to put those inside a function (or as of newer versions, custom actions)

  • But your method 3 does work properly in the air, even if I disable the part that sets the vY to 0 when it's in the air. I think that's quite logical as how the eventsheet works.

    1. Process velocity

    2. Set velocity (jump)

    3. next tick

    The behavior however seems to be processing gravity and velocity in a different way. Perhaps what it does is to first process velocity, then apply the new velocity after. I think behaviors are usually run after events, so it would look a bit like this:

    1. Events

    2. Process velocity

    3. Set velocity

    4. next tick

    So it would first process the velocity at vY=0+gravity*dt, resulting in 1 tick of falling, then set the new velocity, which is then processed 1 tick later. To correct this it would have to set velocity before processing it as such:

    1. Events

    2. Set velocity

    3. Process velocity

    4. next tick

    It's just a messed up order of operations I believe.

    EDIT: It seems that actually, the objects velocity before jumping has no impact. If I set it to -9000000 the cube should shoot into the air. It just does the same, framerate dependent jump. So it's not that the cubes velocityY is processed first before setting the new velocityY, it's that at some point for some reason, a tick of gravity is added deliberatly. So it can very well be some kind of edge case bugfix, which the platform behavior is full off.

  • R0J0houndThat's an interesting project, though I admit I don't really understand the math behind it all that well :V

    What I described in the first post was my first suspicion as to why my game was framerate dependent, but I'm pretty sure the second problem is the actual main culprit.

    I'm not sure if you saw this but I found a workaround for the second issue:

    Now all the cubes in method 3 align almost perfectly at all framerates. It's possible that it's still just an approximation resulting in some minor error, but that's as close as I could get. How would you interpret this? Why do I have to add -gravity*dt to the vector for the cube in the air? As I believe, the game processes the gravity first, moving the cube down gravity*dt pixels for a single tick, then applying vectorY to it. At a gravity of 1500 this would result in 25px at 60fps, but only 6px at 240fps, as such turning it framerate dependent. Am I not right? Man, I wish I could actually look at the behavior code at hand and verify this myself.

    I've also found that the platform behaviors build-in doublejump suffers this issue of being framerate dependent for this exact reason. I've filed the issue again, as the old one was closed down and I do really believe that I'm correct.

    There's some more details and measurements in the bugreport if anyone is curious.

    github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/6550

  • Ugh... so after some more experimenting I could find something odd. I decided to try and hardcode the value, to my surprise, there still is a difference in height. Double-checked the code, nothing that could interfere. Made a small repro and...

    Enabling the platform behavior... is NOT framerate independent?

    Excuse me?

    This probably is at least part of the issue!

    EDIT: Turns out that objects that are suspended in the air are the issue and it might not be a bug. Oh no how am I gonna work around that...

    EDIT2: After some pondering I do think this is actually a bug. Applying a vectorY to an object that's in the air is framerate dependant somehow.

    github.com/Scirra/Construct-3-bugs/issues/6544

  • You can set a minimum framerate, this clamps dt to a maximum. Making games run at slow motion if they fall below that, this is set to 30 fps by default. So this is basically a fixed tickrate, at least from one way.

    This doesn't solve the problem. If I set it to 60, everyone with a quicker screen has different results. If I set it to anything higher, it will run in slow-mo for slower screens. That's no good.

    I think ideally you don't want to design the game around extremely tight timings and precision. Not only for dt but other imprecisions like input delay etc. in case the player has to react.

    I understand, but I'm not even doing that. It's just that the difference is so big that it ramps up quickly and noticeably. If there was a difference of a few pixels I'd not have noticed it. The specific part I have made simply requires 2 of those interactions, and the jump is significantly harder to pull off at low framerates, as the character simply goes ~48-64 pixels lower than it should.

    Alternatively you could instead animate something like this with the timeline, which I think will be much more consistent across framerates.

    That is not gonna work in my case, I'm not gonna animate the player character in a platformer :V

    I guess my last option would be to hardcode the values but I think it would be more fun if I don't? Also who knows where else that issue creeps up again in a different form. Afaik other engines avoid this usually by being able to lock the tickrate e.g. the physics always tick at 30 fps regardless of the games framerate.

  • I've noticed there's a couple of things that appear to be framerate dependent and there doesn't seem to be a way to actually solve this. Take this setup for example:

    wackytoaster.at/parachute/framerateindep.c3p

    It's as simple as it gets. Sprite1 collides with sprite2 and sprite2 vectorY is logged in the console. (then layout restarts and does it again)

    While the results are consistent over and over again for the same framerate (ignoring minute differences), it gets ugly once I switch it. My screen supports up to 240 fps, so I can easily test it.

    And there we have it. A difference in vectorY of 20! I knew beforehand that deltatime has some imprecision, but this is too large to build around.

    60fps -> 875

    240fps -> 894

    4500fps -> 897 (unlimited mode)

    Based on that it seems that the error gets exponentially smaller at higher fps, but the important ranges of 60-240hz (which I think 99.99% of screens fall into) have quite large differences.

    My project (or part of it) relies on this specific interaction actually, and the compounding error over multiple of these interactions is very noticable. I only see two options. Either I figure out some kind of formula that accounts for the differences somehow or I ship it with unlimited mode, simply assuming most computers will manage to run it at 240+ fps.

    The third option is to use a fixed tickrate for the engine which is not possible in Construct from my understanding. Though maybe it is considering there's an unlimited (ticks only) mode?

    So... what can I do? Any ideas?

  • Funny enough, I've many times encountered the issue of "events/actions running that aren't supposed to run, but without noticable bugs"

    I usually notice it when I add sound to things and the sounds go haywire unexpectedly. The event/actions in it do not cause any other issues, resulting in an event being run every tick for no purpose. I'd assume that's kind of an invisible performance sink, especially if it happens with multiple eventblocks and per object.

    I also notice it sometimes when putting browser.logs somewhere and then see it being triggered constantly when it shouldn't, but your headphones blowing up with 240 sounds/second is much more prominent. :)

WackyToaster's avatar

WackyToaster

Online Now

Member since 18 Feb, 2014
Last online 22 Feb, 2025

Twitter
WackyToaster has 26 followers

Connect with WackyToaster

wackytoaster.at

Trophy Case

  • 11-Year Club
  • Jupiter Mission Supports Gordon's mission to Jupiter
  • Forum Contributor Made 100 posts in the forums
  • Forum Patron Made 500 posts in the forums
  • Forum Hero Made 1,000 posts in the forums
  • Coach One of your tutorials has over 1,000 readers
  • Regular Visitor Visited Construct.net 7 days in a row
  • Steady Visitor Visited Construct.net 30 days in a row
  • Enduring Visitor Visited Construct.net 90 days in a row
  • RTFM Read the fabulous manual
  • x18
    Quick Draw First 5 people to up-vote a new Construct 3 release
  • x6
    Lightning Draw First person to up-vote a new Construct 3 release
  • x10
    Great Comment One of your comments gets 3 upvotes
  • Email Verified

Progress

24/44
How to earn trophies

Blogs