Ashley's Forum Posts

  • I'd disagree and say you should never publish a game with fixed framerate mode, but people can and do ignore me on that one

  • Looks like exporting a game to the Marketplace requires an "XNA Creator's Club Premium" membership.

    And even before that, there would be about 30,000 lines of runtime code to convert to C#, not including porting of plugins. First the C++ code has to be finished anyway, and then maintaining duplicate codebases also slows down development time. Unless we can get an official XBox dev kit to compile native XBox code, which I believe costs around �10,000, and is probably wrapped up in politics and official distributors, not generally for lying around in someone's bedroom.

  • Wow, looks beautiful, would love to see a video! And yes, it's always a good idea to have effects baked-in to the sprite textures rather than use shaders wherever possible - it runs much faster, and lowers the system requirements too.

    Since DirectX ***** at drawing text, the next build has a 'smart text' shader which helps a bit, but if the text never changes, you could just photoshop the text in to a sprite texture (then you can have other text effects and processing too). 0.99's VRAM controls should make the memory overhead negligable.

  • You don't need to change your monitor's refresh rate to test different framerates - change the framerate to 'Fixed' at 10fps in application properties, or set it uo 'unlimited' (which should reach a few hundred frames per second at least), and the difference will become obvious.

    The problem is framerate dependent code (like set X to .X + 1) doesn't have a fixed speed (it depends on the framerate), and TimeDelta code does have a fixed speed. So how can you possibly convert between them? TimeDelta always means one speed, and without TimeDelta it could be any speed, depending on your framerate. So to convert to or from framerate-dependent, you have to pick a framerate as your reference, and 60fps is a common one so a good choice.

    My advice, though, is to completely ditch framerate-dependent code. Forget it. Just always use TimeDelta, and get everything moving at the right speed using that. Don't bother converting between them, it's totally unecessary if you start making your game right off the bat with TimeDelta. Also, don't forget the built in behaviors are already framerate-independent, so you don't need to worry about them.

    I hope that's clear, it can be a tricky area to explain! By the way, you should avoid the 'Every X ticks' event in games, because as the name suggests, it runs depending on the framerate (every 10 ticks is once a second at 10fps, but ten times a second at 100fps!). You always want to use 'real world' times, so use 'every X milliseconds'. TimeDelta is another way of using real world times, so with the two, your game should run at the same speed everywhere!

  • Yeah, we're planning something to pack in the required DLLs soon, maybe not 0.99 though.

  • DirectX applications in fullscreen can't display window controls, so you'll have to make your own out of sprites etc. I'm afraid.

  • What's wrong with using layer effects?

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  • Construct does not support vertex shaders, so I don't know how this can be converted. Where did you find the FX file?

  • Umm... go to a job center? Mind you, tens of thousands of people have found employment by posting to random unrelated threads on this forum, so you could keep trying that!

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  • Do they have Data Execution Prevention (DEP) turned on? That causes some plugins to fail to load in 0.98.9 - it's fixed in 0.99 though.

  • Yeah, I love it Great album, especially "Greatest Man Who Ever Lived".

  • You can enter a name for the layout parameter. Also have a look at the system expressions:

    [quote:36v1yo3b]LayoutName

    The name of the current layout.

    LayoutNumber

    The current layout's number.

  • Check out the Wiki references for Families and Attributes; they're designed for different purposes and Families are what you want when you need to use them with picking in the event sheets. The fact objects from different plugins (eg. Sprites and Tiled Backgrounds) can be in the same attribute, but can't be in the same family, makes it impossible to have picking with attributes.