I love c++, and I'm partially biased because over the last 10 yrs ago before I learned it. It was always the answer when I considered learning a language and asked or looked up "what's the main language people use to make games nowadays?"

That may be changing, I haven't checked up lately, but also, id have to say, a really great way to learn is making plugins for construct, don't do what I did, and start trying to make a super important plugin like spritefont before you're fairly comfortable, but its very rewarding and motivating to apply what you learn in a c++ book with boring examples, and use it to move sprites around, and give yourself math expressions for your own game.

If you're serious about making a largescale game in construct its more about complexity and how much goes on per tick, if you have so much complex stuff going on that ot hurts your head to look at, and you're doing similar things over and over in different places, then its worth making a plugin if the function object won't work for readability or because its something that needs to happen for too many different objects.

Also, if you start doing loops with actions that going into the 10s of thousands,constructs runtimeinterpretter wil be a bottleneck where a plugin would be able to do do the work of thousands of event calls with a single action.

As far as python sdk, you don't really need one. I meant to post an example at some point but you can make python functions and classes that you could copy paste as text on the forums that you could plugin different construct objects into like a behavior in a way. Besides, anyone who could make a plugin in python could do so in c++. They're so similar its nuts

Not sure when I was completed. But its by Google, complete and on v2.2. In fact,I'm posting this message from my android phone

right, but the creation tool itself runs in a browser

the apps and games you make run on android

Android is the OS that's in the gradual process of dethroning IPhone as The smartphone

I don't think it works anymore with the new version

you have to sign up to get to beta it, but:

<img src="http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/tutorials/molemash/MoleMashAssets/MoleMashComplete.png">

pretty badass if you ask me:

here's the homepage:(take a look at the tutorials. it's nuts):

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/index.html

i have a question, how does the plug operate exactly, what would the actions, conditions, etc be?

Right now the actions are "add ink"(smoke)(x index,y index, ink amount)

And set velocity. (X index, y index, x component, y component)

Set vorticity (the swirliness of the smoke, for instance the fire had a higher vorticity than the smoke)

Set velocity advection. Advection is the preservation of a property as it moves through the fluid, so a higher velocity advection, the current wouldn't slow down as much as it moved through the fluid

I will add the actions to set heat, pressure, amd ink advection

I think its also possible to set the heat and pressure values at an index like you can with velocity

Oh yeah, and anything you can set adveection for you can set diffusion for which is the tendency to dissapate

Expressions are to get ink,velocity and later I think heat pressure for a given grid index

Right now I'm doing the math to translate grid coords back and forth to screen coords in the cap, but it makes sense to have that done automatically, so ill build it into the plugin

[quote:4b9vg3ll]also i have some questions about how it runs, does it constantly use the same overhead no matter the amount of fluid, i assume it constantly processes a set space parsed into a grid or, does take more to do more?

think it does use more processing power with more ink, because in an empty space it only needs to calculate, the velocity and not any ink advection, but I don't think more and more ink slows it down even more, I think any ink present in any given grid coord adds the cpu time, but after there's some ink there, more ink doesn't slow it down more, of course, it could be the way I was applying it visually, ill let you know more as I figure it out

[quote:4b9vg3ll]aaaand can it interact with solids/moving solids?

I sure hope so. Its not built in to the library, but I think I maybe able to use the wall hitting functions to be able to add obstacles, even if they can't be at an angle for now...ill let you know if it works

EDIT: oh yeah, almost forgot, I want to add a for each loop for eachloop index, with parameters for greater than values you can set for ink, velocity, etc

Almost any implentation I can think of involves a nested loop for 0 thru gridsize x, for 0 thru gridsize y, and sometimes if ink at loopindex("x"),loopindex("y") is greater than whatever do this

So ill have expressions for ink at loopindex, velocity, etc,and the conditional for each loopindex thing will make it very simple

Also before I stated it has the action to set ink and velocity at index, I think it should be for screen coordinates or indexes

And finally I forgot to say, an action to set the size of the grid

All the grids in these demos have been 50x50 visually, though all except for this last post with the smooth and retro versions have been calculated at 100x100 size, just for speed testing purposes

found a cleaner way to visualize, it runs faster, and looks better than the mesh method

no pixelation at all, just pure silkiness.

also in this demo, right mouse button erases smoke

(save it into the same directory with the dll's from the other demos

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/rockrocket.exe

it's a canvas, and one soft circle sprite that pastes itself at the different spots in the grid after adjusting size, opacity, and color according to the thickness of the smoke

I'll try to release the beta of the plugin this weekend, a little too much overtime at work at the moment. just want to add the auto cpu core detection, and some auto math functionality to make it so there's no math required to translate between layout and fluid coordinates.

and for you retro folk:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/retrosmoke.exe

the framework Construct provides will greatly speed development versus strictly using a programming language. If you need more flexibility you can access the benefits of a written programming language (Python) by developing plug-ins.

slight correction

you can use python in your games for scripting, which allows you to add functionality not built into construct, like creating complex data structures, or importing directx control, these can be in your cap file alongside your events. the speed of python commands is about equal to those of actions and conditions from what I can tell.

developing plugins is done with c++, and allows you to create new object types (sprite, and xaudio2 are examples of objects), and it also allows you to create behaviors(such as physics, or platform).

It's c++, so the sky's the limit, and of course it runs very fast.

that's not to say that construct events are slow, or that you need python to make even a complex game. See anything made by quazi for proof that scripting is not needed to make something very custom tailored to your own needs that runs fast with only events.

I've only messed around with window resizing in one project

but from what I can tell, the best solution is to have your game start at the very max resolution you will want it to be at

then immediately switch to the starting resolution

then when you switch resolutions it won't pixelate or blur

whoa.

I'm about to go to work so I didn't have a chance to see how it works

but that's badass rojo, like ridiculously so

I thought I had heard the image manip object was superslow

perhaps not

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1013446/New%20folder%20%284%29/ip.cap

made with latest version

each always event shows a possible method

I have no idea what you mean by clicking the object in the lower part of the screen but

the way that you stick something to it is action

Set Object To Another Object's Position

and there is an option for an imagepoint there, and you either type the number or name of the imagepoint after choosing the object

the way you refer to the coordinates in any case where you can type an expression is

objectname.Imagepointx("imagepointname") (or the number without quotes)

and objectpoint.imagepointy("imagepointname")