signaljacker's Forum Posts

  • One thing I've found useful for me working on a large project is keeping all of my global variables in their own event sheet and separating them into sections with comments/titles. Commenting stuff is pretty important, I ignored it for years, but the more complex your project gets the more you will wish you did.

  • +1 to better multi monitor support, I do find it quite clunky using construct on multiple monitors, basically having to stretch the window across 2 screens and then align everything. It might be functional enough, but not great. Have a look at how something like Reaper (the DAW) allows for window customisation, it's gamechanging. Are these limitations due to it being browser based?

  • Thanks so much, I will study this!

  • Thanks both of you for the insights! The array idea is definitely interesting I will have a play around with it! Thank you

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  • Hi all, my game has different surfaces such as grass, rock, metal etc and I am wanting to play different footsteps as the character runs across these.

    My levels are large, varied and are primarily built using tilemaps so my first thought was to create a colour coded tilemap placed underneath my collision tiles and check if the player is overlapping a particular index in that and then play the sounds as needed. I like this method because I can just paint in areas and they will match up easily with my artwork. I haven't put it into practice yet, but it got me thinking - is that actually the best way to do this?

    I would have to constantly be looping through the tilemap indexes right? Or would I simply be saving myself time if I had several sprites and stretched them as needed across areas and then made them invisible at runtime? Would this be more or less performant? Does anyone have any experience or insights on the best way to do this from both a performance and maintenance perspective, bearing in mind that we are dealing with large layouts here. I realise for small projects the performance difference may be inconsequential. Thanks for any guidance!

  • Seconding this, - ignored raycasting for a long time and when I went to use it did not find it particularly intuitive out of the box - some visual indicators even just as a preview effect would be awesome.

  • Take a look at the Kiwi Story game in the examples, it has an enemy with this patrolling behaviour.

  • Thanks dop2000 - so were you able to just automatically convert that are you saying? Did you need to modify anything to get it to work? I get this error every time. At any rate, I am grateful for the updated file you posted, thank you!

  • Hi all, I am looking at an old example of lightning done by brunopalermo from this thread I think it's a cool example and am interested in playing around with the effect. You can download an example of the file here. As it was made a while ago though it uses the old depreciated function plugin. I've tried to convert it using "replace with built in function" but it throws an error:

    the types for parameter(s) 0, 1, 4 could not be determined (deduced types any, any number, number any)

    I'm just trying to understand this, and see if there is a way to convert it to the new functions.

    Is it throwing this error because it can't determine if some of the function parameters are strings or numbers and it doesn't like this? From what I can tell they all appear to be numbers.

    I notice if I remove the 2 function calls in the else statement it will then convert o the new function, but of course the effect then no longer works - and I'm afraid I don't understand enough of it to know how to fix.

    Thanks for any insights!

  • Thank you, showing the collision polygons was a good suggestion. It showed me that it wasn't actually a collision happening. Turns out it was a function being called that I had set up for a screenshake, linked to another object that was offscreen and when the player passed a certain threshold it was triggering, now I have fixed that up and it is working as expected. Thanks again!

  • I've got a weird issue - I've checked all my layers and there is nothing there, yet when my character walks across the screen at a certain point the screen shakes as if there is hidden object somewhere causing a collision/trigger. I need to find out what this is and it's driving me nuts. I can't see anything like this in the debug mode. I have a lot of layers and objects so it could be anything. I was wondering if there was a way to see a log of all collisions somewhere?

  • Thank you, that is a good suggestion.

  • Thanks Ashley, I'm testing on an M4 Mac Mini (base model), I seem to be able to find precious little info about the GPU other than it's got 10 cores. Unfortunately I can't redesign the viewport size to 1080p in this particular project, but that essentially answers my question.

    I'm pretty happy with the performance of the game upscaled to 1080p, but my fear is that anyone using a 4k monitor who wants to get a fullscreen experience (which is what the game would load as by default) is going to get a bad experience and it will reflect badly on the game. Perhaps though I should trust that with more widespread adoption of these monitors there will also be more powerful GPUs driving them. I just wondered how others were dealing with this - 4k gaming isn't important to me, and wasn't even on my radar but I guess I just got a shock when I saw how much of a hit the performance does take, and the average consumer is probably going to flip out that a little pixel art game can bring their fancy computer to it's knees.

    My target platform is PC but I bought a mac to play around with and figured why not release on that too.

  • I've got a 480x270 pixel art game that is using some shaders/effects applied to the layout (necessary for a distinct style that my game requires). I've been happily developing with 1080p desktops in mind, but recently bought a 4k monitor and was kind of horrified at how badly the game ran when scaling up using the "high" fullscreen quality. Now, that might come as no surprise, but as this size monitor is becoming more and more ubiquitous and in the interest of future proofing my game as best as possible I'd like to see what sort of solutions there might be.

    My settings are:

    480x270 viewport

    letterbox integer scale

    fullscreen quality: high

    sampling: nearest

    no pixel rounding

    Shaders/effects used (not all at once necessarily, but these can be switched on and off by the user)

    BetterCRT

    Diskblur

    RGBAChannelSeparation

    The game runs great on the low quality setting, but the issue is that the shaders and text then look terrible when stretched out over a high res screen.

    On high quality the shaders are the performance culprit as switching them off results in decent enough performance. We could just blame the shaders here, but I'm wondering if there's an intermediate solution that can balance quality and performance.

    I know it's kind of weird, but for this particular project I need the best of both worlds - both crisp, perfect pixel art, but also some high quality effects such as blurs, CRT etc

    Digging around the forums I came across this post, which seems to be discussing a similar sort of thing - but the file being discussed is no longer there - it does look like Ashley provided a solution at the end though, so that gives me some hope...

    What would be great would be to upscale the game from 480x270 to 1080p using the high quality, and then upscale that again to 2k 4k etc using the low quality (if that makes sense). Is there a way to do this?

    How are you guys that are publishing games to desktop commercially dealing with future proofing your games?

  • Thank you very much, I really appreciate the detailed breakdown of where this has gone wrong and how it can be done properly. Your solution is so elegant in comparison to what I was trying to do! Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge!