John Cutter's Forum Posts

  • I'm working on a prototype for work and it runs great on my PC, but on my iPad, even though my browser is full screen, every time I drag an item the whole screen (browser window?) moves at the same time.

    Any suggestions to fix this?

    UPDATE:

    I continue to research this problem but I'm not finding much in the forums. One suggestion said to play with the scaling options. I think I've officially tried them all now, but without any luck. I also changed the layer scaling to "0" and the layer parallax to "0,0".

    I'm using the Browser object to change to full screen and I thought maybe that was the problem. Unfortunately, turning it off had no effect.

  • very well done again! found all of them - the zoom really help this time.

    the second black and white one gave me the most trouble.

    Thanks! And I can't believe you played this one all the way through, too. You are a dedicated (and somewhat masochistic) gamer!

    Regarding the zoom... yeah, about that. The other one had it, too. In fact, this is the 4th year that I've made this game for my daughter and all four have had the zoom. I mainly make it for her to play, so I don't always include instructions.

  • Thanks for the nice comments. It's fun to put those little games together every year. Takes me a couple of days to find and edit the new music, pick out some new eggs, hide them in the scenes, etc.

    I have one "egg" object with two animations: "full" and "pieces". I use a paint tool to hide the eggs (by scaling, cropping, etc.) then I save the pieces and import those frames into "pieces". I place the pieces in the scenes using C3 and change a variable for each piece to indicate which "full" egg it comes from. Then the game engine I created four years ago handles everything else.

    you made it really hard though! there was a nasty hidden egg in the coffee house.. I never even saw it.. I clicked it by mistake.. I must have heard that Winter Wonderland song about 5 times!!

    Haha. Yeah, sorry about that. I knew that scene was going to be really hard so I actually hid 6 eggs in that one. There are two hard ones and you only need to find one of them. (One egg is covering the letter "O" in FLORENCE. The other one is super tricky. There is an egg shaped object on the counter. That seemed too easy... so I hid the egg in the egg shaped object's *reflection*. Yeah, I suck.)

    The game you made/make for your son sounds awesome! I love using Construct for projects like these.

  • When my wife and I moved to Europe we realized that it would be the first Easter that we didn't hide eggs for our daughter (she's 30). This made me kind of sad, so I found some pictures of our old house and used them to create an egg hunt game!

    It has become a tradition and on Sunday I sent Autumn egg hunt game #4. This time the theme was "home", so I started with a picture of where she works in Seattle, followed by a picture of where I work in Berlin. (Then I did "drinks", "graffiti", etc.) There 10 scenes, 5 eggs in each scene.

    NOTES/DISCLAIMERS:

    1. The game runs in the browser. It's big and takes a minute or so to load. Be patient.
    2. It ONLY works on PC/Mac. It doesn't work on phones or tablets.
    3. You can use your middle mouse button to zoom in and out. This helps because I get a bit... creative... with some of my egg hiding. 😈
    4. I don't own most of the pictures or any of the music. Copyright violations abound.

    https://www.cuttergames.com/egghunt_2019

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  • I thought about the scaling. Sure enough, mine is set at 100% and my wife's is at 125%. (These are the recommended settings on both of our laptops.)

    Unfortunately, I tried changing MY scaling from 100% to 125% and it didn't make a difference. I can still see the full game screen.

    AllanR I can't believe people are actually finishing the game. Some of those eggs were practically impossible to find. I'm trying to be more "fair" this year. :-) Did you discover that you can zoom in and out with the middle mouse wheel?

  • EDITED TO MAKE IT MORE CLEAR:

    I have two browser games that are built using the same "engine". One uses the C2 runtime. The other uses the new C3 runtime. Both games run at 1920 x 1080, using scale inner for the display. (I use the browser object to change to full screen, this may negate the display setting.)

    I have two laptops, both running 1920 x 1080 resolution. Chrome zoom is at 100% on both machines. Display "scaling" is at 125% on both machines.

    Using the C2 runtime, the full game screen is visible on both games. Using the C3 runtime, one of the laptops looks fine, but the other is only showing about 80% of the screen. (I can see the full screen only by pressing CTRL- to zoom out to 80%.)

    Any ideas why this is happening? I'm thinking there might be a setting problem with one of the machines, but I have no idea which one. (Note that I tried the display scaling already.)

    UPDATE: I tried changing back to the C2 runtime but I was still having the same issues. (Last year's game worked fine, so I'm not sure what I changed.)

    SOLVED: The issue seemed to be related to me going to full screen mode, so I checked the Browser object's settings and found that I was using "Centered" for the diplay. When I changed to "Scale Inner" it fixed my problem!

  • Thanks for the reply, Ashley! I really appreciate Scirra's customer support. :-)

    I use Chrome so I checked out 'chrome://gpu' and discovered that my hardware acceleration was disabled, for some reason. I went into my Chrome settings and turned it on, and now everything is working as expected. Thanks for your help!

    (Actually, I'm now getting the same framerate and performance with the C3 runtime, but I noticed that my CPU usage has gone down a LOT, compared to C2.)

  • I wouldn't mind taking a look at it if you want don't mind sending the capx but if not I can only suggest maybe change the max texture size in project settings?

    Btw, I played it and I thought I was going to try one level but ended up finishing it chickka rakka chikka boom

    Because of the music and large image files my .capx is HUGE. But thanks for the offer. If I can't figure out what's going on I may take you up on it. :-)

    You finished it??? I'm kind of surprised (and impressed) because I tend to make some of the eggs way too difficult (as in practically impossible) to find. Gonna be better about that with this year's version. Heh.

