Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Updates can be posted at any time during the month

    Basically I was waiting to release 0.99 before posting a May update, because there's nothing new to say about our immediate plans until that's released. Hopefully, 0.99 and the May update will be posted by the end of May. If it's any consolation, 2 and a bit months is the longest we've ever gone between updates!

  • The next build features a line plugin. Why not draw a triangle in a sprite though? Even if there was support for drawing individual textured triangle fragments, wouldn't it be too complicated and low-level to be useful? Mesh distortion in sprites takes advantage of custom triangle drawing, and is a built in (relatively) easy to use feature. I wouldn't wanna do all that by hand in events.

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  • I think it works best for antialiased font rendering mode, you just add the shader to the text object and it improves it a lot. All the shader does is affect the alpha channel like so:

    a = (a - 0.4) / 0.6;

    Basically it expands the alpha range 0.4-1.0 to fill the entire alpha range 0.0-1.0. It's as if the text is rendered with the range of alphas being wrong, squashed too far towards opaque.

  • Cool effect

  • It's just an ordinary shader, so here you go, give it a shot. It's not perfect, but it fixes the horrible blocky look.

  • I'd disagree and say you should never publish a game with fixed framerate mode, but people can and do ignore me on that one

  • Looks like exporting a game to the Marketplace requires an "XNA Creator's Club Premium" membership.

    And even before that, there would be about 30,000 lines of runtime code to convert to C#, not including porting of plugins. First the C++ code has to be finished anyway, and then maintaining duplicate codebases also slows down development time. Unless we can get an official XBox dev kit to compile native XBox code, which I believe costs around �10,000, and is probably wrapped up in politics and official distributors, not generally for lying around in someone's bedroom.

  • Wow, looks beautiful, would love to see a video! And yes, it's always a good idea to have effects baked-in to the sprite textures rather than use shaders wherever possible - it runs much faster, and lowers the system requirements too.

    Since DirectX sucks at drawing text, the next build has a 'smart text' shader which helps a bit, but if the text never changes, you could just photoshop the text in to a sprite texture (then you can have other text effects and processing too). 0.99's VRAM controls should make the memory overhead negligable.

  • You don't need to change your monitor's refresh rate to test different framerates - change the framerate to 'Fixed' at 10fps in application properties, or set it uo 'unlimited' (which should reach a few hundred frames per second at least), and the difference will become obvious.

    The problem is framerate dependent code (like set X to .X + 1) doesn't have a fixed speed (it depends on the framerate), and TimeDelta code does have a fixed speed. So how can you possibly convert between them? TimeDelta always means one speed, and without TimeDelta it could be any speed, depending on your framerate. So to convert to or from framerate-dependent, you have to pick a framerate as your reference, and 60fps is a common one so a good choice.

    My advice, though, is to completely ditch framerate-dependent code. Forget it. Just always use TimeDelta, and get everything moving at the right speed using that. Don't bother converting between them, it's totally unecessary if you start making your game right off the bat with TimeDelta. Also, don't forget the built in behaviors are already framerate-independent, so you don't need to worry about them.

    I hope that's clear, it can be a tricky area to explain! By the way, you should avoid the 'Every X ticks' event in games, because as the name suggests, it runs depending on the framerate (every 10 ticks is once a second at 10fps, but ten times a second at 100fps!). You always want to use 'real world' times, so use 'every X milliseconds'. TimeDelta is another way of using real world times, so with the two, your game should run at the same speed everywhere!

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  • Yeah, we're planning something to pack in the required DLLs soon, maybe not 0.99 though.

  • DirectX applications in fullscreen can't display window controls, so you'll have to make your own out of sprites etc. I'm afraid.

  • What's wrong with using layer effects?

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  • Construct does not support vertex shaders, so I don't know how this can be converted. Where did you find the FX file?