skymen's Forum Posts

  • My question is : are they going to warn me first and ask me to stop the sales and retire my template or my game from the market ? OR are they going IMMEDIATLY to sue me ?

    Don't forget that these are still human beings lol. They gain nothing by jumping immediately at your neck. Basically, if you don't pose a threat to them, they'll do nothing. The biggest threat you can pose for them by selling templates is allowing other people to actually try to copy and sell their game and be real competitors, and that's an issue, so instead of fighting competitors, they will fight you.

    Every company wants to save time, money and their public image. So them first asking nicely with a warning is their way of resolving everything with a simple message. That's meant for you to stop causing them problems and if you comply they probably won't ask for anything else.

    However, if you did make a shitton of money off their product AND you allowed competitors to directly attack them in their market, then this means that you'll be the cause for making them lose money. This would be a valid reason for them to ask you to give them a cut of your money to make up for the damage.

    No one likes to go on trial, so companies will only ever go on trial if challenged and if they know they will win AND make a profit doing so. Some companies might even go on trial out of spite if you were disrespectful when refusing to cooperate, to make an example out of you, even if this means they will lose money in the process (because then, no one else will ever try to challenge them again in the future).

  • By the way, please note that here i'm talking strictly in terms of gameplay. Other elements can come at play too, like story, level design patterns, etc. The more the game is complex, OR the more the mechanics used by the game are common, the less there is legal ground to call out a copycat.

    Aka, if someone makes a 3D shooter where you shoot at people in square rooms, nobody would call it a wolfenstein clone. Same if you make a platformer where you need to jump over holes.

    Basically, if your game is an obvious attempt at riding on another game's gameplay and style, while doing your best to avoid asset/name copyright, then action can be taken.

    If you're just making a game with very common tropes used in many other video games, or if your game is clearly trying to be its own thing, and does not copy more than a few elements from other games, then you should be fine.

    it's still very much a grey area that most of the time gets resolved by Steam/Apple/Google directly, but it has been taken to court, and it has resulted in the party accusing the other game of being a copy to win their case. So there is legal precedent basically.

  • Actually, there is now a legal basis for confronting someone if the gamplay is similar!

    You can define a game being a "copycat" if the game uses the same gameplay elements in the same way in the same combinations, with roughly the same progression with no major changes.

    Changing assets, name, and calling it a day is no longer ok.

    In fact, web and mobile spaces are more and more starting to investigate games that are "too similar" to already existing titles to avoid conflict.

    However, you can still somewhat escape this as soon as your gameplay is different "enough" which is why Voodoo's hole.io can't be taken down even though the gamplay is strikingly similar to Donut County: Voodoo made an arcade online fake multiplayer game where the goal is to battle bots to get the better score when Donut county has a different progression system. Hence this makes hole.io and Donut county two games in the "hole that eats stuff to get bigger" genre even though that genre currently only has these two games.

    Btw, making templates aimed at copying the gameplay of popular title is still considered copying. They just have no ground to file a complaint as long as you don't monetize your template. As soon as you do though, they're in their full right to ask you to take it down. Most companies don't really care if you make a template of their mobile game, but if they did mind they could technically do something about it from what I know.

  • Tbh I'm not sure I understand in what scenario you'd need to know what ID each point is in the editor.

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  • Sure, I'll do some more research and tell you what I find.

    EDIT: Found the issue, I'll send you the new version via email.

  • Hi, thanks for your request.

    We've been talking through emails, and I sent you the addon :)

  • Thanks a lot :)

    No need to download them from the spreadsheet. They appear on the website immediately

  • Hi, my name is Ossama 'skymen' Jouini. I have been using Construct since 2014 and I have recently decided to officially start a consulting service for Construct projects.

    I have helped many people in the past, including big games like Hypnospace Outlaw.

    I also developped many big addons, and wrote a lot of big courses and tutorials.

    You can check my portfolio here: dedragames.com/consulting

    Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you need help for your Construct project and I'll try to do my best :)

    You can also reach out right here in the forums, via discord at skymen#8098, via email at skymen75019 at gmail dot com or via twitter at skymen75

  • I really recommend you use C3_IDE to make C3 plugins:

    github.com/armandoalonso/c3IDE

    It does SO much for you. It can open c2addons and c3addons and auto generate the project from them (most of the time)

    It generates all the JSON for you, it auto generates common code, it allows you to setup ACEs in only a few seconds, and most of all, it comes with an integrated web server that will allow you to easily host developer mode addons for very fast testing.

    It works for plugins, behaviors AND effects btw.

