skymen's Forum Posts

  • Hi bro, I found an easy bug.I referenced it first, and then set the variable. Although this may be my problem, it's better to avoid this situation.

    Hi, yeah this is a limitation you can only set a variable once. It's more like a named wire teleport than a proper variable.

    If you need to change the value of a variable, use other variables, or compute the variable in a way that gives it its final value directly.

    Also, I was thinking of removing the localisation system. It's a bit cumbersome and properly supporting localisation would require reworking a lot of the UI and none of the docs are localised.

    In the current state, do you find the chinese localisation worth keeping or not? I dont speak chinese so I genuinely can't tell if its any good.

  • Haha thanks, but no the tool is not made in Construct, I built it in vanilla Javascript

  • Subscribe to Construct videos now

    I made this video explaining how to use the new SDF nodes. I'm really enjoying making these shorts so far. I'll try to keep going and explain small parts of the tool in bite sized chunks.

    I'll eventually make bigger non shorts formats, but these are really easy to make.

  • I've already started working on them.

    As I make more examples and little tutorials, I add new features that I need in the process.

    I added a bunch of SDF nodes (for shapes) and more UV transform nodes, and I ended up remaking the kaleidoscope example in the process.

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    I also added preview scripts that allows creating interaction in the preview window. I used it in the first short to preview the light position moving around.

  • Subscribe to Construct videos now

    Tried making a short breaking down how I made the 3D holographic card effect.

    I might make more in the future :)

  • Did some more work on the shader graph to fix a bunch of issues and improve the UX

    I have organised the remaining work under a few major updates:

    The Changelog Update
    An update focused on implementing proper versioning on the editor and the shader files. This will allow me to make changes to the data structures used while keeping them backwards compatible, and it will allow me to notify users of the changes that I push
    The Big Preview Update
    An update focused on the preview window to fix a few of its shortcomings and add many more features
    Sub Graphs And Routines
    An update focused on adding the sub graph feature. I want to try and design it so Sub Graphs can also be reused as routines, so I can implement functions, loops and proper if else statements

    Right now I'm really happy with the tool and I will take my time adding these features because they represent a lot of work and I don't think they are vital for the time being.

    I'm curious to hear what kind of features you guys would see and which one you feel the tool is most lacking.

  • Thanks :)

    This is much appreciated.

    You're right, I'll add a link to the Open Collective in the app

  • Made this holographic card shader using the shader graph.

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    I also went ahead and fixed a few of the bugs that were reported on github and most importantly fixed 2 issues that were causing the tool to lag a lot.

    It's now a lot smoother, even with hundreds of nodes in the file.

    Addons exported should now have the language file exported correctly :)

    If you find any issue or want to make a request, please make sure to create a new issue on the github repo, and I will try to fix them as soon as I can.

  • Yes :)

    You can donate on the Open Collective page:

    opencollective.com/construct-community/projects/shader-graph

    Feel free to request examples and I'll try to make more.

  • For now the best thing I could do was provide a bunch of examples, and add more specific explanations to the nodes I deemed most confusing.

    Giving a full manual page for all 187 nodes by hand would be too long so I decided to give a reference and only explain the ones I would get complaints about.

    I want to make a video going over the tool and all of its nodes at some point, but for now the best way to learn is to just mess around with it. Of course, some shader knowledge is required, but there are many lessons made for the Unity, Unreal or Blender shader/material graphs that should give you learnings that transfer over quite well to this tool.

    My hope is to catch the eye of more and more people and to eventually work with people in the community to make the tool more accessible as I can't do all of it on my own :)

  • If you are not aware I recently developed a shader graph tool for Construct 3.

    This makes it very accessible for anyone from artists to experimented shader devs to create their own effects for Construct 3.

    The tool is available as a web app here:

    skymen.github.io/construct-shader-graph

    It comes with:

    • A dozen examples
    • 187 built in nodes
    • A fully featured manual
    • An advanced preview system
    • Support for all shader languages
    • Custom nodes
    • Comments and auto node arranging
    • Exported code is commented for easy debugging
    • Full source code available for free

    I am extremely proud of this tool. It has already been used by a few folks to create shaders and I can't wait to see more people use this for custom shader creation.

