Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Normal maps are faster than heightmaps because heightmaps have to first be converted in to a normal map. So if you can, use a normal map.

  • There are built in functions for handling angle comparisons. Don't use the ordinary compare less than/greater than. They won't take in to account the 0 degrees/360 degrees crossover point, nor will it know that 410 degrees is wrapped around and becomes 50 degrees.

  • A color replacer is easy to write in a pixel shader, but we don't have a colour parameter for shaders yet.

    An expression to get the colour of a pixel on a sprite's texture would probably not be a good idea. That information is stored on the GPU, and events run on the CPU. It would be extremely slow if you requested that information.

  • Strings are also converted to values where necessary. For example, you can set an object's X co-ordinate to "500", and it works the same as passing the number 500.

  • Profiling the 'set displacement at' actions probably isn't worthwhile: it's irrelevant if you only set the distort map once, and even if you update it every tick, the extra vertices sent to the GPU are probably a bigger overhead.

    Since there can be a lot of distort map points, using a loop is probably the most convenient, from the events.

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  • 'Play music' can play MP3s natively without any other codecs installed. I think this is an issue with the codec. Besides, why on earth is it necessary for the codec to put in a task bar icon when playing an MP3?? Caching doesn't affect the 'Play Music' action either, so I'm not sure why that's relevant.

  • Use the timeline object to schedule a series of events?

  • I don't think mesh distortion would work well for a larger circle. You'd need too many vertices for it to be efficient (remember 4 vertices is equivalent to 1 sprite). Textures are the way to go.

  • As I said, there's no better, or less wasteful, way. If you're creating <100 of these objects, I doubt you'll ever notice an FPS difference.

  • You have to use textured sprites for circles anyway. DirectX doesn't provide any better way to draw circles other than putting one on a texture and drawing that, which is exactly what Sprite does. If you draw a fairly big, white circle (I wouldn't go bigger than 512x512 to save VRAM), you can colour it with the filter, and set the width/height to change its size. It'll still look nice.

    You can use Box for a rectangle/square too!

  • I'm sure the worst that happen would be Microsoft asking you to purchase the full version. I don't think they'd ask us developers to do that unless we were selling Construct, and I don't think they'd ask any indie developers selling Construct-made stuff to do that either, because they're not using Visual Studio

  • It helps if you just quickly test drive new builds with your .caps even if you don't intend to use that build, because it helps us find and fix things which have been broken quickly, instead of wondering which change over a couple of builds was the culprit.

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  • Bugs aren't closed unless either a developer fixes the report, or they are re-tested at a later date and found to be working now. Us developers go through the full list regularly (including the oldest ones) and review all of them, and a bug won't be closed unless it can be proven fixed. I won't close an old bug just because it's old, it still needs to be fixed. Also, I'm sure nearly all of them are bugs, since feature requests should not be on the bug tracker and I immediately close any reports which are not bugs (and I don't think I've seen many on there).

    I don't think it's a mess. It's a relevant list of all the problems currently in Construct. It's miles better than having reports strewn around a forum being forgotten about.

  • That's totally awesome. Good stuff, showed off most of Construct's graphical capabilities