What types of plugins would you like to see?

Hello, most of you have likely seen me on the forum occasionally and know me as the creator of Q3D. I've been using construct for some odd 8 years now and would consider myself one of the more experienced developers around here.

Lots of talk on these forums in recent time has centered on mobile, HTML5 performance, etc. but this doesn't really do anything for anyone using construct right now. As a skilled developer I'd like to know what kind of plugins / behaviors / features are in demand so I could attempt to fill those voids in the future when I'm mostly finished with my current projects. I'm not making any promises to do whatever anyone's asking for, however I'd simply like to get a gauge on what people want, and good ideas will be taken into consideration. There's not much I can't do programming wise, however it has to be worth the investment and effort, and it has to be feasible within the current C2 SDK.

I look forward to what you all have to say.

Movement behaviors.

We have bullet, custom movement, moveto, tween, and roll-yer-own-lerp.

We need grid movement, and paths.

The question is how to do all the different variations for those, curves, diagonals/ no diagonals, stepped, non-stepped.

I'm not sure if this is possible, but how about unloading textures?

I'd like to see a gravity type of behavior. You set the direction, and speed, then it is drawn in that direction, and also interacts with the solid behavior.

No point in adding the platform behavior to a roc.

newt

not really sure whats meant by "grid" movement. Path i assume is a simple follow the line type behaviour? I'd probably do path as a plugin rather than behavior so it can show something in the editor (sdk limitation), and so that multiple objects can be linked to the same path, or you could pair paths through containers if you'd want per object paths.

the gravity stuff sounds like something you can already do with custom movement very easily.

UberLou

Im not sure but doesn't C2 do this already? at least sprite has a function for it internally, might not be used. It might be possible, though I haven't thought about it enough.

Grid movement kinda like the one we had in CC.

As for paths, I realise you can't do paths in the editor, but I'm willing to make an external one, and when you think about it the need for creating paths in-game far outweigh that anyway. A simple node based, runtime editable, spline movement that doesn't force you to use the object angle is what I'm suggesting.

Sort of like the one of Rojo's in CC, just no editor. Importing a json would be acceptable.

On the custom movement thing, how do you get it to interact with the solid behavior?

The idea for the Solid is to not have to set up collision events for it, but it only works that way with Platform.

I'm not sure if you can add to pre-existing stock plugins, but I'd personally love to have an audio action/expression to fade in and out of a specific tagged audio file. Also assuming there would be no performance difference (other than download size), it would be WONDERFUL if music were to use WAVES instead of ogg or mp4 for PC products.

UberLou

Im not sure but doesn't C2 do this already? at least sprite has a function for it internally, might not be used. It might be possible, though I haven't thought about it enough.

I believe textures are only unloaded on layout changes.

SpriteFonts++++ - where you could select part of the text and change it's color/bold/italic (always was imaging that as a one sprite with many images (like animations in sprite)) - without using shaders.

But actually some time ago Ashley mentioned about...can't remember the name so lets call this UberSprite. An object that is a blend between Tiled Background and Sprite.

Where you could set things like: repeat texture, offset a texture, scale texture etc.. I wonder what happened to that idea.

Tilemap+ - where you could set some variables for specific cells (without using separate Array object) and maybe some easier and nicer way to make it work for isometric grids

and what newt said, all thou Path might be tricky with current SDK and editror limitations :/

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> UberLou

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> Im not sure but doesn't C2 do this already? at least sprite has a function for it internally, might not be used. It might be possible, though I haven't thought about it enough.

>

I believe textures are only unloaded on layout changes.

That is true,

quote from my "official question"

In other post you mentioned (Ashley) that objects place on a layout are automatically loaded into a memory and will stay loaded until layout is changed. Objects that are not placed on a layout but spawn/created in runtime are then loaded into a memory and when last instance of it will get destroyed object will be unloaded from memory. But then it turns out that even if you create or spawn objects they will stay loaded for entire layout, even when last instance is destroyed.

So every objects texture you create/spawn into the layout stays in the memory until you restart or change to another layout.

Since you are now an expert at edit side rendering, how about a simple behavior that displays the UID and/or IID of objects in the editor so you can more easily reference them in code?

I don't know how feasible is to render text in the editor, but if it's possible this would be very useful for trigger zones, managing multiple cameras, dummy colliders and the like. If it had a field for a custom ID that you could set like "cam01", "triggerZone02", etc... that was displayed in the editor and could be referenced like a variable in events it would be supper handy as well. Other ideas are the ability to display the collision polygon per object, bounding box, hotspot, angle, and action points.

It would be basically a helper behavior.

It would be nice if we had a bit of insight into what C3 will do, or or how it will work.

Easier to plan for the changes.

Animmaniac: The UID is already visible in the properties for any selected instance of most non global plugins in the editor.

How about an Image manipulator like in cc ?

Animmaniac: The UID is already visible in the properties for any selected instance of most non global plugins in the editor.

Yeah, but only when selected and not very visible among other information. The idea is to have it visible at all times in the editor. A small blue box at the corner of the bounding box so you can see it at a glance without the need to fight layers to select an object.