Jase00's Forum Posts

  • No probs, glad it was useful! I use C3 with 2 monitors, so I always have "find" and "find all references" popup windows on a 2nd monitor.

    3 other small tips to help with big projects:

    I often want to find when an object was created. If you search "create object sprite" or even just "object sprite" or "ct sprite", you'll often get the correct result fast.

    You can leave comments with "tags" within. Say you have a complex HUD feature that links to many different events and event sheets, I'd write comments such as "TagForSearch: HUD System" near each event. You can then do a search for "tagforsearch: HUD system" to find all related events of a system you created. You can also do a search for "tagforsearch" to list all of your "tags", which can be useful. Bonus points if you use autohotkey to map a key to auto-type "tagforsearch" so it saves time typing this when doing a search.

    Finally, emojis! Sometimes you might be working with, say, 3 different arrays, or multiple families. You can't change the icon of these types of objects, but it is very useful to have a visual indicator to what object is what, rather than having to read their name each time. Simply rename the array or whatever object to have an emoji such as a 🔴 or 🔵 or something distinctive, and you'll always instantly know what array you are looking at. You will even see the emoji within expressions as you scroll through your event sheets. Don't put the emoji at the start of the object name, or else you cannot quickly type its name when adding events, actions, or expressions. To be honest, I use this tip less, but I once had to do a massive change in my huge project to replace a spritefont object with a sprite object - by using "find all references" and giving the old spritefont a red 🔴 in its name and the new sprite is given a 🟢 in its name, it reminds me that "red is bad, this needs to be updated", and "green is good, this is correct". Sure I could have just kept using find all references, but seeing the little red dot amongst expressions helped me quickly edit my events to get the job done faster. Also just in case you didn't know, you can quickly get an emoji window to appear in Windows 10 by pressing "WINKEY + ." (Windows key and the period key).

    EDIT: I made a suggestion a year ago, for enhancing the bookmark bar. Looking at this again, perhaps "colourful bookmarks" isn't user-friendly to those with colour-blindness, but perhaps bookmarks could have unique icons or tags against them instead. Either way, consider voting if you are a C3 user that has a huge project to navigate! construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-4

  • Yeah I agree, this and the bookmarks bar needs some love and attention, especially for those with a big project with several thousands of events.

    A small tip that I discovered: If you use the find window as a popup window, then you can click into the address bar of the find window, press ctrl+f, then you can use the browsers find feature to search through your find results.

    E.G. Say you are trying to find an event related to visibility of an object. You could do "find all references" on an object, and you might get 300 results, but if you change the find results into a popup window, you can use the browsers find feature to search for "visible" to save time hunting through the 300 results you initially had.

  • I see what you're saying. I have tested on a 60hz monitor on the same computer, but still jittering and such.

    I'll double check stats later but on 60hz monitor with vsync, generally cpu is like 10% usage, gpu unsure but it is heavy gpu stuff (video playback, particle effects, layers with effects, etc.). I do feel competent with designing my events efficiently, but everyone is capable of mistakes.

    I wonder why would it work so nicely without vsync, but jittery with vsync, even if it is related to cpu and gpu usage. It makes me worry, if I can lower the usage of cpu and gpu on my high end computer to fix the vsync jitter, then great, but it might jitter on a low-end computer, even if they see it says its a solid 60fps. I still think it is vital to give the player the option to choose.

    EDIT: Just to add, the video playback, when vsync is off, it is buttery smooth. With Vsync on, it's very noticeably choppy. Again, not been able to reproduce on blank project, could still be gpu related and such, but it's such a tease to see my whole project working perfectly when vsync is off (ironically using more resources but giving a smoother experience).

    EDIT 2: Another way I would approach this issue, even without jitter issues: If I were a player, the first thing I would do in a game is make sure video settings are set to my own preference, such as when I play a rhythm game or FPS, I turn off vsync and such. It doesn't feel right to NOT offer a way for players to disable vsync, when like every other game, old or modern, does offer the option.

