Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Construct does not fully support translations, so I would not recommend you attempt a translation at this time. Thanks for your interest, though.

  • I would believe the "lives in danger" argument, but I can't see any evidence that this is actually the case. Who's life has been put in danger? Has anyone directly been killed or injured by leaks?

    The goal is open, honest and accountable government - a worthy cause. Some of the content may look risky, but it is worth the risk for that goal, and without any evidence, "lives in danger" just sounds like the line delivered by the governments who are scared stiff.

    As for Assange - is it important if he's a douche? I haven't judged him that way myself, but even if he's trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, he's still trying to do the right thing.

  • Paypal appears to be down now too... crazy

  • Wikileaks is all over the news recently. Here are some recent developments:

    • They've released a huge number of secret internal communications which are embarrassing for the US
    • Their DNS company, Amazon, Paypal, their bank, Visa and Mastercard have all bailed out on them making excuses like terms of service violations. Twitter is still hosting their feed.
    • They're mirroring their site all over the world now, and torrents of their data are spreading widely.
    • Assange has been arrested in the UK over Swedish *** crime allegations
    • 'Anonymous' have succeeded in at least temporarily shutting down the Mastercard and Visa websites (and some others AFAIK) via DDoS in 'Operation Payback'
    • They claim to have an 'insurance leak' - the most sensitive documents they have: 2GB of torrent data heavily encrypted and already spread all over the world, and if anything happens to any Wikileaks members the key is apparently to be released.

    Some possible views on this include (all of which are pretty hard to judge)

    • The leak puts lives at risk
    • The leak exposes the extent Western governments routinely hide the truth from their electorates
    • Death threats against Assange by top level politicians are tantamount to incitement to murder
    • Wikileaks cannot be shut down
    • Wikileaks is a terrorist organisation
    • Governments and corporations must change to be either totally open and transparent, or become even more secretive (and therefore less efficient)
    • The Obama administration advocated openness and transparency but still want to shut down Wikileaks
    • The US government made pro-openness and pro-internet remarks around the China Google hacking earlier this year

    I find all this really interesting just to watch as it develops, especially with the emerging cyberwarfare twist and the potential implications for future politics. What are your thoughts?

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  • Looks like an awesome project, hope it goes well

  • Hehe, you got it the wrong way round Construct came after Multimedia Fusion. In fact, myself and a couple of the other developers used to write extensions for MMF. We ended up leaving and writing our own program though.

    The copying thing has been done to death in the past, but a good example is: is OpenOffice "copying" Microsoft Word, or are they just two originally written programs that attempt to solve the same problem? Isn't it better for customers when there are two competing options which are always trying to do better? Clickteam have come up with more features (HWA, Flash export, Java export etc.) than probably in the rest of their history, since Construct appeared. Then there are other open source projects that openly aim to simply be an open source clone of another program. Construct isn't even that - the way its event sheet is displayed is quite different, for example, and there are additional features like subevents.

    Then there's other projects like Game Develop which seem strongly inspired by Construct's way of doing things. That's fine too. This whole idea of "OMFG THEY COPIED THEM!!!1111" isn't a very good way of looking at it.

    I hope this doesn't descend in to a flame war - it's been argued over before and I'll lock the post if it gets out of hand. However, Construct and MMF2 have been coexisting just fine for a couple of years now, and MMF2 remains the more popular option, so we advocates of Construct should maintain some modesty.

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  • If it only contained your backups (i.e. things you have saved somewhere else) you can just throw it away and get another one, and copy everything you had on the old one back to the new one.

    If you had things which were only on that memory stick - as in, not backed up, then...

    Congratulations!

    You have just learnt the importance of backing things up in multiple places. Always good to learn the hard way

    (If you're really stuck and desperately need that information, your best bet is to take it to a data recovery specialist. It will cost you. If you solder it yourself and don't do it properly you could just make it worse.)

  • There's a captcha on the registration form and I've tried changing it, but I guess the bots are getting pretty good. Also, I suspect actual humans are recruited in some cases to pass the captchas (i.e. semi-automatic bots) so it might not make much difference. I think we're also targeted because we run phpBB, which is a popular forum software and therefore more highly targeted.

    Do you know how to limit posting URLs until you have a certain number of posts? I hate modifying phpBB because every time I do it it's a nightmare, it doesn't seem very well designed for it. Besides, it's probably one of those things that will irritate legitimate users (e.g. signing up to post a link to a .cap with a bug or something).

  • Hi all,

    Since we're fortunate enough to have a lot of visitors to the site, we also get targeted by spammers regularly. These spammers sign up accounts then make posts that either are full of advertising links, or just useless no-comment posts with advertising links in their signatures.

    The admins and mods regularly delete these users to keep the boards clean. However, it's difficult to examine every post made to the forum, so sometimes we miss them.

    There are a couple of really easy things you can do to help us keep the board clean:

    • Report any spam posts. There's a 'report post' option on every forum post - if you spot some spam, click the report button and we'll be notified.
    • Don't reply to talk about spam posts: simply ignore them, or continue replying to the rest of the thread as if it wasn't there. Once we find a spammer, we can delete the user and all their posts in one go, saving us having to remove the posts manually. If there are posts left behind by other users talking about the spam, we have to remove these manually otherwise the thread suddenly makes no sense at all.

    So in short, report them and don't reply to them, and we can keep the board clean and tidy <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

  • It's more likely a graphics card driver issue than the bit-ness of your operating system - try upgrading your drivers.

  • Global event sheets can actually be annoying, because the global events would be running during both the menu system, game itself, loading screens etc. I think it's best to leave it as manually adding an include to each level - is it really that bad?

  • Yes, it's free, you can find the full version for download on the site. Sorry to hear you got done on e-bay - maybe you can get a refund? It's either legal for them to do it by some loophole (they probably word it carefully that they're selling you a physical CD, which just so happens to have Construct on it), or it's not legal, but there's nothing anybody can really do. Being a volunteer project we can't really follow up on this stuff

  • I'm not sure I understand. How does that improve performance?

  • You can do that yourself with an array object. Perhaps you don't understand the performance implication of even requesting a single pixel. The graphics card is rendering the last frame while the events of the next tick are processing, for maximum efficiency. If you request a pixel off the GPU, the CPU stops and waits doing absolutely nothing until the GPU completes rendering the entire frame from the previous tick, then you get your pixel, then the GPU waits, doing absolutely nothing, until the CPU finishes the current tick and issues the drawing commands for it. So by requesting a single pixel you've turned a highly efficient parallel execution system in to a slow stop-and-wait. If that nudges you over missing a V-sync point, you could literally see the framerate drop to half. For one pixel!

    It's a cool idea, but it's not technically possible to do it fast because hardware is not designed for that.