Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Try putting a sprite on top of the player with the Additive effect. You could try changing the opacity for a pulsating glow.

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  • Click 'Add new artifact' on the tracker. Then wait. For the fix.

  • Actually kwarn reminded me of another point; using the plugin SDK you can design behaviors and plugins in C++, so you can do more advanced logic and code via C++ code and custom-built plugins for your game. For me being a C++ coder, I know if I come across something Construct can't do easily, I can design a plugin to solve that problem in C++, as well.

  • You might get more people interested if you upload any of the story, screenshots, plans, level design, concept art, sound effects, music etc. to show you're serious.

  • Crashes are always bugs so please put it on the tracker. No combination of events, however crazy, should crash - it should either do nothing, or tell you that you've done something wrong. If you have a file that crashes just submit it straight to the tracker.

  • After eight years with C++, it seems to me like an awkward and unnecessarily laborious way of developing applications.

    Well, you would think that, coming from C++ or another scripting language, because you know how already in languages. For you and I, coding pong in C++ is a triviality, because we know exactly how to do it, and any other way seems to be a waste of time. Firstly, Construct is partially aimed at people with no language experience whatsoever, so they can, for example, make pong without having to learn about pointers, memory, structures, classes, code design, functions, the old C-backwards-compatible little bits that really you ought to be avoiding but sometimes you can use, and so on and on. Or, in other languages, all the syntax and structure can be hard work to learn for the first time. Because coders already know all of that so it comes naturally, it's not an issue in development, but it is for some.

    Secondly Construct aims to do it much quicker. I know how to make Pong in C++ code, or some other scripting language, but to get the basic engine down, especially if I want shaders and all that, would take even a seasoned developer the best part of a day. In Construct you can click it together in moments, partly because you can code something much quicker in events (when you know how). So although its "just predefined code blocks" it's actually a big timesaver.

    [quote:2s9ftelp]it was the fact that its fast, has shaders (not many 2d game making libraries can provide those), and all that while being a proper IDE (object and resource management, properties and building rooms/layouts) and handling every aspect of game development (so not just graphics, but also sound, file i/o, physics, particles etc)

    Well, why not write your games in C++? You already know how, and assuming you've worked with DirectX before, it's easy to have a custom engine set up and working in no time, even with shaders (which are surprisingly easy to support in C++ with D3DX). XAudio2 can do your sound, the C runtime library can do your file i/o, Box2D can do your physics, and particles are a lot more flexible to code in C++, and the whole thing will run faster than anything else by a long shot. I guess the IDE helps you sort out your level design, but if you design a level editor as in-game using the game engine, it's not much work either. So if you know C++ even with more years experience than me what are you going round using IDEs for?

    I'm in the same position where I could easily sit down and code an entire game in C++, but I don't want to. Construct is designed as a time-saver, so I can make the same game I could in C++, but in one tenth the time.

    Maybe Construct isn't the tool for you, but don't knock it till you've tried it

  • Hi there, I'm one of the Construct developers.

    There is this object pane attached to layout editor, on which objects are always displayed as icons, you can scroll it up or down and... thats it?

    I agree it's hard to use - what actually annoys me most about it is that it doesn't sort anything alphabetically, which does make it pretty useless for finding stuff in large projects! (Right now I'm sticking to just locating it in the layout editor!) The object bar is a relatively recent addition - it isn't quite "there" yet in terms of what it should be doing. Ideally in the next build or two it will also have:

    • Alphabetical sorting (!)
    • Filter like the event wizard (eg. type 'Tank' and get all objects with the string 'Tank' anywhere in their name)
    • Small icons, list, icons only, text only, listview with details views (set by right click menu)
    • Folders
    • View only global objects, only layout objects, all, etc

    These additions will hopefully make it much more useful for large projects, because right now it's really only useful for (very) small projects. Also, I don't know if you noticed, but the bar can be undocked and docked anywhere, or resized bigger for multiple columns, so if you have a multimonitor display or something, you could put it there with a bigger view to see more objects.

    [quote:1nwu0wr9]In Construct, there are event sheets, in which any actions triggered by events/conditions for any objects are placed. Imagine you have tens or even hundreds of objects, and for each objects you have a few events and conditions that trigger specific actions - so you either need a huge number of event sheets, one for every object, or you get long, hard to read and manage sheets.

    In Construct, things work significantly differently to languages - at first it might seem primitive, but you can actually very elegantly express code once you understand how object picking works, using subevents, for-each (and for-each ordered), containers, families and behaviors. It's a completely different paradigm to languages, based around manipulating lists of 'picked' instances, as opposed to sequences of explicit commands (which is all most languages really come down to).

    Construct isn't really a scripting tool - Python was intended to be a way to get around some of the limitations of the event-based structure (eg. highly algorithmic processing with many variables and lots of data). I don't think we intended Python to be used solely to develop entire games, although you could - frankly I'm not very interested in programs which work like that either (they don't seem to go much beyond a gaming API for a programming language, like Allegro with a UI) - the event system is what makes Construct special. Right now I don't think Python in Construct actually works at all, it was broken a few builds ago! (Some users have noticed but I think most of us shrugged and carried on with the event based system) We do hope to have it fixed soon though.

    Construct is still in beta (and will be until 1.0) and is only just recently emerging as a fully featured and stable piece of software. As a result, I don't think many people have attempted such large projects as you describe. That's probably why there aren't mature features for large projects yet, but I do hope we get that sorted for 1.0, especially since I'm planning some large projects myself!

    As for event sheets, it also works a bit differently in Construct. Since it's a very high level programming system, event sheets tend to be ordered by what they do rather than what they are coding for. Instead of event sheets for each object and lots of functions, I think most people (including me) go with event sheets by their purpose, eg. events relating to "User interface", "Movement & Animation", "AI" etc. The main idea behind events is you can express ideas very compactly and briefly, so these event sheets shouldn't be jammed with thousands of events - just short fragments of events sorted by groups (basically event folders), and commented. This seems to work very effectively for everything I've done.

    Try out the Ghost Shooter tutorial and Deadeye's Platform School at http://www.scirra.com/tutorials - it might seem a bit simplistic given your experience with C++, but it should give you a rough idea how things are generally set up in Construct. Generally the whole functions/file-per-class/statement-based paradigm isn't applicable to the event system.

    Thanks for the feedback though, and I hope this helps explain things a bit

  • Hehe nice, I like the contrast

  • Great new installment deadeye, good job

  • Does the same thing happen with only loading from files and not using any resources at all? i.e. if in the example you sent, you change Load Resource to Load File, and delete all the resources? Does it only crash after separately running and closing the preview a few times? (that would suggest a memory leak)

    It works fine for me, loading from files (resources aren't set up right when you move the .cap to another computer)

  • This is fixed in the next build!

  • Does it still do that on startup? If it does, you pasted the file to the wrong directory and need to reinstall Construct to get the original back, that file can ONLY go in the Plugins\Runtime directory. Then I still need to know if it fixes the original crash when you press run.

    Same goes for anyone else who had this file crash!

  • Can you try this? Save it to your Plugins\Runtime directory, and let me know if it fixes it.

  • Actually... I think I might've just fixed it... huh, weird...

  • Crashes for me too - but when I try to debug it, it works. This is a really annoying problem, one of the hardest to solve. Please submit the .cap to the tracker if you haven't already, and I'll remember to spend some time on it next week.