skymen's Recent Forum Activity

  • I am not sure that listing ALL of the templates is a good idea. I would rather have it be opt in so it doesn't clutter the project bar.

    Also, wether to just copy a template or make it a replica I would assume would be off by default if pulling the default instance, and on by default if pulling from template list.

    I think having the templates be children of the object type in the bar instead of having it in its own list could be an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's a good idea for all use cases. Having a separate folder is probably a better idea, especially if it's opt in.

  • > B) Make it so new instances pulled from the project bar automatically become replicas of the "default" template if it exists.

    This design makes it a bit of a hidden feature, and hard-codes an English string which isn't great for non-English users. What about a property to choose the default template name used for new instances? This seems like a good solution as templates are the feature intended to be used for determining initial properties.

    To be honest, I think that if you were to do something like this, you might as well make it so you can save any template in a "template" folder in the project bar so it would almost work like prefabs and you can drag and drop them in any layout.

    I don't see why this feature should be limited to just one "default" template per instance or even why there should be a way to decide what the default template name is.

    Also, I feel like it really wouldn't solve the issue being discussed here; the main problem is when dragging an instance from the project bar in a large project. Having to retrofit "default" templates for every instance sounds like a lot of work for very little benefit, especially when this could be solved with a simple right click menu option. Right Click > Make Default Instance.

    So basically, c3 forces bad types of programing in order to avoid bad types of programing while solving complex/advanced problems, and the solutions themselves are difficult to maintain or scale. You avoid one issue, but create a different issue.

    I thought a lot about design patterns within C3, and while I agree with all of what you said, I think there is one major takeaway you're not seeing; traditional programming patterns are never gonna be a good fit for C3 even if it had some of the features you mentionned because I think at the end of the day C3 has bigger flaws than just support for arbitrary design paradigms.

    C3 works far better with something like composition where a single family is an isolated feature, and you can compose an object by adding it to families. In this case, family inheritance is still useful because there will still be cases where you'd want some amount of inheritance within general systems.

    IMO even with all the features you want, it doesn't answer C3's 2 major flaws that it needs to address before any of this can even be tackled.

    - C3 is horrendous at dealing with data. When you have to handle a JSON, I feel like while C3 has some amount of solutions in place to make it possible to do, in general data management feels like an afterthought that was handled by an external addon rather than by a system implemented directly within the engine. This creates a large bottleneck of sorts whenever there is a need to treat and transfer large amounts of data because it needs to be serialised to JSON first, or it needs to be transfered through archaic picking systems that make the code way too hard to read.

    - C3 lacks an abstraction system. There is no way to refer to instances without knowing their type and without picking them through the SOL. This means cross family picking is hard, storing instance references is hard, and it's one of the main reasons composition systems fail so easily. As soon as you need 2 families to synergise when they are both being used on a given type, it becomes problematic.

    IMO if C3 had a way to store SOL as a variable and do more complex SOL manipulations, it would make C3 far more powerful. Also, if C3 had a way to make cross type families for types that share actions like set position and set size, it would also allow for very useful abstraction to be done.

    What I've ended up doing fairly often is relying on JS for complex data management and that kind of inheritance when necessary and using instances as just the visual aspect if it can't be done nicely with events. Still I think it's not a great solution and I wish C3 had systems in place for that.

    until we go through the engine and use private fields everywhere, which we've been planning to do for some time

    Since you've mentionned this a few times over the past few years Ashley I went digging into the code to see what this would do concretely.

    Private fields would absolutely make it much harder to do some of the bigger hacks that I've done in the past. The bigger ones being the following:

    Layer Manager: construct.net/en/make-games/addons/1053/now-c3-layer-manager

    (Dynamic layers before dynamic layers were added)

    Layer Magic: construct.net/en/make-games/addons/886/layer-magic

    (Rendering hacks to do some cool multi pass rendering on layers. I still think this would be a sick thing to have, but I stopped working on it due to huge bugs the hack caused)

    Limit FPS: construct.net/en/make-games/addons/1188/limit-fps

    (Wrapper around the C3 ticking method to force some kind of arbitrary limit)

    Experimental XXX Fix:

    construct.net/en/make-games/addons/1128/experimental-touch-fix

    construct.net/en/make-games/addons/1094/experimental-9-patch-fix

    construct.net/en/make-games/addons/906/experimental-text-fix

    (Replaces parts of the runtime classes to fix annoying issues with these plugins)

    What all of these have in common is that the way these operate has been to do something close to the following: 

    let oldClass = C3.Path.To.Class
C3.Path.To.Class = class myClass extends oldClass {}

    This way of doing it has a big advantage because it's non destructive, and more importantly, it is way less prone to breakdowns when changes to the parent class are made. It also allows me to be very precise with the hacks and reuse as much of the original code as I can. With private fields, this becomes completely impossible, and the only way to do something similar would be to replace the entire class and rewrite everything, which would make it painful enough to warrant doing something else instead.

