IKnowMyStory's Forum Posts

  • Hello fellow Constructors. My name is Jim and I found Construct 2 from a LinkedIn post about the death of Flash. I just had finished with my project when Apple chose to put a stack right through Flash's heart. So begrudgingly, having already learned several other programming languages starting with Basic in the 80s, I began the task of learning HTML5 the hard way in order to recreate a project when all of a sudden out of heaven came Construct 2. Hallelujah!! It is so easy because it works the way the our minds think. Based on images (sprites) driven by logic. I do not care about the code, I just want it to work and boy does Construct work well.

    I am a K-8 teacher who was studying to be an engineer and took a hard right turn in my career. Civil Engineering was boring and constrained by city departments which thought they knew best. In college, I was always teaching and helping college students with their tech problems, many whom would comment on how I would make a good teacher. Well I receive my K-8 credential in 1996 with a supplement in Computer Applications in Education. I used all my schooling and wide array of other experience to teach and mentor students in pulling network cable (Telephone communication in USMC), network infrastructure installation, programming, video, audio, graphic, web design, etc. My teach experience was mostly project base learning instruction integrated into all other core curriculum.

    Currently I am recreating our Flash based course on how to become a better writer which use the fact that we think in pictures not words. So why not use pictures to teach how all the grammar is in real photographs or images in our mind.   We just need to understand how to pull the data from the image and organize it into sentences, then paragraphs, and onto essays. I am working with a college professor who has thought writing for 30 + years and turning his lessons into a game, (which means highly interactive and engaging content when I talk to other teachers).   I love how fast Construct 2 keeps meeting my needs each time I have strived to understand what Constructed 2 could do, and the next thing you know, it does way more than it did just the day before. Thank you all you code lovers for all those plugins and of course the Scirra team.

    I have always been the mad scientist type since I was little and love teaching students how things work. Unfortunately now days, I would be in jail for many of my most exciting experiments I did as a child. I hope to some day work with another charter school's students teaching real world science and math using a custom built bus as a mobile science and technology platform.   In the past, my students, teaching partner, and I would go camping or sailing on a 156 foot ship and study the world at large.   I once had an RV which was purchase at my charter school for home schoolers for this very purpose but sadly that dream slipped away.

    I look forward to completing the high school, college, and adult version of our project this summer and then begin developing the children's version soon after. I will also be developing a series of Logic lesson studies using Construct 2 gaming structure for students of all ages on how to think logically in every day life. If this, then that, else big mistake. OOPS!! <img src="smileys/smiley3.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

  • Alright, I really feel dumb. My first post and I make a novice gaff and make the simple hard. My problem was I used a global variable in the clamp function that I did not reset. This caused the next clamp function to not start at 0 but at the last value it ended at. So the lesson is "Make sure you track your variables because if you don't you will get variable results.

    Sorry Animmaniac for not trusting your expertise!

  • Well I have to take everything I stated above back. I does not work with any other values because they grow exponentially and make it slow down to much. Back to the drawing board or Construct 2 animation manual. All I want is to control an animations rate of change over a fixed time frame of my choosing. If I enter 1, 2, or 3 seconds for the time frame that is what I want. Why is that so hard. Clamp is the answer, but it does not function with any consistency. Is it the min, max values that need to be set differently for different time frames?

  • If you want a constant rate you need to set constant values to the range and increment the ratio every tick. So you need to do something like:

    +Every Tick

    >set width to lerp(0,600,variable)

    >set variable to clamp( variable + dt / duration ,0,1)

    Being 'duration' the desired time in seconds to go from 0 to 600. Which means that if duration=2 the width of the object will go from 0 to 600 in 2 seconds.

    The clamp expression is used to ensure that the variable value will always stay between 0 and 1, otherwise the width of the object would increase forever.

    I have been studying in the manual and forum posts about the lerp function. I understand it much better now and want to thank those that have helped the new Construct 2 learners like me. I now can use lerp function effectively in my project. Yet, I was wanting to make my movements and scaling actions work at a constant rate and found the very helpful post by Animmaniac regarding this issue.

    I applied the clamp( variable + dt / duration ,0,1) function to accomplish this task, but it did not cause the animation 2 seconds to complete as stated. I tested several options and found that the divided by operator "/" in the formula

    "clamp( variable + dt / duration ,0,1)"

    did not cause the scaling over 2 seconds as stated.

    However, when I changed it to exponential "^" operator

    "clamp( variable + dt ^ duration ,0,1)"

    and it worked correctly. I am not sure why it works and the original "/" does not, but now my lerp move and scale actions now work at a constant rate. I hope my post does not confuse anyone if I am wrong in my approach to getting this to work the way I need it to.

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  • Kyatric, thank you. That worked just as you stated by hover over the top left edge. I had not use the feature enough to remember were they were, so I never test for that possibility.

  • Construct 2 full version r67, Windows 7 with all updates, Chrome 15.0.874.120 m

    I am new to Construct 2 starting with r63. I completed the Ghost Shooter game tutorial in r63 with no problems and it ran as expected. I download each release version in between r63 and r66, but did not work with those versions of C2 much. Since downloading the r67 version, I tried to complete the tutorial again for a quick reminder of the basics. However, when I reached Beginners tutorial page 5 for editing image origin location point for the bullet spawn using the image point tool, the origin point tool icon and therefore the image point dialog is not available. The first time I completed the tutorial it was easy and straight forward to create and edit the origin point 1 on the player. Now I cannot find the "Set origin and image points" tool in the "Edit animations" dialog box at all. I reopened the first Ghost Shooter project file and there are no image points on the shooter image "player" on that version of the game that appears either. When I right click player or any of the images and select the Edit animation option, the "Animations dialog box opens and has "Default" displayed and the "Animation frames (1)" dialog box also displays. The small red target and blue frame icons are not showing in the "Edit animation" dialog box at all. I search the forums to see if anyone else had a similar problem, but nothing is posted. I don't know what I am doing wrong because it was easy and very obvious the first time I completed the beginners tutorial, but I am lost now.

    Steps taken to resolve problem are; download and reinstalled the r67 version, ran Windows disk clean to clear old files, cleared Chrome browsing data, Shutdown and restarted Windows 7 more than once, confirmed c2license.txt file still in C2 program folder, confirmed that none of the layers were locked, and followed the Beginners tutorial exactly as writing, right click, left click, tested every iteration of clicks I could think of but still nothing. Thanks for your help and I sure I will come out looking dump in the end which will make it an easy fix.