Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Bleh, I'll try and sort out 3D box and re-upload it... 'Template' shouldnt even be there, left it by accident

  • Download 0.97.5 now

    A fairly small update - a lot of us have been busy. I spent a while trying to get some multi-monitor support as well, but I just couldn't get it working...

    Directsound is deprecated in this build and will be replaced as soon as possible with the XAudio2 plugin, since Directsound is not properly supported on Vista. You will have to recode all your audio events for the new plugin. Inserting Directsound or opening an existing .cap with Directsound will prompt a warning.

    Full changelog:

    General

    • [ADD] 'Is group enabled' system condition
    • [FIX] Crash closing projects
    • [FIX] 'Get object count' system expression inserted the expression "ObjectCount" which was invalid. The correct expression is "TotalObjects"; this has now been corrected.
    • [FIX] '&' can now be used in comments
    • [CHANGE] Layer parameters in system ACEs re-titled to "Layer name or number" to clarify that you can refer to layers by their names as well as numbers.

    Plugins

    • [FIX] 3D Box issue
    • [FIX] Crash setting mesh distortion on Sprites
    • [CHANGE] Sprite mesh distortion 'set displacement at': opacity is a value 0-100 like the rest of Construct; was previously 0-1, multiply your current value by 100 to correct your opacity values
    • [CHANGE] Sprite mesh distortion 'set displacement at': x, y, u and v displacement were using texture coordinates, which was not a useful way to use mesh distortion. These have now changed to take a value in pixels. Old applications using mesh distort need to multiply these values by the object width for X and the object height for Y in order to restore the same functionality as before.

    Runtime

    • [ADD] Debugger: warning when referencing nonexistant layers or event groups in system ACEs. Should pick up any errors caused by typos.
    • [FIX] Crash with incomplete containers in layout editor and one of the missing objects had a behavior
    • [FIX] ScrollXLeft, ScrollXRight, ScrollYTop, ScrollYBottom gave wrong values when passed a layer parameter
    • [FIX] Debugger: warnings sent on start of layout are now shown correctly
    • [FIX] Debugger: window moves to upper left of screen instead of sitting on top of the runtime window
    • [FIX] Behaviors + mouse & keyboard object input no longer responds when window has not got focus
    • [FIX] Crash using load/quickload when the save was on a different layout

  • - Alot of my variables go into an unnecessary amount of floating point digits (i only really need it to 2 decimal places or maybe even 1) Is there a way to set variables to have a maximum amount of DPs?

    This will have no impact on performance at all. The floats are always calculated to the same precision, but to display fewer decimal places, use the FormatDecimal system expression.

    [quote:1gux5b5x]- Alot of For eachs.. In some events i have for each object "Ship" for each object "turret" in the same condition. I found this is the only way for it to work... Does this sound inefficient?

    Yes - nested loops can be very CPU intensive. If you have 600 Ships and 600 Turrets and you do:

    + For Each Ship

    + For Each Turret

    -> Actions

    You are requiring that the actions are run 600 x 600 times, which is 360,000 times (over a third of a million). Repeat this a few times and you're asking the CPU to run millions of iterations!

    Only do loops like that if it is absolutely necessary. What are you doing that requires that code? Often, there are much more efficient solutions.

    [quote:1gux5b5x]- How do you use the profiler? Could that help me?

    The profiler object can be used to time regions of events. All you need to do is call the Begin action, run some events, call End, then the Get Seconds expression returns the number of seconds spent on that code.

  • No. Do not use Directsound - it's deprecated. It will be removed within 2 builds.

  • i think there should be a "zoom" effect, that just zooms whats behind based on its colours(black=none,white=max) it instead of what the magnify effect does,in which it zooms as if the zoom area were a bulbuos lens, which looks a tad strange

    Magnify does work like that - you only get a bulbous lens if you use a circle gradient texture with the effect. If you use the effect on a sprite with a solid white colour, it will just zoom in that area.

  • There is practically no need to spread values in Construct. The 'For Each' system condition makes it redundant. However, if one of your alternative methods is crashing, you should report it as a bug so it can be fixed and you can use the correct method. You should report bugs instead of trying to work around them!

    You could simulate a spread value by using a For Each - but that kind of defeats the point.

  • It's alright, the last build introduced support for space-time continuum recursions.

  • I found Construct because it was on a CD in PC Plus magazine, had a little note saying "Free DVD Game Making, 7 of the best full products for inspired game creation" on the cover.

    Really? Wow, I wish they'd put a recent build up, heh.

  • I tried Lens with my method and the entire area of the sprite becomes a lens instead of just the white parts.

    Lens is used to both magnify and zoom out regions of the background. 50% grey corresponds to no effect, white is magnify, and black is zoom out (or possibly the other way round...)

    Generally, Magnify is more useful.

  • It was a bug. Fixed next build!

  • We will develop a special program for translating plugins. It'll allow translators to translate the ACE lists of a plugin.

  • I don't mind if anyone mentions Construct now or not. Your call, go for it now or wait till 1.0, I don't feel I'm in a position to control what, where and when people talk about Construct. I don't think newbies are a bad thing; some of them will eventually become adept and useful contributors to the community.

  • ...what kind of advertising can we expect?

    I don't know, heh. I have a few plans to get ourselves known, but step 1 is to reach 1.0! Just existing as a project and keeping it active brings in visitors, our download rate has been steadily increasing in the long-term, which I presume is from getting better known across the web, google ranking etc.

    [quote:zioxg2ny]give us permission to promote Construct on other sites

    You already can if you want! Who said I put limits on what anyone says about Construct??

    [quote:zioxg2ny]you're not planning on spending money on ads, are you?

    No - probably not, and if we did the money would come from donations, but I don't think that's a good use of donated money. For example, a few months ago we upgraded to a new version of the Prof-UIS library, which brought a lot of IDE bug fixes and new features like theming. That wasn't free - but was paid for entirely by donations.

    [quote:zioxg2ny]In any case it should be a good time for the gamemaking community.

    Definitely. It will be exciting to reach that point in the Construct project

  • 'ELSE' in a subevent might be handy here, something along the lines of...

    + On 'Enter' pressed

    ----+ Value = 1

    ----> Set Value to 0 (and do other stuff)

    ----+ ELSE

    ----> Set Value to 1 (and do other stuff)

    This way is completely contained inside the event, and won't suffer the fall-through behavior.

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  • There is a new Plugins module on the CVS. The plan is to gradually open-source all our plugins by placing them in this module. New plugins, including XAudio2, will be developed on this module as well, and the preliminary (but not yet useful) code for XAudio2 is now on there if you're feeling curious.

    This will provide plugin developers with an excellent resource for example code, all kept up to date with new releases. Hopefully in future it will cover a broad range of plugins. Additionally, our plugins are currently managed by different code management software which isn't as ideal as CVS, so it makes sense to have all the code hosted in the same place.

    Being an open-source project, the open-sourcing of our plugins is long overdue. We haven't open-sourced existing plugins because many of them have been in development for one or two years, dating back to very early (and frankly ugly) versions of the SDK. It would be counterproductive to share messy code & projects (even if they work smoothly) because ideally other developers should not be writing their plugins like that! Also, it has taken longer since the SDK was known to be changing. However, the SDK has been stable for some time now so can be assumed safe to develop with, with no breaking changes planned. Over time, we plan to convert our plugins to the latest SDK version, and put them up on the Plugins CVS module.