Ashley's Forum Posts

  • You can use C/C++ in the plugin SDK for Construct - that's what all plugins and behaviors (like Sprite) are already written in. Does that help?

  • I think generally this forum is a welcoming and productive community - I try hard to keep it that way and prevent it becoming your typical internet furnace of flaming, while also allowing people to be liberal in what they say. It's a difficult (even contradictory) balancing act, but I won't stop trying, I'm sure it's possible. Most other forums I know either let the flamewars rage (even with admins joining in!) or simply shrug and delete anything borderline, and I don't like those extremes.

    Also I don't buy for a second any of this "he started it" rubbish. If someone is rude to you in real life, the best way to deal with it is keep cool. Think what a third party impartial observer sees - if they see two people shouting each other down, they don't care for either person. If one is getting angry and rude and the other is politely and cooly trying to sort things out, you're obviously going to side with the calm one. It works in real life, and it works on a forum too. I don't see why so many people don't get that and still try to fight fire with fire.

  • You mean you want an edittime plugin to set up a Win32 window message pump?

  • AppPath includes a trailing backslash, eg. C:\Games\MyGameSo that should strictly speaking be: AppPath & "Music\Gears.mp3"

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  • I respectfully disagree with your view there. You can clearly see where I was attacked

    I respectfully also disagree, since this sounds like "he did it" to my ears. You could've dealt with it better. But Quazi could also have worded his post better, hence I asked both of you to calm things down. All I'm trying to do is run a forum where threads don't get bogged down in to flamewars, it's too common on the internet.

    [quote:17m6bekc]I posted some ideas, and I think anyone would agree that they have been met with some very fierce (and somewhat puzzling in its ferocity) opposition, but I think a lot of it was due to misunderstanding

    I speak only for myself, but I welcome ideas. I hear a lot of ideas on these forums which is great. But I haven't got anywhere near enough time to even start a lot of these ideas. My way of filtering is to argue against ideas I don't think are viable (and I sit at a feasibility/hours of my time point of view, as I'm sure you gathered!). The best ideas will stand up to skepticism provided they have a well reasoned arguer behind them. That's my view anyway, things tend to get a bit more chaotic with everyone throwing in their two cents

    Anyways I hope you're not discouraged from posting other ideas, I certainly hadn't even thought of sports games at all before your post, so that was an interesting angle to hear. Thanks for the post

  • I disagree. There is no disadvantages of being able to export source code only advantages. I understand it may not be human readable, but even so saying the code as an export would not be useful or have any advantage is a bit extreme and over the top. Code at its very core is better then events, yes I understand events work really really REALLY well in construct, but if the program has a bug or they wish to expand on it with extreme custom code and actions that they could not do within the editor then it would be best to be able to see that code.

    I know it will never happen because of how advanced and great the event system is but saying exporting code would not have any advantage is not true in any part of the context. Not trying to call you on anything but facts are facts.

    I know the event system can do 99% of what anyone would possibly want with python possibly picking up the slack, but exporting code would be the ultimate in debugging and advanced mechanics.

    So what are these advantages? From what I can gather from your post, you state code is better than events even when not human readable. Why is that? Isn't it better to write custom code in plugins which Construct already supports? I'm not saying events are always superior to code - they're not - but the options are put your code in a plugin, or ponder what to do with tens of thousands of lines of unreadable code. This isn't about code vs. events, it's about Construct generating tonnes of useless source vs. giving you the finished thing. That's not a feature, it's a waste of time to develop, from my point of view!

    Don't think this is a personal attack or anything, it's just that this idea about Construct generating source code comes up from time to time. I can't really see any point to it at all, so I'm trying to establish what people think it will enable. Such as:

    he wants to create the source code itself ... so he can take it over to another program, like you would a jpeg or a text file.

    Remember this is a big ball of mud code which doesn't make sense. What are you actually going to then do in another program with this unintuitive source code? I'm yet to hear any convincing real-world scenarios yet.

  • "export" the source code back out

    What do you mean by importing source code to XNA then exporting it out again? That doesn't make any sense. Source code is source code.

    As for exporting to source code, I really don't see the point. You would never be able to modify the source code to make changes. The insides of the event engine are very complex, and because there are no languages that support event style picking as language features, the generated sourcecode would not be human readable, it'd just be a massive mess, like a really complicated function copied and pasted a thousand times. And what kind of changes would you make? What would the advantages be? There are no advantages to exporting source code. Only disadvantages.

  • Quazi and MaxMan777, neither of you are coming across as civil and polite in this thread, and I will simply lock the thread if anyone continues to be in the slightest bit bitchy. I don't know why it's so hard to be understanding and diplomatic on the internet, but you've come to the wrong forum if you want to argue.

    There are so many nuances to making an American Football game work properly it's just not done by single programmers, and even large teams have routinely failed

    MaxMan777, I am not getting your point. Do you want me (or Davo, the only other active developer) to go to all this effort that defeats large teams and is fraught with nuances and time consuming coding? And for what, a thousand identical football games with superficial differences?

    We who make Construct do it in our spare time, unpaid, as volunteers. Our goal is not to make pre-made but moddable games - there are already loads of tools out there for that, and a lot of them seem to suck. Our goal is to provide, in Construct, a useful set of tools and high-level primitives (eg. Sprites) that can be used easily to make original games. I don't see your idea fitting in with that - but other developers can always extend Construct as they like with plugins and behaviors. I think that's your best option if you want to take this idea to Construct.

  • What advantage does exporting source code rather than built EXEs have? What does that have to do with this thread?

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  • Interesting ideas, just to add my comments...

    1. A Web-style creation system with simple-to-program randomization ... randomly display characters, or numbers ... all much simpler than it is now

    I don't understand your point about randomness. The random() expression gives you a random number. You can use that to jump to random layouts, display random numbers, make random events happen, etc. What are you asking for to be different here?

    [quote:23llzzmp]2. Sports-friendly creation algorithms ... engines built to accommodate shooters and platformers

    Nothing about Construct is specifically tailored to specific games - it's probably the built in behaviors that gave you this impression. If you like, you could develop (or hire someone to develop) sport-friendly behaviors via the C++ behavior SDK. Construct itself is aimed at creating any kind of 2D game, so features are necessarily generalised so they can be applied to as many kinds of game as possible.

    [quote:23llzzmp]3. A Template system

    You can select File - new template/example since we planned a system just like this, but there aren't many that ship with Construct. I'm open to community submissions for the templates dialog.

  • Because we haven't written full support for translations yet and there's no UI to change language - as soon as someone fixes that in the source code, translations will be more useful.

  • Another of my just-curious polls. I was wondering how many of you use the python scripts in the event sheet editor at all. I get the feeling not many people use it, but it'd be useful to know if more/fewer than I expect are using it at the moment.

    Python was always meant to be an addition to events, not a replacement, so that highly algorithmic or logical parts can be scripted. I'm not sure how successful the current Python implementation is at doing that right now, or if anyone bothers to use it at all! It's definitely an interesting idea that could be taken further, so this poll is just to see where things are right now. Feel free to add your comments below.