Paster CS3

Does the official "Drawing Canvas" plugin do all the things you need?

I remember worrying about the lack of Paster and Canvas when moving from C2 to C3.

But drawing canvas works well for me, I use many of then in my project for pretty visual FX.

Does the official "Drawing Canvas" plugin do all the things you need?

I remember worrying about the lack of Paster and Canvas when moving from C2 to C3.

But drawing canvas works well for me, I use many of then in my project for pretty visual FX.

I just use 1 function mainly, paste objects (an entire family at that). Well, that and set resolution and opacity, the the former version did lack a bunch of other common construct interfaces, but never really needed them.

I remember paster abusing some functionality, which gave the mechanism I use great performance. (jump to a location on the layout where player is, paste family of objects (twice on different paster objects, for 2 players) set sizes and resolutions, and set position back to the Viewport for both objects, resulting in 2 screens from the same layout, all in 1 tick, resulting in 60 fps game play :)

I also remember the newer version from construct not having this performance.

So, if the above sounds doable with the drawing canvas, I am willing to give it a try, but I fear this is still not the case.

Ah yes I forgot just how powerful paster is!

For what you need, I think drawing canvas has some quirks that will be annoying or stop you entirely - I can't remember exactly, but I think if you change the size of the drawing canvas, it clears the drawing canvas image.

There's usually always an alternative method to achieve what you need though, I wonder how people using C3 achieve 2 player splitscreen... Hmm...

Sorry, this isn't on my radar for things I'm interested in doing currently.

If anyone else is interested in attempting this it basically amounts to taking the official canvas plugin and changing the paste function to draw immediately instead of deferring to when the frame is rendered. Likely C3's renderer is designed to setup most of it's state when the frame is rendered. Also that is likely the point where any culling occurs. Both those things mean there will be some set up that will need to be done with care to not break what the render later expects.

Overall I imagine it may be fiddly to setup, and probably has a high chance of breaking with construct updates. I'm more into one-off projects that only need to be updated for fun as of late. I'm less interested in something that requires a lot of maintenance and requires compatibility with most other construct features.

Anyways, looks like a cool project. There's probably a way to utilize a canvas to do split screen, but not having it draw immediately is inconvenient (it basically complicates it). I haven't really used it but you could use two canvases to display the second screen. Basically any given frame one of the canvases would be on screen where you can see, and one is offscreen being drawn to. The only drawback is what you see will be one frame behind, which may be ok?

Decided to test the idea:

dropbox.com/s/pkjhiiaumiebo4t/split_screen.c3p

Seems to work well, but like in C2 the tilemap won't draw tiles that are offscreen. In C2 the solution was to temporarily move the tilemap onscreen but I don't have a solution for C3. Likely particles have a similar issue.

Anyways, cheers.

Thanks Rojo

I used your example and made it work, ... in a way.

I'll try and switch it out for the project and give it a go.

Made 2 debug apks with the different mechanics.

old paster, runs smooth while testing in construct, running smooth as debug apk, touch response feels instant. 60 fps everywhere (slight dips meh)

draw canvas, runs at near twice the cpu load compared to paster in the editor, 45 / 60 fps while testing in construct.

Odly enough, as debug apk it runs smooth too, 55/60 fps. Sadly the tiny response in delay is noticeable compared to the pasted one. Not sure if it would really hinder gameplay, lets just say I'm spoiled.

Other:

paster, several of the effects, warp ripple and some others, work, no issues. Some other don't.

Also, paster does not need sorting of objects when pasting multi layers of objects. All in 1 family, 1 paste objects action and it works.

draw canvas, none of the effects I used that worked in paster, works in draw canvas, perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but things just weren't working with effects.

Pasting objects, from multiple layers, in 1 go, mixes up the sorting of which object is on top, had to run a loop from the bottom layer up to get the sorting right, atm it requires 8 past actions to get a single image with the images correctly stacked.

Pff, I think I am gonna switch to the draw canvas, especially with an eye on longevity. Not to mention all the extra and new features and less bugs ^_^