    However, I dug around the code of C3 a fair amount in the past few years, and I don't think that too many fields can be made private. The engine internal classes communicate with undocumented public fields of other classes all the time, and usually these are the fields we'd wanna mess with anyway. From what I can tell, using private fields all over the engine in an efficient way would require rewriting a significant chunk of the engine's code and I'm not even sure how that would look like.

    Also, since private fields would most likely make replacing classes a pain in the ass, a lot of these hacks would probably then just revert back to hooking to random parts of the engine, and trying to inject code wherever possible which would in turn be a lot messier. So really, to me the idea sounds like a lot of work for not a lot of return. At the very least, IMO it doesn't do much that the idea of SDK v2 doesn't already do, and IMO again, adding better APIs and more features to the SDK is really the only sane way to fix these problems.

    Another reason why I don't especially like that idea is that being able to mess with engine internals is a great way to prototype feature requests before I make them.

    I have mostly halted addon dev since SDK v2 was announced to give it some time to mature so when I get back to making addons, I can try to use v2 exclusively and start porting my old addons. However, I still use Construct and I still mess around with it's features, and recently I made a game that made heavy use of Dynamic layers and I found a bunch of tiny additions that could be made to the feature that would make for nice feature requests, but I first wanted to experiment with them.

    For example, here is a snippet I use in that game that adds a layer effect to a dynamic layer 

    	let effectData = [["skymen_DropShadow","DropShadow",[true,	[0,0,0],0.75,4,60]]]
	let layer = c3_runtimeInterface._localRuntime.GetMainRunningLayout().GetLayer(runtime.globalVars.layer_ui_gun)
	let renderer = c3_runtimeInterface._localRuntime.GetRenderer()
	layer._effectList = C3.New(C3.EffectList, layer, effectData);
	for (const effectType of layer._effectList.GetAllEffectTypes())
		effectType._InitRenderer(renderer);
	layer._effectList._InitRenderer(renderer);
	layer._effectList.UpdateActiveEffects();
	layer._needsRebuildEffectChainSteps = true;
	layer.GetEffectChain();

    This snippet is very hacky and a real implementation would require a lot more work, but in the meantime this allows me to test it in a real game and see how well it holds up so I can then come with a well thought out feature request that can prove that the idea has legs. With private fields everywhere, things like this are 100% impossible and I don't think that's a good thing, at least for me.

    Anyway, I hope that by the time SDK v1 is fully sunsetted and private fields are implemented, SDK v2 will be mature enough and will provide a good enough API to make these kinds of hacks unncessary.

    The point I'm trying to make with this post is that the bigger hacks are usually born out of necessity and rarely out of laziness to achieve a similar goal with legal means.

    Addons like Empty Shell, Limit FPS or Layer Manager are born out of a real need to do something that C3 doesn't do and while I understand that V2 aims to make it harder for these addons to be shared with people that don't understand the risks, I would still like being able to mess around with things at my own discretion, even if that means I stop publishing my code.

  • FWIW the editor has a fixed limit on how many spritesheets it will render at once, specifically to cap the memory usage. For example if you have 1000 spritesheets, it will only render/compress something like 10-20

    Do you think it's possible to have an experimental setting (even something hidden like a URL query param) to change that limit? I'd be down to give it a try and report if changing the limit helps or not.

  • As far as I'm aware browsers, and Construct, don't have any particular memory limits that would affect even a large game. For example you can use as much texture memory on the GPU as you can - there's no limit there. No matter what software or technology you use, it's up to you to design your game efficiently and not use too much memory.

    I think the main issue here is that C3 seems to have a hard time handling memory with large amounts of image data. Even if that amount is way below the memory limits, when C3 is generating spritesheets, it seems like memory usage skyrockets the more images there are, and very often it leads to memory overloads.