  • Ayyy,

    The main question I have, is, is it POSSIBLE for C3 to have a "max FPS" option for those who want to disable vsync, or is this impossible to add in? Whether or not Scirra feel it is right to implement, I'm mostly curious if it is an absolute "no this is impossible due to how C3 is designed" or not.

    I'm a year into a Rhythm game, desktop only, which I plan to release, but there's two thing at the back of my mind that could be a deal breaker when release day comes: lack of control over vsync, and no way to set max FPS.

    I haven't isolated the issue yet on a blank project, but my project is a bit jittery when vsync is on, as well as slight input lag (as always with vsync). This happens even on a 240hz monitor with vsync on. Obviously it is unacceptable to release a rhythm game where the notes aren't smoothly moving and there is noticeable input delay.

    With vsync off, there is no more jitter at all, input feels perfect. But as we know, the downside is the fps shoots up to like 600, which is bad for laptop battery, and makes the fans of your computer go wild.

    Like many other desktop games, I'd love to be able to add an options menu to allow the player to choose to have vsync and whether to cap their framerate.

    Gdevelop has an option for max FPS, as well as any Source engine game (altho hidden as a console command, but it's set to 300fps by default), spyro reignited has a FPS option, etc.

    There are other uses for a max FPS feature, such as someone on a lower-end device might want to cap their FPS at 30fps, so that they don't have a variable framerate if their device floats around 40 to 50fps.

    Anyway, yeah, I really hope I can pinpoint the jittery issue with vsync being on, I tend to forget it exists because I almost always run my game with vsync off, but I know this won't be acceptable on release. Unless I made 2 builds, one with vsync on, one with vsync off, which sounds like a very sloppy workaround, and still has the issue with players on laptops as we can't limit the max FPS. I'm worried and hope I can find a solution.

    Thanks for reading!

  • I'm always looking to using the most effecient events. Whilst my project works perfect on a high-end desktop computer, I want to cater to low-end computers too. My project can end up with hundreds of a specific object existing at one time, so I like to be as efficient as possible, just to get that little extra performance for anyone with a weaker device.

  • Ohhh I see. Yeah it can really feel like your world is crumbling when you encounter glitches and bugs in software, but I guess you realise now that the developers are happy to help and resolve things, especially bugs that can be reproduced.

    It can also be hard to be critical on yourself, but sounds like you might have learned a thing or two since your last encounter here.

    Assuming you didn't outright insult anyone, good luck with your future game creations!

  • Out of interest, what made you feel negative enough to leave in such a way?

  • I'd be curious if you see any measurable difference!

  • The way I look at it, is there are 3 resources to find out the answer to your own questions: Examples in C3 (visual material), documentation on the website (reading material), or "How Do I" section on the forums. Obviously it's great when you get all the information you need from an example or the documentation, but it's nice to know that generally someone on the forums will be happy to help, including the staff of Scirra at times as they're often engaging with posts on the forum.

    The manual isn't a tutorial per say, it's more of a reference to get a bit more info about what things do in C3. Sometimes the manual isn't descriptive enough, perhaps that is the case with speech synthesis.

  • I agree in some ways, I find it can be a memory game when using C3 in certain cases (e.g. For me, when working across multiple event sheets, it can be easy to get a bit lost (the bookmark bar needs a bit of love as it's too simple)).

    With layouts and layers being selected or locked, let's say you needed to make a change to the HUD layer on 20 layouts: once you have done 2 or 3 layouts, wouldn't you sorta get into a pattern of "click next layout, click HUD layer, make change, click next layout, click HUD layer, make change"?

    With determining which objects are on which layer, I agree that perhaps there could be a way to easily tell which objects are on which layer quicker, but generally wouldn't you know "oh this object is the score text, so this must be on the HUD layer. This is the ground, which will be on the Game layer." etc. Unless your game is a layer-heavy game and objects go between different layers often.

    I personally don't lock many layers at once, because I have like 20 or 30 layers, so I tend to lock things when I go to click the object I want, realise something is above the object, and because I've clicked this other object, I look over at the properties bar, see the layer this object is on (e.g its on the Debug layer), so THEN I lock the debug layer and continue what I was doing (then I might forget to unlock the layer, but that's my own fault really).

