pirx's Recent Forum Activity

  • this is what I do for UI element shadows - use a seamless 9patch shadow png (so it can be scaled to any width/height without distortion).

    since it is pre-rendered, there is no blur performance hit. Obviously this only works with rectangular objects. This demo creates 10 random shapes with a shadow - the shadow has a fixed offset but the opacity is random. The objects have drag and drop so you can move them around...

    In the top left corner I included a white version of the shadow png so that it can be coloured, but I normally only use black shadows.

    https://www.rieperts.com/games/forum/DropShadow.c3p

    Brilliant!! For this specific project I need some irregular shapes so still need to do the blur stacking thing; but in general surely going to utilize this technique for some popups and other ui elements. Thanks!!

  • kindeyegames.itch.io/effects-for-construct

    Shadow offset.

    Don't know why but blurs are exceptionally expensive, process speaking that is.

    Thanks. Looks like it has everything apart from the blur though... Yes I think the reason is live uniform blurs are somehow too intensive to handle casually. I'm still surprised that there seems not to be a single working solution.

    Found on the forum that an approximation of a good looking blur can be achieved by stacking 4 directional blurs (2xV + 2xH), which indeed doesn't look bad. However not sure about performance implications of doing four blur passes of any kind. Will need to test on mobile.

  • construct.net/en/make-games/addons/255/dropshadow

    This is an effect, but maybe not what you want.. not offset.

    I guess someone could quite easily re-write this to be an offset instead of this

    Thanks. I already have and use this here and there but this is more of a perspective shadow with very limited blur. I meant more like the simplest drop shadow effect that any graphics related software has, also CSS, Unity, Powerpoint, MS Paint ... (well not really MS Paint)

  • 1drv.ms/u/s!AkmrWgxeuxlKhIdtK-WtIlVlBvH2pQ

    Here you go. But yeah, could easily be an effect.

    Thanks - but then again, blur. Even a darkened sprite copy effect like this would be convenient to have, though. But still, what I meant was a soft shadow with blur, which I think is the most problematic part.

  • make a copy of your ui behind your UI, paint it black or grey, make it 50% opacity, put it a few pixels down and a few pixels right, badabing-badaboom

    Yes, the key word though is "blur". 😉 (and no, none of the currently available blur effects give a good gaussian blur, including combining horizontal and vertical)

  • Agreed, one of the features that make you feel 100 kg lighter. Try implementing a full-game save of all states in something like Core Data in Swift and we'll be talking days of development vs 30 seconds 😬

  • There appears to never have been a good solution for this. I can't imagine I'm the only one regularly looking to drop a simple shadow with offset/blur/intensity on a UI element or sprite in one game or another.

    Shadow Caster doesn't count 1. it's way overkill for simple shadows 2. no good blur effect available.

    Drawing sprites with shadows already on them also doesn't count because it's super inflexible and doesn't work with scaling, rotation etc.

    I remember Ashley (?) explaining a few years back that shadows, or maybe this was specifically blurs, are problematic but can't remember the reason. Heavy performance-wise?

    On the other hand it's such a common feature in all kinds of software; so is there really no good solution to have soft shadows or at least a good blur effect?

  • Thanks! Well there's other reasons, the score was just an example.

    E.g. the game has an away timer that depends on it knowing the last saved time at all times, things like that. Yes this can also (should) be done with localStorage but it was more of a theoretical question.

    Thought maybe there was some rule of thumb like 'make sure not to save stuff too often because it kills performance/disk/battery'...

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  • Hi, was wondering this today, working on an idle/clicker game.

    Ideally I'd save game every time the player increases their score, which could happen every couple of seconds. Is there a particular reason not to do that around 20 times a minute?

    Would that have an impact on performance? How about 20 times a second, for example?

    Not talking about extreme cases of saving thousands of things on screen or something, let's assume a pretty ordinary save with some optimization done (excluding static objects etc).

  • I wish you all the best and would be very interested to see the result, but not sure how much experience you have with developing software in general.

    Just a heads up, although it's technically possible, doing this with multiplayer and/or own backend using Firebase or something would be a lot of pain even for an experienced developer (Construct or not). Multiplayer is evil.

  • I would also very much like the ability to replace objects in events with a different object type.

    Yes, I understand that some events or actions may be incompatible, but many events exist in all objects. So the editor should allow me to replace "Sprite Set position" to "TiledBackground Set position" for example. Or "Text set text" to "SpriteFont set text".

    However this would be very welcome. Couldn't count all the situations when I wanted to replace something and got confused as to why it doesn't let me. Ah 'mkayyy.. this is a tiled background not a sprite/9-patch/whatever. .. and the only way out is redoing a bunch of things from scratch. Would be great if some basic types were compatible for replacement.

  • lionz

    Thanks, great suggestion. I actually also dislike the way with the family because it feels clunky, and would much rather work with the two objects directly. However, unless I'm doing something wrong it seems that the following logic just doesn't work:

    On Drag Ended -> If Sprite1 is overlapping Sprite1 -> do something.

    The "do something" action just doesn't trigger, whereas it does without any problems when it's Sprite1 overlapping a Family.

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pirx

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