Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Ah, I see. It doesn't do it for me with unlimited framerate, so I think this is not a problem with timers, but with rounding due to ticks (at 75fps for example a tick comes every 13ms, which is a significant proportion of 50ms). Submit this as a bug on the tracker and I'll get round to it.

  • BROO: Your application does not prove anything wrong with Construct's timers. Construct uses double-precision timers using QueryPerformanceCounter, which is accurate to microseconds or better. The 'timer' system expression returns the sum of all past timedeltas (in effect, the runtime is doing what your 't' variable is doing, adding all timedeltas). So 'timer' is not the system timer, there's no way to retrieve it in the runtime currently, since it's difficult to apply timescaling to the system clock. In effect, the .cap you posted merely explores the effect of double-precision rounding errors when you multiply a number by 1000, which is independent of any timers.

    I realise the timer in the runtime therefore may accumulate a rounding error from summation of the timedeltas, and I might be able to improve the resolution of this in the next build. Still, the error shouldn't be large except over long durations.

  • Just overlay.

  • 50) Add Post Processing Filters 'on top'.

    ...

    It'd be cool if we could have a layer that's put on top of the whole render and is being applied to everything in the scene during runtime. We'd still have to be able to specify where the post processing effects are active and where they should be inactive (like, you wouldn't need them in menus and stuff), but that'd be a great addition.

    Try a canvas object the size of the window on top of everything with 'grab before drawing' and an effect applied.

  • Alternatively, it may suffer from the free=bad mentality :<

    Maybe, but if the program really is stable and powerful, it should gain a reputation to topple that mentality. Some good finished games in Construct, for example, could disprove that.

    I'm much more concerned about the free = developers don't make any money = can't keep up development issue.

    We're all in full time education, so even if we went commercial, we don't really have the time for all the sales, admin, updates and support that we'd be obliged to perform with a commercial project. We've been going a couple of years as a free project though, and it seems to have worked out OK so far.

  • Hmm, I didn't think this would be a problem. Can someone put up a quick .cap that demonstrates this? (preferably one I don't have to wait a day to see)

  • As I said before, we have no plans to sell any version of Construct, and intend to continue giving it away for free.

  • It's been in the documentation for a while!

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  • FYI Construct converts all your graphics to 32-bit ARGB, so even if you do use 8 bit/low colour graphics, it gives you no memory or performance advantage because they're still loaded as 32-bit ARGB.

  • Not for a while, I wouldn't make plans just yet...

  • I just checked their web site. Their looking for new project leader.

    So their site is largely empty, they've barely got any code, and their lead guy just quit. They're gonna have to try harder than that to be a serious player.

    I'm pretty skeptical of this whole project, their site navigation looks like it was directly lifted from scirra.com and their project seems very similar in spirit to Construct. What's the story here? Are these ex-Constructors?

  • Then something else in your .cap is causing the problem. Back it up and strip everything away until you have an empty .cap with just the problem. If it stops doing it half way through removing everything, one of the last things you deleted was causing the problem.

  • I know it might be annoying but so far it seems to have stemmed the flow of spambots - so if you don't mind typing in one word from time to time - it's saving us a lot of clean-up work to prevent spambots overrunning the forum!

  • Most hosting accounts can give you detailed statistics about hits and visits for pages and files. If you don't have access to that, though, you can probably use a little PHP/ASP redirect page that increments a counter then forwards to the file. That can cause problems for submitting your file to other sites, though, which sometimes require a direct link to the file.

  • A company approaches you -the developers- to buy and use (with or without you in the development team) Construct, resulting in a non-free Construct.

    Is this situation realistic/what the developers would choose for?

    I don't think this is actually a realistic situation. For a commercial company to buy out a GPL program like Construct is pretty tricky: the source code and binaries are currently freely available on the internet, so if a company commercially adopted Construct, there's no immediate incentive for any users to pay until enough work has been done to improve it to make purchase worthwhile. This is probably too big a barrier for any companies to overcome (except the really big guys, who wouldn't bat an eyelid at a project this size).

    Still, if it did happen, personally I would insist us developers are still on the team. Things like the object picking algorithms that power the event engine are so complex I doubt any other developers would be able to sensibly expand on it without our help.

    Currently, their whole business model is based on donations I guess

    We're not a business, hence we don't have a business model! Donations are there simply to support the project/developers, it's not part of our "business". We haven't got any plans right now to become a business either. While in theory we could go commercial, we face the same problems as above (overcoming the freely available branch) as well as being obliged to provide customer support, regular updates, put up with pissed off users who want their particular bug fixed, etc etc etc. So right now we haven't got any plans to go commercial ever. Free for now!