I started optimizing the cap. So far it's down to 315 events. And I realized that my use of the TimeDelta fix is messy, since I have some subevents in there that are unnecessary. And I found some more mistakes I made... oh well.

I'm not using shaders or RTS pathfinding, so it might be down to loops I guess.

I sent you a PM Ashley, big thanks for taking a look at it!

Didn't really notice that it was this long since I last posted about my game...

Well it's still there although I had a really long break from working on it. But I'm back on track now.

<img src="http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/5851/llashot5bbcb0.png">

I added quite some stuff like slopes and different enemies, new tiles and sprites... and well, stuff .

One of the enemies chases the player and tries to jump him in order to suck his blood and you will have to have a good timing to get rid of it once it's stuck on you. It's the smallish thing in the lower left corner of the wip screen and its behavior is based on Deadeye's enemy AI example, thx for that btw!

Had a pretty hard time making those enemies work on slopes. Although I had a very simple solution at first which seemed to work perfectly in a standalone cap. It kind of broke in my game cap, resulting in the enemy getting stuck sometimes when moving from slopes to solid again. I still can't explain why this happened but I finally seem to have a workaround for this problem.

Just recently I ran into a much bigger problem: the framerate drops dramatically causing the whole game to feel very laggy. Sometimes it's even like the player is teleporting instead of proper moving through the level.

I compared it to the cap from the last beta build for my testers, which was still perfectly smooth. Major difference: 197 events as opposed to 348 in the most recent cap. Which means I added 151 events in the last two weeks. And something I added or changed was really bad for the performance.

But I can't quite think of the cause since I mainly added events regarding enemy behaviors while the custom engine remained the same for the most part. I compared the CPU usage too: It's about 20-30% for the older version and 40-50% for the newest one. Pretty damn big difference if you ask me.

Well I don't suspect that it's just too many events or loops. My believe is that Construct is capable of handling a lot. Still I'd like to know if somebody experienced something similar with event-heavy caps or certain events which tend to slow down games significantly. So if you have any experience with this or a similar issue I'd love to hear about that. Till then I'm continuing to investigate the big bad slowdown originator.

Okay first of all: Ninjas are awesome.

I like the vibe of this game so far. It already feels like it's easy to play, but hard to master. Which is a very good thing imo. Although the teleporting was a little odd to me. But you're right: Ninjas should absolutely be able to teleport!!!

Now I want to throw shurikens that can break stuff, like crates... or whatever. Bad guys... more Ninjas.

What exactly do you need? You want enemies just walking somewhere minding their own business or pretty much like in TCR following the player. Did you read the description Deadeye gave in the thread?

So I'm guessing you're trying to do a side scrolling platformer. You can use the platform behavior for enemies too, just remember to set an event that starts ignoring user input on startup. Deadeye has made a pretty good example for enemies with simple AI in the THIS CURSED ROCK thread.

If you simply require an enemy which is walking a certain path (from right to left and back again) just add ball behavior and some detectors where the enemy is supposed to turn. Very basic but works well.

Well I guess the moving itself of the sprites isn't the problem midnight.

But couldn't you like have some interaction detector together with the sprite/hitbox. Then on creation set a private variable of the detector to the UID of the sprite. Now if that detector overlaps another one of the same type of sprite which has a different UID than stored in the variable => interaction.

Or maybe I'm missing something important just my first thought on it, didn't try it myself yet. Maybe you could go more into detail what you're exactly doing eventwise right now hero_bash.

I just downloaded the attachment myself and tried it out. Worked fine. What exactly doesn't work for you?

EDIT: I noticed a minor glitch and did a slight update with some other small changes.

EDIT2: Was still glitchy, should be done now finally.

Okay, fixed it. Now it should work properly. There was a problem with the use of the family "friendly" to get the width. Now it's checking if the DrawHere Object is overlapping friendly, so the width will be set correctly.

EDIT: Oh no now line breaks mess it up for some reason. Too bad. Needs a little work still.

EDIT2: Fixed now too, DrawHere was simply too big and therefore overlaping the characters in the line above as well after a line break. My bad.

It really really should work now hehe.

Very nice. I must have been blindfolded, never even noticed the "create object by name" action before. Embarrassing

But I noticed already there was a little problem with the space between characters ("o" not displayed correctly when trying "hello world!"). Will have a closer look at this.

But many many thanks for pointing this out!

Just posted something that might be of interest for you Caspis.

http://www.scirra.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1995

If I'm not mistaken something like the Text Blitter extension from MMF is already requested for Construct. And I'm really looking forward to this. But in the meantime I came up with my own workaround. I don't think it's very elegant, but works on a basic level.

Just try the cap. You can type any text inside the edit box and by clicking on the "Text it!" button it will be displayed character by character in a custom bitmap font. Well not ANY text, since I only included the letters from A-Z. Full stop, comma, exclamation mark and question mark will work as well. No other special characters, hell I didn't even include numbers so far (yes I'm lazy). But you can add any character you want quite easily. I hope my event comments are satisfactory.

If you have a better solution please let me know. I'd really like to see this being improved. I already thought that I probably should have used a single sprite with different animations or frames for all the characters, but right now I'm happy it works at all (also regarding the fact that at first I had no clue how to do this).

No Scroll X and Scroll Y was still default 0%. I tried setting it to 100%, but I'm afraid it's all the same.