Eleanor's Patreon (the best construct 3 programmer in the world)

Hello my name is Eleanor Jacques-Morel

Pixel Artist and the best Construct 3 programmer in the world! She/Her & Trans woman with Asperger's syndrome, Making 🍓Strawberry Punch 🍓

I decided to open up my Patreon if you want to:

• want to support me, Eleanor.
• want to support my game, https://www.strawberrypunch.com.
• want to support women and queer and marginalized game creators.
• want to support the best of the best, crème de la crème!!
• want to stick it to the sexists and transphobes and haters.
• want personal help with construct 3 or pixelart.

Here's my Patron link ! patreon.com/strawberrypunch

Some of the tiers include exclusive tips and help with Construct 3 from the best Construct 3 programmer in the world, me!!!!!

Happy Developing !!

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3D collision detection is IN !!!

also mobile controls

it dosen'T get stuck in the seams between blocks anymore !!

see for yourself strawberrypunch.com

Here's progress on the game

Here's some of my construct 3 tricks I use to make this work

launch the uh quad issue performance under tech demo in construct 3 and run it and compare it with this cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/312194372001202177/587028875696144427/quadisperf.c3p

the second one will run out of memory before it runs out of CPU

and have gazillions of objects

I discovered i could do this when i was getting a really high engine% on cpu usage in strawberrypunch and i started some optimisations like

i coded a render culling thing that would check where objects are in 3D space and see if the camera can see them and if not the delete all of the rendering and make the "object" containing the variables stop ticking engine stuff like quads and whatever

my first try was i made them stop moving

even though their 3D variables still ticked a lot

and then i was like

wait a minute

what if i just use some object that doesn't have stuff that the engine ticks on every frame

and empty arrays and binary data works great

bonus for empty array for being able to self reference data in the array

bonus for binary data to be able to self stuff that you want to serialize

keep in mind the "self" thing that'S gonna become really important

that'S like my shittyest trick so put your seat-belt on

uh

i could cite lots and lots of testing with this project

to test what kind of variables are referenced the fastest

or just tell you the gist of it

arrays are complete ass

6 times slower than for each

for each is very slow

self is pretty fast

global is fast

global static is the fastest

global constant ?

bleh

i always mix up those two words

that might not seem important yet

it will be in a minute

do you know how booleans work in the engine ?

They're like either 1 for true or 0 for false

but

they suck

because

you can't toggle them without picking

so they'Re garbage

you can make your own booleans with get bit set bit

get bit set bit is better than using a number

for reason we'll see later but

what's important is the 1 and 0 part

you can for example, in a single line of code, increase the falling speed if your velocity is over 0

by doing set falling speed to self.fallingspeed + gravity + self.fallingspeed > 0 * gravity

where self.fallingspeed > 0 will return either 0 or 1

so gravity will be double or not

you can get pretty complicated with that it's really useful

also

you can call functions without for each

by calling them with a return value

do you know that ?

like

in the event sheet

there is function call

to be able to call for each object without using a for each loop

you can create a function with a return value

and then call it in the expression system thingy

this might seem dumb

but it'S really really important

because you can use the function to change other expression inside the thingy

like in this collision detection code

where it calls a functions that alters self.vx that is used in the operation later on

so that if it collides with a wall while walking self.vx will be set to 0

and stop going forwards

but if you'Re hit

self.vx will be set to -self.vx

and you will bounce off the wall

and the function is not called at all if there is no collision detected

so saves overhead

this kind of reveals the biggest part

making code without picking

this is why you need to know the speed of references

it changes how you write it

where it can end the code prematurely and set it to self or 0

so it dosent have to call functions

and it dosen'T do picking

because picking is a huge overhead inside the engine

well

every time you pick it calls functions to the engine

for every instance

so when you have a shitton of them like i do it'S a big deal

so

I make those overly complicated expressions to set variables

using all of the operators to the max and the boolean comparator thing and calling functions while seting the value

but you have to balance engine overhead to "set a variable" with "expensive references"

like if in a calculation you need to divide the same value 20 times

it'S faster to add a variable

calculate it once with self and set it once

and then use it to call self once instead of multiple self to calculate the result multiple times

if that makes sense

oh also in that code snippet my collision detection is in a dictionary

and it creates unique keys using a X & "x" & Y & "y" & Z string

to see if that voxel is occupied

and it checks of 0 instead of checking for all of the other possible results

and the results are in the function for the type of collision

so i can add and remove collisions in 3D space at runtime in the level so that'S cool

doing it with a dictionary beats an array because most of the array is filled with empty space

and both of those beat an octree because it only need to check for one collision on each axis

whereas with the octree sometimes it would be 7 or 8

or much much much worse in the shadow's case it could do 50

ouch

because it needed to raycast down until it found something

also for rendering it's kinda complicated

it takes into account how many numbers you can cram inside construct 3 's 64 bit numbers

and how the data is networked

so positions are 16int or unit i dont remember

but can go up to 32000 ish

so 5 digits

and so it goes by first priority, what is the distance from the cell to the camera

then if it's the same cell, what's the Z value divided by the z side of the tiles

and then if also the same it goes by calculating the Y position

of the screen

isometrick-y

so it's a more refined way of doing it ?

and there will be two digits left

for a dot and a decimal

for zordering my sprites on

so that the clothes are over the skin and so on

all super fancy like

no picking because they're in a container

the set animation has getbit into it

so that it plays a different animation if the bit is true or false

without any new code to switch it

and the letters hold the data for the colors and the variants

and the animation name

so my whole game is super duper fancy like

with my own collision detection and physics and shit

kind of hacking my way around the picking

cool stuff

it uses the multiplayer plugin with binary data to do whatever the fuck i want

interest management and whatever people claim you can'T do

and the host can control all of the AI too so that'S cool

to sync like 400 objects it uses 30 kbps ?

it will probably increase later when i need to sync more data but that sounds realy good to me

so

here you go

that was big secrets

Support me on Patreon if you want more and/or help with those until someone takes all of this information and makes an actual tutorial you can use instead of me regurgitating it all at once

For the shadow to stick to the floor I use this piece of code

note that for this specific piece of code, I'm using this for each loop

because I'm still testing features with it, but on to how it works !!

so the code above the red line is to check if there is a floor using a dictionnary like previously explained,

but this time it'S slightly different because it uses -1*loopindex inside a loop and if the result is 0, which is what is returned when no dictionary entries at the specified key exists,

then nothing will happen,

so the variable is set to 0 and the "set variable" action ends, then loopindex gets increased by 1, and the code will look for a dictionary entry that corresponds to the space below the one in the previous loop to check if there is floor again, and repeat 5 times.

The goal is that if it cannot find a floor within 5 loops, then i could make the shadow sprite invisible or place it somewhere else to indicate there is no floor below the character.

But, if a floor is found, it calls the function shadowstoploop

that sets stoploop to true, and if you remember from the events earlyer, if stoploop is true then the loop ends

and variable "shadowZ" becomes the distance between the character and the floor on the Z axis, and the shadow is set to the right position where isometricangle is 0.5.

My issue with this code is how hard it is to stop a loop Ashley, it's impossible to put a function there that just stops the loop, and if the loop isn'T stopped, then the shadow looks for floors below the current one.

I though about using a variable to determine if that specific instance of the player has detected a floor with it's shadow, but that means that every player that has stopped looking for floors still have to run events to check if they have found a floor if the for each is removed, which is a lot of wasted CPU time when there are a LOT of players