Ashley's Forum Posts

  • As has been mentioned on the forum before, it recently came up that Vista has disabled much of the Directsound implementation, which means the Directsound object in Construct currently may not work on Vista (I don't have Vista to check right now). It would be useful if someone could tell me what does and doesn't work in Directsound on Vista at the moment.

    I'm planning a new audio plugin, using the newer XAudio2 API (which is still part of DirectX), which is supported by Vista (and for the forseeable future, hopefully!!). It's also a much more sophisticated API than Directsound, so I may be able to add better features anyway (arbitrary mixing, channel groups, optimised effects and filters, amplification, etc). I'll start work on it soon, but complete plugins take a bit of time to write, so it may be a while before it appears in a build anyway.

  • 1. How to recognize that PARAM_OBJECT-ed param was a Binary Object (and not for example Sprite Object).

    Generally I think you'd have to put a magic number in the target object's CRunObject, and check that that value is expected. I think I can come up with a better system in future though, using the plugin name (which isn't currently available at runtime).

    [quote:31gzq68k]2. Is there any reflection mechanysm allowing to access given CRunObject*'s Fields/Properties/Methods?

    As you mention, GetData and CallFunction can be implemented to return data like the binary object's buffer - however, the Binary object doesn't have any such implementation yet, I don't think. If you ask Rich for the source to it, I'm sure he can send it to you. Also, if you have the Binary object's CRunObject definition (copy and paste its ExtObject from Main.h and rename it to BinaryObject so it doesn't conflict with your object), you can then cast a CRunObject to a BinaryObject, and directly access its member variables.

  • It definitely shouldn't crash. But the important thing with a Physics engine is due to the limited precision of computers, and shortcuts taken for speed, there are boundaries on reasonable use and stability. If you use the physics engine in a manner which is realistic, it should be stable, but if you try colliding something with the mass of a planet in to something with the mass of a speck of dust, you can't expect a realistic result. Collapsing may be because you've hit some limit of the Box2D engine - it's probably not designed for such complex simulations.

  • The Directsound object actually uses Directshow for the 'play music' action - and as far as I know Vista still has good Directshow support. Does it work if you use 'play music from file'? It might be a bug to do with resources.

  • Blur horizontal and blur vertical is, I think, exactly the same amount of pixel shader processing - the only difference is you need an intermediate step (a copy) when using two shaders instead of one. With one effect you don't need an extra copy, so it may be a little faster. Modern graphics cards can do simple copies in negligable time, however, so if it is much of an overhead today, in future it won't be.

  • One potential problem is you'll still need the VC2005 redist installed and the DirectX 9 updates in order to launch the IDE. If the computer you're running on via USB doesn't have either, you still need the full blown install. In theory we can get rid of the VC2005 redist, but you'd still have to go installing things without an up-to-date DirectX 9.

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  • For instance, I know that MMF extensions had unique identifiers so that the main program could verify that you had the correct extensions required to view the project file, and I figure Construct has something similar, but I haven't found it yet.

    The plugin SDK has no such identifier; Construct uses the plugin filename as the identifier.

  • Uploading .caps is a great idea, I'll get that done as soon as my ISP can provide a semblance of service. Also you're right, the lightning one is corrupt, will fix as well.

  • ISP decided to cut off internet access shortly after installing it. They move in mysterious ways! Back soon.

  • Oops, fixed that, thanks!

  • Try them out, let me know if any problems or issues. If you have any more suggestions for demos, post them here - it would be cool if we had some small, simple, fully playable games as demos as well, so if anyone's up for making one, I would happily put it up.

  • We need everyone's help, but we need to configure the wiki to add a new permissions level. We should have it done soon, sorry.

  • Mipmapped images are pre-rendered with high quality, not just linearly interpolated. I guess you don't want that for point sampling though.

  • The current status on Python is that it seems to be broken in the latest builds - I think that if you install yourself a version of Python different to the one the IDE has implemented, Python can't find the right files, or something like that. We'll be looking in to it and fixing it before 1.0.

  • Bah, I prefer the runtime motion blur! To me that looks nothing like motion blur, because the main object graphic is still perfectly crisp. It's just a smudgy trail behind it.