Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Seems reasonable to me - if they don't know or aren't sure, they'll say no, since it's safest for them. If you also say you're starting a company, they'll assume you have money to spend, will hire a lawyer, and have the issue checked out professionally.

    Is it that important to the game? Perhaps the easiest thing to do is just to not use the material then, especially if it's just a "this technique runs 10% faster than the usual" type thing.

  • Thanks for spending the time to post your experiences. This reads pretty critically of Construct, but I have a feeling a lot of it is justified. There are some serious problems in Construct that are really important to fix ASAP; we just don't always have the resources to fix them quickly, given our commitments to university, jobs, etc. I might also add Construct is officially still in beta, not yet 1.0, so bugs would be expected (was your tutor aware of this?).

    One point about the UI - you know you can collapse/auto-hide all the bars - and the Ribbon - so that they only appear when you mouse over tabs at the edge of the screen. This can give you a near-fullscreen editing.

    I'm going to take most of these points as suggestions for Construct 2, particularly:

    • Implement a smaller, leaner set of features, and test them better
    • Aim for solid reliability of all core features
    • Support for collaboration (we're planning a system that works with source control systems like SVN, so existing collaboration systems can be used to allow multiple developers to commit changes in parallel, use the existing source control conflict resolution, and so on).

  • Yeah, try the 'play sound at position' group of actions in XAudio2.

  • It depends on where you are in the world what you call them

  • Interesting feedback in this thread. Thanks for the posts.

    I know Construct isn't perfect, and there are some serious problems that may be causing people problems with large projects. We hope to get the serious things fixed and release 1.0. But we actually wanted to shift focus and concentrate on Construct 2 soon. I can't guarantee that all problems will be fixed in 0.x and you may have to rely on workarounds. The codebase in 0.x is not fantastic and it can be very difficult to work with. These kinds of problems are part of the motivation behind C2 - it's going to be completely redesigned, architected for reliability and flexibility, and as a side effect things like 30 second saves can be avoided as well (which is difficult to fix with the binary .cap file format in 0.x).

    I know this may be frustrating to many people who have invested so much in to Construct 0.x, but it does have serious architectural limitations. I doubt it can be taken much further than it is now, bar attempting fixes for the more serious problems. And C2 like the project already will be a spare time project. I hate to use this as a crutch, but we've never been able to guarantee fixes or support because this is essentially a hobby project. Some people watch TV, we write code. So I'm starting to see Construct 1 as a kind of a very big, complicated proof of concept, and C2 as the real thing getting going - we're much better at programming now, and some of us have professional experience to add to that.

    So can you make a major game? I think you can, if you try to keep things simple - but I can't guarantee an easy time, unfortunately. That's not saying things will go completely smoothly with other tools either though!

  • I've done that before, and had some success. It'd be cool if other people could do that or promote/link to the site/facebook/twitter/youtube account. Remember to be tactful when phrasing the emails, they don't owe us anything!

  • It's pretty much impractical - you'd be better off waiting for the C2 architecture which is going to be designed for it.

  • Hi,

    Have you tried the Ghost Shooter tutorial? More here as well: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/c ... =Tutorials

  • Add a condition like "Object A layer does not equal Object 2 layer".

  • How long do they guarantee to keep files for?

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  • Was just reading this thread where a linked file had expired from the host and is causing problems for some users.

    Obviously you can attach files if they're small enough (I just upped the attachment limit to 512kb but we can't turn in to a host for large files). But for the bigger examples does anyone know a reliable, permanent, long-term host for files that won't expire after a year or more?

  • Yeah, this is annoying and is why I prefer people don't use download sites which expire. You can attach files if they're small enough, but it's best to try to find reliable hosting... and drop-your-file-here sites don't really count, since I think they expire files over a period of years. Anyone know any good solutions?

    Actually, I'll start an open topic thread for this...

  • A 2x2 sprite stretched out is probably the best way. It'll use less video memory (VRAM) than a 128x128 texture, and in some cases Tiled Background may render itself by effectively drawing a grid of sprites (it only does this with non-power-of-two sized textures - but best play it safe, stretching is probably easier than tiling for the graphics card anyway).

  • Nice idea, might get some good exposure if it gets lots of diggs

  • 50-100 layers is way too many in my opinion. Layers should not be used for fine grained Z ordering, that's what Z ordering itself is for. Layers are useful to group large numbers of objects in Z order, like background, foreground, parallax layers, and so on, which means generally you'd have under 10 layers.

    Layers are fast if they have no effects (no shaders, and opacity must be 100% and filter white). In this case objects are just drawn directly to the screen as if everything was on one layer. Otherwise, the effect has to be processed on a separate texture, which can be expensive, but is still fully hardware accelerated. Processing 50-100 layers with effects will be very slow, but without any effects they have no performance impact at all.