  • It seems to be running fine here. Construct provides tools for you to check performance and investigate why things are slow if you run the debugger and look at the profile tabs. That's the first place to go.

    To be clear, the version I linked was using the C2 runtime.

    When I load that program and choose the C2 runtime, it takes 12.89 seconds for my text message to scroll up the screen and the next scene to fade in. If I then choose the C3 runtime, the same sequence takes 56.25 seconds. So I'm clearly doing *something* wrong.

    Okay, I just checked the debugger with both the C2 runtime and the C3 runtime. I'm not an expert but everything *seems* okay, except I did notice a big difference in CPU usage. During the text scroll:

    C2 RUNTIME: 60 fps and 92% CPU

    C3 RUNTIME: 26 fps and 1.8% CPU

  • For the past three years I have been making my daughter an egg hunt game for Easter. I just loaded last year's game, made with the C2 runtime, into Construct 3 and everything is moving like molasses. Any ideas what could be causing this slowdown?

    My game consists of 10 scenes (each 1920x1080) and a dozen or so fairly large egg sprites. I am also fading the images to black using a large black sprite that covers the screen. Is it the large images?

    NOTE: I was able to switch to the C2 runtime and it's pretty much back to normal, but I was looking forward to a slight framerate improvement from C3... definitely not getting that.

    Here is last year's version, using the C2 runtime: cuttergames.com/egghunt_2018

  • I'm pretty familiar with Construct, and I'm an owner of Construct 3. I have not, however, tried to do anything with the multiplayer object.

    With that in mind, how difficult would it be for me to create a multiplayer quiz game for my office? I'm fully confident that I can make a quiz game, but I want to allow up to 30 people to connect to it and compete against each other, in realtime.

    PLAYER EXAMPLE:

    As a player, I go to a website link with my iPhone and am prompted to enter my name. A second or so later my name appears on the Quiz Screen. (In this case, on a large monitor in a conference room.)

    When the Quiz Creator clicks the READY button a question and four answers appear on the Quiz Screen. A moment later they appear on my iPhone and I choose one of the answers. (I have 20 seconds to pick.)

    After the timer runs out, or all answers are in, the correct answer appears on the Quiz Screen, along with the number of people who got the question right and wrong.

    And so on. Is this a moderately difficult endeavor, or a hugely complicated rip-my-hair-out kind of project. :-) (I've looked at the example "chat" app, and it doesn't look *too* bad...)

  • I did a quick Google search to see if this had already been suggested somewhere but didn't find anything...

    The game flow of my current project has gotten a bit complicated as I transition from my puzzle, to a scoring popup, and then on to the next puzzle. I was having strange issues and to help me find the problem I came up with the following idea:

    1. I added an array to my layout and called it "array_debug".

    2. Then I created an event that PUSHED a string value to my new array.

    3. I pasted this event in each of my main code Groups, and in each Function that wasn't part of a loop. (Then I changed the value I was pushing to represent the Group or Function name.)

    4. When I run my game in Debug Mode I can then look at array_debug to follow my event flow.

    What I EXPECTED to see was something like this:

    Initialize Group

    Setup Group

    Create Sprites Function

    Game Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Final Score Group

    What I ACTUALLY saw was this:

    Initialize Group

    Setup Group

    Create Sprites Function

    Game Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Scoreboard Group

    Scoreboard Group

    ...

    My scoreboard group was supposed to execute once and then exit, but I forgot to deactivate the group so it was running over and over again. Now I'm paranoid about other places where I'm looping through unnecessary code that might be slowing my game down. This trick should help me find those sorts of problems.

    EDIT: This trick can also be done by logging events to the browser console, but to be honest I haven't looked into how to do that.

  • [quote:319mkdi1]But i'm still confused as the array isn't showing as an object I can use for events.

    To add to what blackhornet wrote... In order to use many of the built-in features of Construct (like arrays) you have to first add them to your project. So go to your layout, right click, select "Insert New Object", and then pick Array. Now it will be available to events and actions.

    The next thing you will want to do is add an action for your AJAX event (On "shop" completed). Array --> Load --> AJAX.LastData.

    To make sure that everything worked, run your game using "Debug Layout" (instead of the triangular Preview button) and then click on your array on the left side of the debug panel. You should be able to see your data listed.

  • A tag is just a name you can assign to help Construct identify things. It's almost like a variable name, which means it can be anything you like.

    For example, when you use AJAX to "request" a project file you can add a tag like: "zebra_yoghurt". Then your next line would be:

    AJAX --> On "zebra_yoghurt" completed -- Dictionary --> Load from JSON string AJAX.LastData

    Another place where I use tags is with audio. When you play a music file, for example, you can assign it an optional tag. Again, it can be any name you want. By giving it a tag you can then do things like check to see if music with that tag is playing.

  • For a bit more help, check out my recent thread here:

    Here's a quick overview:

    1. Right click on Files and select New --> Dictionary

    2. Edit your dictionary with keys and values (do NOT include quotes for text)

    3. Add AJAX to your project

    4. One of your first events should use AJAX to Request a Project File

    5. When it's loaded (AJAX "On [tag] Completed") then the Action for your Dictionary object should be "Load"

    6. You can then load AJAX.LastData into your Dictionary

    7. Now you can use keys to retrieve information from your dictionary

    8. If you created an array then you can do things like: Array.At(index) or Array Contains Value "Text"