    I also use C3 when sleep deprived! When I'm TOO sleep deprived, I start to notice the quality of my events gets worse, and how slow I am at solving issues, so I tend to stop and just go to bed, otherwise I will end up wasting my time the next day by cleaning up the mess I created the previous night when I was sleep deprived.

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  • Glad it worked! No problem.

    It worried me when this first happened, because "what if CTRL+S corrupts my project as its currently crashed?" but thankfully in this case, it's fine.

  • Does CTRL+S save?

    I've seen this bug, even on paid login, something to do with image editor when you click the little close button, it sometimes just locks up, but you can usually do keyboard shortcut to save - hopefully this works even if you are logged out.

  • I don't think your ideas are bad, Tiny Martian.

    Scirra are definitely assessing all feedback and it's in their best interest to execute this new product correctly, especially when they're stepping into new competitive territory.

    If they don't acknowledge something you've said, don't worry! Maybe they can't acknowledge some stuff, because if they find that they cannot execute the idea correctly, then they will have to disappoint everyone that was hyped for it.

    I have mentioned "drawing tools" twice, but I don't believe it's been acknowledged (IMO it's odd noone else has mentioned drawing tools? Don't animators prefer to draw their animations directly onto their background, rather than opening the sprite editor, drawing, then placing?). However, I keep it in mind that Scirra reads everything here and at least the idea is in their minds now. Do I even deeply care if drawing tools are added? No not really, I'm not an animator, but I do know 1 person that I could get interested in Construct Animate, but they immediately don't like the fact that they can't just draw an animation like Flash does. They like to look at the scenery/background and draw onto it with layers. Like how do you neatly animate 2 different people walking up to each other and then they shake hands? Well, without drawing tools, you could use the Image Editor and predict how to animate each sprite individually, or maybe do some awkward switch-over where the 2 people become 1 sprite once they are close together... Or, like, you could make the sprites in other software first, then import them into Construct Animate!... That'd be ridiculous if you need other animation software to use Construct Animate. Ahh sorry for going off on this point too much, but you see, perhaps I've convinced you how important this is, but I've posted 2 times about this, and no comment from Scirra, BUT they are aware at least.

    Construct Animate must be easy and powerful to use, much like C3 is for game dev. Easy for a beginner, powerful for someone who's stuck with the software and mastered it. Any weird setups for a Timeline need to be addressed, and also, don't think that it's up to you or the community to find the solution to UI or UX problems in Construct Animate, like the whole "technically, what is the most bottom layer" question - Scirra are UI and UX designers, I mean the design of event sheet view is god-tier. They can solve it, that's their job, even if we feel like we must find solutions (we are all technical-minded problem-solving people, after all).

    If they ignore issues that you post, then others will post the feedback too and maybe it will open their eyes to the idea. So it's always good to post feedback. Even if Scirra defend something, you should respond to that if you feel confident in your stance. We aren't here to fight or argue, we just want to explain our experiences and opinions to hopefully aid Scirra in making the right decisions for their software.

    Sometimes a back-and-forth can entice others to jump in and pick a side - If everyone disagrees with you, then perhaps you might change your mind (or perhaps everyone is completely missing your point lol), and if everyone sided against Scirra view, then, well, we did our part as a community and its simply up for them to decide.

  • I wonder if this will work when creating new objects then calling function in same event. Or, if that doesn't work, adding a wait 0 seconds before calling the function. When I'm home, I'll be playing around with this!

  • I wonder if drawing tools are on the cards at all. Like not "going into a sprite, draw, then place on layout", but drawing directly onto the layout, kinda like flash? Draw directly into layers or something, even if behind-the-scenes this gets converted into a sprite.

    I ask, as this is the one thing preventing a friend from trying Construct Animate, as they want to draw a background, then draw a character on top of the background so they get the scaling and perspective correct. But right now, you have to go into the sprite editor, which means you have to guess how it will look once placed onto the layout. Sure we can resize sprites, but they're raster images, so they won't look smooth if suddenly resized.