Ashley's Forum Posts

  • In a shocking display of the possibility of competent people working at the ISP, my connection is now restored!

  • I don't really want to fix it. Ever visit forums where every post is the height of your screen due to obnoxious signature imagery?

  • Nice example - you probably want 'V-Synced' framerate mode instead of 'Unlimited' in application properties though - it makes the display a lot smoother (and less CPU intensive!).

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  • Ouch. That's a pretty poor result. Thanks for doing the testing, that confirms it really is useless on Vista.

    Don't worry about making a bug submission. It's a top priority of mine to have an XAudio2 plugin written ASAP.

  • While I agree with Soldjahboy that we have the capacity to discuss this in a sensible manner, I don't think threads like this need to exist. The whole legal threats thing is too tired to be dredged up again; you can find the backstory in old threads. Further, there is no need to pitch the benefits of Construct on the Construct forum itself; it's elitist and as I said, pretentious and unrealistic. This doesn't mean censoring any mention of any competing product - there's no reason not to talk about them if it is productive, accurate and relevant to do so. Rants about how much other programs **** is firmly outside of that definition.

    Hope you understand folks, this thread is now locked.

  • I can't check right now (ISP still being incompetent; at the library), but I think the ScrollXLeft, ScrollYTop, ScrollXRight, ScrollYBottom expressions give the current viewport, and if you add a layer parameter, it should give the appropriate values for that layer. Eg. on a parallaxed layer "Stars", ScrollXLeft("Stars") should give the X co-ordinate of the left visible edge. If this isn't implemented, then I'll try get it in to the next build. You could then use these values to determine if the stars have left the viewport of the parallaxed layer.

  • I appreciate that you guys like Construct, but I don't think we have any room to be complacent just yet. Construct is still officially not finished, and is missing several features that MMF and other game creators have. While we hope to have a complete featureset by 1.0, as things stand MMF still has a wider userbase and more extensions. I don't want to speculate on what they're planning - I'm still not very happy with them about the past frivilous legal threats they made against us. But we are not competitors in a commercial sense. You may perceive competition in featureset, but whether or not any other game creator is successful or not doesn't actually affect a free, open-source project - and even if we end up in some kind of arms race for features, that's really good for the users - everyone ends up using better software!

    Since Construct is not in competition with anyone, making comparisons seems a bit redundant. You could also post a similar comparison about Game Maker. What good does that do anyone except anger users and developers of another program and encourage us to be pretentious? It might be nice to celebrate what we have achieved with Construct, but we have to be realistic, otherwise we will just end up alienating new users and losing perspective of where we really are right now.

  • Oh, also as soon as the XAudio plugin comes out the Directsound one will be deprecated and removed as soon as possible since it's no longer useful. So once it's out everyone should take steps to convert their Directsound games to XAudio - bear this in mind if you're going to start any significant projects with lots of Directsound code.

  • Well, the audio engine in Vista is much superior, and XAudio2 is a much more sophisticated API anyway. I guess they want everyone to use their more advanced technology. If we had more people on the team, it would be less of an issue - large companies can probably just throw the manpower at converting their engines.

  • I think it's too early to worry about CPU usage. Try both ways running uncapped. I doubt the FPS will be much different.

  • Yeah, if you could run through just simply autoplaying a file, then try positional sounds, then maybe some effects or frequency changes and just see what works and doesnt (compare it to an XP box maybe).

    XAudio2 also supports WMA and ADPCM as well as PCM WAV files so built in support is better than Directsound; I can add Directsound-style 'Play music' actions using Directshow as well to get MP3s going too.

  • As has been mentioned on the forum before, it recently came up that Vista has disabled much of the Directsound implementation, which means the Directsound object in Construct currently may not work on Vista (I don't have Vista to check right now). It would be useful if someone could tell me what does and doesn't work in Directsound on Vista at the moment.

    I'm planning a new audio plugin, using the newer XAudio2 API (which is still part of DirectX), which is supported by Vista (and for the forseeable future, hopefully!!). It's also a much more sophisticated API than Directsound, so I may be able to add better features anyway (arbitrary mixing, channel groups, optimised effects and filters, amplification, etc). I'll start work on it soon, but complete plugins take a bit of time to write, so it may be a while before it appears in a build anyway.

  • 1. How to recognize that PARAM_OBJECT-ed param was a Binary Object (and not for example Sprite Object).

    Generally I think you'd have to put a magic number in the target object's CRunObject, and check that that value is expected. I think I can come up with a better system in future though, using the plugin name (which isn't currently available at runtime).

    [quote:31gzq68k]2. Is there any reflection mechanysm allowing to access given CRunObject*'s Fields/Properties/Methods?

    As you mention, GetData and CallFunction can be implemented to return data like the binary object's buffer - however, the Binary object doesn't have any such implementation yet, I don't think. If you ask Rich for the source to it, I'm sure he can send it to you. Also, if you have the Binary object's CRunObject definition (copy and paste its ExtObject from Main.h and rename it to BinaryObject so it doesn't conflict with your object), you can then cast a CRunObject to a BinaryObject, and directly access its member variables.

  • It definitely shouldn't crash. But the important thing with a Physics engine is due to the limited precision of computers, and shortcuts taken for speed, there are boundaries on reasonable use and stability. If you use the physics engine in a manner which is realistic, it should be stable, but if you try colliding something with the mass of a planet in to something with the mass of a speck of dust, you can't expect a realistic result. Collapsing may be because you've hit some limit of the Box2D engine - it's probably not designed for such complex simulations.

  • The Directsound object actually uses Directshow for the 'play music' action - and as far as I know Vista still has good Directshow support. Does it work if you use 'play music from file'? It might be a bug to do with resources.