  • Here it is a behavior "Destroy inside layout by Sailer" (C2Runtime & C3Runtime versions, I ported the behavior to the C3Runtime) and demo to it: drive.google.com/file/d/1jf86vgcke5S071MFccMiSrAtlr0dz2Px/view

    Thanks!

    Can you add it to the list here?

    docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oxbmtXqXcW64IAU_4noZchLMxVrPeA4jD_rqTw35H2w/edit

    I'll make sure to confirm your contribution asap.

    (This basically works like the website's database)

  • I ported the addon to C3 and I updated the C2 addon (I fixed a bug that I noticed when porting the addon lol)

    Here is the new C3 addon:

    construct.net/en/make-games/addons/436/greenworksredraw

    And please download the new version of the C2 addon if you happen to have the older one.

    construct.net/en/construct-2/addons/435/greenworksredraw

    There you go Fib :)

    I ported this and didn't test it (since the code is pretty simple).

    If for some reason anyone does encounter any issue, I'll get my dumb ass to fix it and actually test this time.

    EDIT: Ended up testing it, it was unsurprisingly broken, and had 2 bugs in it lmao. Good times. Haven't tested the Steam export yet, cause I don't have a Steam project setup for C3 at the moment.

    (Update is up on the addon exchange)

  • Hey,

    After speaking a bit with Dannyyy, I cleaned up the updated ForceRedraw addon I made.

    construct.net/construct-2/addons/435/greenworksredraw

    From my tests, this worked flawlessly. I can't really speak for performance but realistically there should be no issue.

    Just in case, I added actions to manually start and stop a constant redraw, and a param that gives you control over how many frames to skip before the next redraw occurs.

    If anyone gets issues using this, tag me here, or DM me on Discord via the CC discord server. I'll try to take a look and see what's wrong.

    EDIT: If anyone needs this to be ported to C3, also do tag me, or I'll just eventually port it one day when I have some time.

  • Well, I did a ton of testing, and it turns out that changing the CSS doesn't always update instantly the browser. Some optimisation seems to make it very inconsistant.

    I did end up finding a way around that though: Instead of using a timeout, using requestAnimationFrame seems to force the update to instantly update on the next frame.

    Here is a new addon that uses that technique.

    mega.nz/file/Z4cBwABC

    I also went back to updating the body instead of html, and I forced both to cover the whole window.

    One issue I had with only updating for a short while was that the timer (that was partially outside) would start tearing as soon as the plugin stopped the forced rendering to occur. And when closing the overlay, sometimes, there would be residual overlays until i moved, resized, or unfocused the game window.

    What ended up working great however was refreshing every 3 ticks: imgur.com/a/ki77Wi0

    Also, I'd like to mention this issue on github about the windows 10 title bar:

    github.com/nwjs/nw.js/issues/7362

    So people here know: this flag only worked for me when I put it at the very start of the chromium args list.

    Between this and the new forceredraw addon and some other flags shenanigans, we now have a fully working overlay inside NW.js v 0.46.0!

    Here are my chromium args:

    "chromium-args": "--disable-windows10-custom-titlebar --disable-plugins --disable-internal-flash --disable-popup-blocking --enable-gamepad --enable-html5-camera --allow-file-access-from-files --ignore-gpu-blacklist --limit-fps=60 --disable-devtools --in-process-gpu --disable-direct-composition"

  • Hi, I noticed that sometimes the ForceRedraw plugin failed to redraw the whole window.

    That's because the addon changes the CSS values of the <body> tag, but sometimes, <body> doesn't span on the entire window, and so, on Letterbox Integer scale, the bottom part of the window would not get redrawn, and it would cause some tearing effect where the overlay properly redraws up until the bottom of the canvas, and not the black bar under it.

    I fixed it by making it change the css value of <html> instead, and by forcing <html> to cover the entire window at all times.

    Here is the fixed plugin: mega.nz/file/gllGna5D

    Also, even with --disable-windows10-custom-titlebar, the overlay sometimes renders above the title bar (but less often) and when it doesn't, the top part is just cut from the overlay entirely, so the timer and the tip on how to exit the overlay are partially missing.

    Edit: This was all tested with v0.46.0 with the following chromium args: 

    "chromium-args": "--disable-plugins --disable-internal-flash --disable-popup-blocking --enable-gamepad --enable-html5-camera --allow-file-access-from-files --ignore-gpu-blacklist --disable-gpu-vsync --limit-fps=60 --disable-devtools --in-process-gpu --disable-direct-composition --disable-windows10-custom-titlebar"

    Edit2: I still get tearing with my solution (but a bit less). Not entirely sure why though :/

    I found that by forcing the window to resize by a pixel every frame, or the background color to update every frame, I could get the overlay to work properly, but then, the overlay would slightly flicker in the parts outside the game.