Ashley's Forum Posts

  • It's not possible. You can only show the values of parameters in the display text. Perhaps you could add a parameter which defaults to the value you want.

  • cranberrygame - I don't understand - is it possible to specify the ad size to preload? If so how? The documentation does not cover it as far as I could see. It sounds like it would be useful in case you want to preload a different size to SMART_BANNER.

  • All the images still return 403 (access denied).

  • The easiest thing to do is deprecate the expression (add the ef_deprecated flag) and add a new expression with a different name with the new parameter. This preserves backwards compatibility but forces new projects to use the new expression.

    New parameters are automatically filled with a default for conditions and actions, but it's a lot harder to do for expressions since they are parsed from text when loading the project.

  • As is normal with 'Sync object' simply use the 'Sync' action on the host only, and create/move/destroy objects on the host only, and they will automatically sync on all peers.

  • Oops, thanks for the report, should be fixed in the next build.

  • You should report this to the Bugs forum following all the guidelines, otherwise it is very difficult to help.

    Also try disabling browser addons - some buggy addons break C2 games.

  • Yep, Chrome broke all games published in 2012. We filed a bug report with them and they declined to fix it. There's more details in that thread. Long story short all that old content needs to be re-published, which affects all web content, not just our own arcade.

    Our Arcade is in need of some upgrade work and we have it planned, and largely because of this I think we will require all games to be re-submitted when we relaunch it.

  • 'On banner received' was added in r185. I thought I had a preload banner action already, looks like I missed it - added for the next build.

    cranberrygame - the preloadBannerAd() API doesn't appear to specify a size - how does it know what kind of banner to preload?

  • I don't think there ought to be built-in features for things which are already fairly easily possible. You can use sprites and avoid obvious stepping by using linear sampling mode.

  • Closing, please attach a .capx as required.

  • Not a known issue, but there is nothing we can do if you don't follow the bug report guidelines. I regularly work with projects for longer than 20 minutes and haven't seen any such issue. Please provide all the required details in the bug report template.

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  • Oh, good point, it looks like that was an oversight. Will add for the next build!

  • Shaders are more expensive than simply setting a blend mode, so I don't think a special Mode7Additive effect is going to improve anything.

    If you've made all the improvements to the Mode7 effect I suggested (including separate shaders to remove the conditional), then I think it should be about as fast as normal rendering. The bottleneck is normally the number of texture lookups (normal rendering does one, but a blur might do ~10, requiring 10 times as many texture reads), conditionals (especially if unpredictable, which can make entire groups of cores stall if one mispredict occurs), or loops. Mode7 does one lookup, then some branchless math with no loops. I think in some cases the math is done "for free", because even if it weren't there the core would have spent the same amount of time stalling waiting for the next memory read to come through.

    The only thing to worry about IMO is the fact you have two more layers which will be using their own texture. After the layer renders it then has to copy the canvas-sized texture for that layer to the screen. It's the type of thing that on mobile will hit your fillrate hard and possibly cause poor performance. However if you're targeting desktops/consoles you probably have more fillrate than you could know what to do with (especially on high end desktop graphics cards, you will probably sooner run out of CPU power trying to issue rendering commands than run out of fillrate). So fillrate is probably not a major concern there either.

    So basically I wouldn't worry about it, it's a good way to get the effect working with different blend modes. Something you could do to help reduce the fillrate: if any of the layers are empty - or even if they have content, but it is offscreen - set them invisible. A visible but empty layer using an effect still takes fillrate (just to process a screen of transparent pixels); if it's invisible, it's entirely skipped, saving any rendering cost. So then you only pay the GPU cost when it's necessary, so e.g. if there are no FX under the ships then you don't spend any time at all processing shaders or using fillrate.

    I wonder if the engine could skip layers automatically if they are empty. I might try experimenting with that in the next beta.