Object and behavior requests

After university I'll have copious free time to work on all my projects and do some coding work. Use this thread to post plugin and behavior requests, however whacky.

Personal requests

• Online plugin, for easy game making

• An equivalent of the MMF's Text Blitter object
• Particle object, for creating visual particle effects

Online Multiplayer Object - preferably something that automatically controls object positions so you dont have to manually assign packets for every single freaking thing like in the MOO objects for TGF/MMF.

Minimap Object - for making minimaps easily... would be nice if they had a "scale" feature as well so you could toggle the area around the tracked object easily.

Inventory Control Object - Inventory control has always been a struggle in making any kind of RPG game, or any game really if you can carry more than 2 things at a time... Some kind of inventory with visual array would be really nice. This is the one thing that always annoyed me the most when making RPGs, and is usually why I never committed myself to sticking with an RPG style game... Making inventory screens that work well always sucks.

Dynamic Path Movement - OK so path movement sucks becuase it just follows a single path... but how about dynamic path movement? Draw your path(s), with intersections and all... and the object follwing the path will randomly choose which part of the path to take! This would be awesome for example say, enemies that could go along several corridors in a top down shooter game, but you want an element of random choices instead of knowing exactly where the enemy will go each time... or cars being able to pick which road they want to drive on. Turn here or go straight?

Just some ideas I have at the moment... will add more as I think of them.

~Sol

Minimap Object - for making minimaps easily... would be nice if they had a "scale" feature as well so you could toggle the area around the tracked object easily.

There already is one

Inventory Control Object - Inventory control has always been a struggle in making any kind of RPG game, or any game really if you can carry more than 2 things at a time... Some kind of inventory with visual array would be really nice. This is the one thing that always annoyed me the most when making RPGs, and is usually why I never committed myself to sticking with an RPG style game... Making inventory screens that work well always sucks.

This is a really good idea.. could go as far as to make it fully automated, so you can 'add' an object to the inventory and it'd take care of drawing it, doing drag and drop, etc.

Suggestion : File Object

To use this plugin, simply drag it on the layout.

EVENTS =

File.LoadText = "c:\text.txt"

File.SaveText = "c:\text.txt"

File.LoadCache* = "c:\file.exe"

File.ClearCache**

File.Cut = "c:\directory\"

File.Copy = "c:\directory\"

File.Delete

--- --- ---

*Loads a file into cache

**Clears the cache

--- --- ---

The plugin works this way :

if you need to load a text, assign it to a variable

Global('text') = File.LoadText("c:\text.txt")

if you need to paste/cut/copy, do like this

File.LoadCache("c:\file.exe")

File.Copy = "c:\directory\"

File.ClearCache

Online Multiplayer Plugin Only, unlike the one above I'd really like to control all packets and not have automatic sending. That way, I can control all of the behaviors myself and say I wanted to make a large-scale server I could have the packets sent out to different parts, if you know what i mean, but that doesn't matter as much as just putting in all the packets.

Encryption Plugin For encrypting messages, it would be really nice to have a really good method of encryption, so maybe blowfish?

DirectInput So this one could be really cool.. If we could use DirectInput to use controls on a game, then people who have controls could use them in game. (Ex. A rock band drumset being used in a game, like a remake of a Rockband sort of thing.)

Keypress simulator Could be interesting for simulating keypresses, such as doing keyboard macros on the computer. It would work really well for making some sort of multitask program or something.

There's a minimap object already? How the hell did I miss that?

Anyway... Maybe for an online object, perhaps it can be mode switched between automatic and manual?? I just hate having to add the same crap for EVERY object, like X,Y position, direction, speed, etc etc... stuff that could easily be controlled automatically seeing as it's virtually a given that it is added for anything that moves. I guess having it controlled manually as well could leave more scope for certain specific event styles, or allow customisation for laggy internet connections. Either way, I'll be happy, even if I DO have to add all the boring samey crap into the event sheets for the object controls and tracking.

Yeah im really into power over ease of use for the online plugin. Aim it at serious projects

Yeah im really into power over ease of use for the online plugin. Aim it at serious projects

Why not have both? I mean... if you know an object needs to track position and direction, how much better would it be to have an option for "auto track object"?? The rest of the stuff is fine, I just hate having to do the exact same events for 300 objects.

I think both are important; tracking objects through C++ in the plugin would be marginally quicker than eventing it yourself with a parsing system, also.

An easy to use yet highly powerful online object is definitely what Construct needs. I wonder if mK will ever come back

I think both are important; tracking objects through C++ in the plugin would be marginally quicker than eventing it yourself with a parsing system, also.

An easy to use yet highly powerful online object is definitely what Construct needs. I wonder if mK will ever come back

I concur!

Also, another thing I would like to see is a "save game" object that is similar to the TGF/MMF plugin "INI object"... but has built in encryption so it's not just a standard text file. Even if it just uses something simple like binary encryption it will be enough to stop someone from easily cheating by editing the file in notepad

This would also be nice to include with the online object (should one be made) so there can be server-side saves to stop cheating all together. It would also make it more like a "World of Warcraft" type system where your "character" or other information is never on your computer. this would be ideal for games where there is a career scoring system, character development, ranking system, or similar things.

The current save layout to file action in system serializes the layout, as opposed to saving it as ini or text. It'd be very difficult to effectively edit it with notepad (though hardcore gamers could check our source for the correct serialization and reverse engineer it.)

An encryption plugin is necessary for true protection, something like Blowfish.

Yeah, there's saving built in to the system object... you'd have to reverse engineer each plugin too, so it's hard work, and made even more difficult if you encrypt the file!

Soulja, I'm not sure how your making your online games, but if you plan it well it can be really efficient anyway. For example, obviously all the play is on one frame (i suppose with global event sheets this could be different in Construct), I have all my "players" as one object. You then only really need to apply the tracking to one object. Theres no need for you to need to track loads of objects. Its tempting to open source(ify) an old version of Eden to show how i did it

Also, yes, player info should NEVER be held at clientside. It then really comes down to how secure your server is. If it was "unhackable" you could just store all player info in an unencrypted ini file and it wouldn't really matter.

I'm really just ranting, but i think what im trying to say is that the fundementals of online game creation are far more important than how well we can encrypt - It all comes down to planning and a clever system.

Hope i didn't sound rude or anything! Im basically just thinking out loud

lots of stuff

That acctually worked? Every time I tried to apply an "object type" the events would never seem to work quite right in controlling everything... I haven't played with it in Construct yet, but I am assuming "containers" work the same way so you can apply the same behaviour to all objects in a container?

And yes, if it is server side saves then it doesn't have to be encrypted, in fact it would be better if it wasn't in case some admin-editing needs to happen

And no, you didn't sound rude at all.... it's always good to get a proper view on what everyone is getting at, otherwise you go around in circles. If you could apply objcet tracking to say "every player object" and "every bullet object" etc then it wouldn't be so bad!