  • After almost exactly a year of development, I can finally announce Construct Addon Wizard 1.0

    This consists of an addon development framework coupled with a VSCode extension. The framework is really solid and was used to develop many of my addons this past year.

    For people who were already aware of this framework, this release finally brings the wizards system to the VS Code extension. Wizards are forms that the VS Code extension can create to help automate some of the work of creating the addon.

    For now the wizards are used for creating a new addon and publishing a new release, but they could be used for more in the future.

    The framework was also updated with many fixes and new features such as:

    • AI Agents support out of the box with an AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files
    • Auto publishing on Itch.io and the Construct Addon Exchange
    • Support for every feature in the SDK (file dependencies, domside, C++ wrapper extensions, Cordova, etc)
    • Auto translation in as many languages as you want
    • Automatic support for the scripting interface for actions, conditions, triggers and expressions
    • Automatic generation of the documentation and the github readme
    • Changelog system that is also used when automatically publishing the addon

    Typescript definition files support is also on the way.

    The Construct Addon Wizard family has also recently expanded to include the CAW Shader Graph and the CAW Theme Creator.

    LINKS

    Construct Addon Wizard

    Scaffold repo: github.com/ConstructFund/construct-addon-wizard-scaffold

    Extension source code: github.com/ConstructFund/construct-addon-wizard

    VSCode Marketplace: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items

    OpenVSX Marketplace: open-vsx.org/extension/skymen/caw

    CAW Shader Graph

    Tool: skymen.github.io/construct-shader-graph

    Source code: github.com/skymen/construct-shader-graph

    CAW Theme Creator

    Addon: construct.net/en/make-games/addons/1533/caw-theme-creator

    Source: github.com/skymen/caw-theme-creator

    (While the Theme Creator is fully functional, it has been made private after a request from Ashley as we figure out how to better handle in-editor tools, the links are valid and will be available as soon as it is figured out)

    There is still some work left to do, and many things could be made even easier, but I believe that these frameworks are now good enough to be used by the general public for all sorts of addon development.

    How to use

    In your favorite code editor (as long as it supports the Visual Studio Code Extensions system) look for the Construct Addon Wizard extension and install it.

    From that point, you will see the CAW logo appear on your sidebar with a few new actions. You can use them to create a new addon and it will automatically scaffold everything for you and initialize the github repository.

    Once you are done building your addon, hit publish and the addon gets built and sent on github where a github action will run and publish the addon for you.

    By default it only publishes to Github Releases, but you can also enable publishing on the Construct Addon Exchange and Itch.io by setting up the following secrets: 

    # for Construct Addon Exchange publishing
C3_AUTH_USER=construct_account_username
C3_AUTH_PASSWORD=construct_account_password

# for itchio publishing
BUTLER_API_KEY=itchio_butler_api_key

    You will still need to create both pages manually but once that is set up, you can just set the appropriate information in the buildconfig file and the system will take care of the rest.

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads

  • Hi, if you want to crowdfund work done around the Construct engine, may I suggest donating to the Open Collective that was designed to do just that :)?

    opencollective.com/construct-community

    This goes to open source addon and tools developers in the community that probably need the extra funding, and you can already monitor how these projects evolve and you can also vote for your favourite projects:

    construct-community-voting.dedragames.com

    (To be clear this is unrelated to Scirra, and the funds go to people in the community making things for free otherwise)

  • Yeah that's fair.

    In my version I was running it in about:blank and I used postmessage to execute any code that would have been blocked.

    Let me know when you eventually start looking into it then :)

  • Just to get back on the topic of Editor tools,

    Ashley should I spend any time doing this?

    Alternatively I can also remove all of the code that handles the new dialog UI layer (which is most of the code) and only keep the code that opens a popup if you think that is safer in the meantime

    If you want I can make a prototype and email it to you, or give you access to the private repo. The window manager addon is designed to be easily swappable in the future with any official API you might make, so if you think it's safe, I can make the window manager addon only manage popups and the message communication layer.

    If you still think it's not worth working on until you sit down and decide what to do about it, I'm also happy to leave it be.

    Of course in any case, I won't release it until you tell me it's fine.