    I've seen the issue happen on both Biogun and Astral Ascent, and usually the exact memory management efficiency vary depending on the browser being used. At the time I remember Edge was more efficient with memory, but now that it's Chromium based it might not make a difference anymore.

    It's way easier to get the crash when using larger spritesheet sizes and with multiple layout tabs open or multiple browser tabs/programs open on the computer.

    Currently, to minimise the crashes happening, you need to use only one or two layouts, and load the minimum amount of icons and sprites because any new icon spritesheet or sprite spritesheet being generated can cause the crash.

    I don't know if that can be fixed, but I think C3's spritesheet generation algorithm could maybe be made more memory efficient when too many images need to be handled, even if that means going slower.

    Also, an alternative could be to save the editor spritesheets in the project files within a special editor folder like uistate files so the sheets don't have to be generated again every time the project is opened. That folder could be gitignored to prevent merge issues.

  • My advice would be to, wherever possible and to the greatest extent possible, develop a separate external tool and have some way of importing that tool's output to Construct.

    If you build a separate tool which does something like produce a file you then import to Construct, you avoid all these problems and it will probably work fine indefinitely. So I'd strongly recommend you do that instead of trying to use a browser extension to hack unsupported things in to a large, complex and continually changing codebase that is not expecting that.

    I largely agree with that point of view, but as stated in my other forum post, the fact that C3 does not do any kind of live reloading means it's actually extremely complicated to build any kind of external tool that has a decent UX.

    I recommend you look at my Construct Crawler tool that allows reading and modifying Construct 3 project files. The tool would be infinitely more usable if it did not require closing and reopening C3 constantly.

    I wrote it at the time with the intent of making it easy to refactor or extend with more functionnality in the future, but any feature I think of ends up being made completely unusable because of the archaic UX.

    Being able to do live reloads means external tools can be used with the project open, and this would also allow addons to communicate with external tools directly as well.

    Since the editor SDK is so limited, the only way for 3rd party addons to get data from the open project is either through an external tool gathering data from the project folder, or from an extension that gathers that data from the editor directly. Without live reload this significantly limits how useful external editors can be (since most likely an editor is not meant to read data but also to write back what you want)

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  • What you're looking for is a pathfinding algorithm. The C3 pathfinding behavior won't help because it uses a grid of nodes rather than what you have.

    The only way to implement what you want is to implement something like Astar or Djikstra since you have only few points.

    Here's a video that explains how the algorithm works:

    youtube.com/watch

  • Hi CairoCreativeStudios

    Absolutely!

    Please DM me on Discord :)

  • I initially replied here, but to avoid diverting from the original topic, I made a separate thread:

    construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/general-discussion-7/custom-3d-renderer-instead-182406

    I think Mikal's proposition deserves to be discussed and I don't want my response to take away from that.

  • This is a followup to this forum thread:

    construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/general-discussion-7/proposal-community-developed-182378

    In there, Ashley said the following:

    Are you sure that there are not other approaches that could make an integrated 3D engine work, or new APIs that would smooth integration? It seems to me that it ought to be possible to basically import existing Construct objects in to a 3D engine

    I'm down to humor this because I'm trying to do this exact thing nowadays.

    For the past few months, at Dedra, we've been working on two 3D games made in C3 with the purpose of pushing the engine to its limits and see how far we can go. While so far it's gone well, we've already ran into multiple roadblocks that have made me question the legitimacy of this plan.

    So, I've started messing around with OGL initially and now with ThreeJS within C3. (OGL was chosen because it was very lightweight, but after working with it a lot, I figured I would need to build a large layer on top of it to get the results I wanted, which would make my fork just a poor version of ThreeJS)

    During my tests, I was doing the whole thing in JS and loading models from the asset manager to run benchmarks, but the plan has always been to try and create a 1:1 mapping of C3->ThreeJS since I'm pretty sure most of it can be done automatically.

