Ashley's Recent Forum Activity

  • Transparency in 3D is extremely complicated. To get correct 3D rendering, you have to use a depth buffer, and depth buffers assume everything is opaque.

    It should work providing everything is drawn in back-to-front order, so adjusting Z order may make a difference in some cases. But this is a fundamental limitation of 3D rendering. This kind of thing is really just the tip of the iceberg of the incredible complexity that you get in to if you want to make a real 3D engine, which I'm keen not to go in to - the design of 3D shape is aimed at basically a 2D shape with depth, or "2.5D" as some people call it.

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  • It's still possible to get seamlessly looping music by mixing the tail in to the start, which is what I assumed most people were doing. Sample-accurate playback works well for things like fast regular sounds, like in the built-in example for audio scheduling, which is what I had in mind when designing it.

    As I said it should be fine to put music tracks in the sounds folder. They are only loaded on startup if you enable "Preload sounds", so you can just turn that off, and use the other memory management features of the Audio plugin to control what's loaded and when.

  • Hierarchies should work with savegames. We've done the work to make sure relationships are preserved and I've fixed a couple of bugs relating to hierarchies and savegames in the past, so it should all be working. If it doesn't work in your case, please file an issue.

  • So can't you do it by splitting it up in to 3 tracks: intro (clean), intro (with tail), and the rest of the main track? I don't think that's a hack, that seems a pretty reasonable way to do it.

    I'm not sure if you realise, but scheduled audio does not actually usually work with audio categorised as music. These tracks are normally backed by <audio> elements, which don't support sample-accurate playback - only Web Audio buffers do, which is how audio categorised as sound is played.

    On some platforms for various reasons like compatibility we actually ignore the audio categorisation and play everything as sound anyway (i.e. via Web Audio buffers). I've never seen or heard of any particular negative consequence of doing that, so I think it's fine to do that in your case too if you need sample-accurate playback of music tracks, and audio categorised as sound can be played with unlimited overlap.

  • Again, hosting important project data in a file you AJAX request is not effective. If someone copies your entire project, they will also copy the files that are AJAX requested, and everything will still work.

    I'd advise just to use the domain lock approach described in the tutorial I linked to previously. If you use AJAX, it's entirely possible you could come up with a very complicated scheme that offers no protection against copying whatsoever.

  • The tutorial Publishing to the web has some advice under the heading "Domain lock".

    I personally wouldn't bother going much further than that, unless you're willing to enter an on-going DRM arms race.

    I wouldn't actually go for the approach of AJAX requesting a file - if you want it to work in preview, you have to configure the AJAX response to work cross-domain, and if it works for any domain, the protection is no longer effective.

  • I was wondering myself why people choose other engines and I came to the conclusion that most people choose Gamemaker because it has better performance since it exports to native code???

    Modern JavaScript engines are exceptionally fast, and we've carefully tuned our engine for performance over several years. On my development system it can manage hundreds of thousands of on-screen sprites and still hit 30 FPS. I would think it is at least strongly competitive on performance. Who knows, maybe it's even faster? It would be interesting to see actual benchmarks. But I think Construct is fast enough for the vast majority of people who use it, and of those who have performance issues, often it's hardware limitations like GPU fillrate that won't be improved by changing software. So I'm sceptical many people would choose other software for performance reasons alone.

  • Making random modifications to the runtime could easily break lots of other things. You shouldn't really do it. Please file an issue following all the guidelines so we can properly investigate and fix the real issue if necessary.

  • Why not just mix the tail in to the start of the track? That's what you'd normally do to make a looping audio track.

  • Peers connect directly to each other - the signalling server is not involved when peers are connecting to one another, it acts only as a meeting place. Peers cannot always directly connect if the network configuration is too restrictive. This is explained in more detail in the multiplayer tutorial series.

  • If you can use a tilemap, you probably should. However tilemaps are limited to same-size images in a grid. You might still want to use the technique you described (sprites with different initial frames) if you want more flexibility, such as positioning different sized objects freeform, not aligned to a grid.

    Using tilemaps is faster than using a grid of sprites to produce the same effect. But other than that, it's probably too soon to ask questions about performance - and if you want a good answer, you can measure the performance yourself.

  • In Construct, you are effectively still working in a browser on mobile (via a webview), and Cordova wraps the Android/iOS specific parts. So you either have to still code it like you would in the browser, or you'd need a Cordova plugin to use it in an app. Again this is something you'd need to talk to them about.

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Ashley

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