    I'm glad that you seem to agree that this is a decent plan so let me list a few features that are currently needed to do make this possible:

    1- Getting texture data

    In C3, there is no legitimate way to get the texture data from anything without using undocumented features. I'm not just talking about sprites here. I would like to use:

    • Sprites
    • Tiled Background
    • 9 Patch
    • Text. This one is especially important. C3's Text BBCode system is way too useful to give up on, the alternative would require loading fonts manually, and doing text rendering using some other solution. I suppose I could use the IRendererText interface, draw to an invisible texture and show that, but that's extra work to recreate something that is already there.
    • Particles. NB: This one is far less important as a particle system would probably need to be rewritten in 3D and could pull texture from sprite. Also, I implemented Effekseer in C3 a few months ago, but that particle engine was designed for ThreeJS originally so most likely I'd use that for complex particle systems

    This feature would also be very useful for my Empty Shell addon. It currently uses an undocumented feature to get the texture from a sprite, but if this feature was done, I could make it work with any of these objects.

    2- Getting linked instance objects

    A few objects in C3 get their texture data from other places. This is the case for 3D Object which is the most important one by far.

    Particle also does that but as stated this is less important.

    Having that system be exposed in the new SDK would also allow me to port my Empty Shell addon, since it relies on a similar concept for texture linking.

    Intermission

    These two are by far the most important features because otherwise none of what you're proposing is possible without hacks, without jumping through massive hoops, or without just ignoring C3's editor entirely and storing everything as separate files.

    3- Mesh data

    I think we've already made a very solid point for this in this feature request.

    However, this is also very important for a C3->ThreeJS system because otherwise there is no way to port anything that uses mesh. For this we need all the data, so world position, but also local positions and UV data. Without all of it, it's not possible to do it.

    A big reason why this is very important is that mesh is the only way to do 3D rotations and skews in C3. Doing this in full Three requires storing a lot of data as numbers in instance variables which becomes cumbersome when meshes do the same thing but better.

    4- Extra notes for full support

    A few other far less important things required for this would be:

    - Support for Video in the scripting runtime (URL, current position etc)

    - Tilemap texture. This one would be far more situational.

    - DrawingCanvas texture. Unless I'm mistaken, it's not possible to get the canvas texture data from DrawingCanvas.

    - Spritefont. I personally don't use Spritefont, but it would help

    Conclusion

    This would be quite a lot of work to do, and a lot of it would essentially be syncing the full state of C3 objects to 3D.

    I am personally down to explore this possibility, and if it works out well, I am planning on open sourcing a lot of my work so other people can give it a try as well.

    However, right now it's just not possible to do without reaching beyond what is allowed.

    Also, if I have to go the length of implementing a 3rd party 3D renderer and do all of this syncing work, it would only be fair if I got to use this engine to the full extent. However, right now, C3 lacks a lot of UX features that would also need to be worked around to have a decent workflow. Something as simple as placing 3D shapes with a 3D rotation is impossible and yet would be extremely useful in a proper 3D renderer. Do I need to store rotations as instance vars and keep hitting preview to see if I rotated my object correctly? I'm already doing this, but it's far from ideal.

    You have to realise that following this route means gradually moving the problem away from the runtime, and straigth into the editor, and given how little work has gone into exposing more editor SDK I frankly doubt we'll be allowed to create custom views any time soon to implement a 3D editor ourselves, let alone get all of the data I outlined above directly from the editor SDK.

    Scratch that! Let's say I write a brand new 3D editor completely separate from C3 that gets all its data directly from the project folder. I can't live reload anything in C3 (besides scripts in the scripts folder) so to preview my changes, I need to restart the C3 editor and THEN the preview.

    (all of this assumes it's a sensible idea to write my own 3D editor and use a 3rd party 3D renderer. That sounds far fetched, but I can think of a few theoretical good reasons to actually do that)

  • Hi Ashley, in the past few C3 releases you included 2 examples for custom drawing with canvases inbetween layers. This is pretty cool, and in fact it's something I've been experimenting with in the past, but I'm curious about something:

    Why do it this way rather than using C3's provided dynamic texture system? Dynamic textures can also take canvases as input, and with them I'd be able to integrate rendering with a lot more precision than with an extra canvas inbetween 2 layers.

    Also, using dynamic textures, I can place my custom drawing in the C3 world directly and have it automatically be affected by layout/layer positionning, the Z ordering, and the effects compositor.

    Is it that this method is more performant? If so, how much better is it?

    I'm curious to learn more about the rationale behind these. As I said, I've been experimenting with something like this recently to implement custom 3D in my games, and for my specific use case, both would actually work fine (with some minor caveats on both sides) so if you can explain, it would help me a lot.

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skymen

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    Sometimes I do some cool stuff in Construct. Sometimes I like to talk about it.