jwilkins's Recent Forum Activity

  • Couldn’t you just do “$”&TotalCash/100

    *facepalm* yeah... I could. Thanks!

  • Context: I am storing the players money as a whole number (lets say, 894) and I want it to display as "$8.94" in the UI.

    I start with:

    "$"&TotalCash

    But I don't know where to go from there to add the "." before the final 2 characters in the string. I know that "left(text, count)" will get me the index, but how do I insert that in? Thank you!

  • Urgh, was really hoping this wasn't just a quirk of 3D in Construct and that I was missing something.

    I think I'm just going to design around the issue for the time being. I did find what I think is the effect you were mentioning but it states it must be the only effect in use on the object which is a no-go for me.

    The main gameplay issue I had with this was that large attacks at the default Z Elevation would obfuscate too much of the enemies underneath me when it didn't render the transparency. I can solve this by adding a value to the attacks that lets me customize the Z elevation and spawn them lower, so more of the enemy is seen. It might not look great all the time, but it shouldn't impact gameplay much at least.

  • Here's another example of the same issue, the dagger stuck in the player's billboard sprite is clipping the player with it's transparency:

    This only seems to happen when the sprite is closer to the camera than the object it is clipping through, which makes some sense since Draw Order is set to Camera Distance for these layers.

  • Here's a screenshot example of my issue with the problem circled:

    Based on the 3D documentation and best practices, I believe I have properly setup my layers, but my understanding is that this shouldn't be an issue for 2D objects in the first place. 3D objects with transparency and 3D objects with no transparency need to be in separate layers. I have all 2D effects on a separate layer as well:

    This issue is generally not that big a deal outside of sprites that I scale up and that have large areas of semi-transparency.

    I should also note that I have tried moving the "2d Effects" layer (where the sprites are located) both above and below the opaque/transparent layers to no effect. Some of the 2D sprites use additive blending as well.

  • My biggest issue with Persist behavior is that "Reset persisted objects" action resets all objects on all layouts - which makes it pretty much unusable in large projects.

    There are also lots of bugs when objects with Persist behavior are in hierarchies, restored from save state etc.

    What are some of the issues you've run into regarding saves? I'll need to keep an eye out on those in my project as well. I did run into hierarchy issues on my end too, which I had to solve with some failsafes.

    Persist feels more and more like it is more trouble than it's worth. I've avoided using it in other projects because of it's monolithic nature, and only did so this time because developing my own tracking methods was previously such a pain that I figured this would be better.

  • You would think that the straightforward nature of the Persist behavior means it works as intended all the time right? After all, it barely even warrants a page in the documentation, and it doesn't have any parameters. It just makes things remember how they were when moving back into a layout after all.

    Except it does have at least 2 issues that do not work as expected and are not documented anywhere in the behaviors page:

    1. It doesn't work with the Pin behavior. I can at least understand that this is because Pin is dependent on 2 objects, and there is no guarantee that both objects also contain Persist... but if they do, it should work properly, or at the very least this should be noted in the documentation instead of forcing users to figure it out on their own, since (to my knowledge) Pin is the only built-in C3 behavior that contains an incompatibility with Persist.
    2. Objects with Persist do not remember their template names. Unlike the previous issue, I don't see any reason for this, it's just something you have to find out the hard way on your own. Yes, it's easily worked around by simply storing the templates name in a local variable, but I shouldn't have to do that, or (again) at the least this issue should be documented.

    -Signed, an annoyed dev who spent a couple hours tracking down why his supposedly persistent templated doors didn't work and could not be picked using previously working code.

  • Still trying to figure this one out, I am able to band-aid fix some of the issue by turning the back face of the object invisible when it's obscured from the player (using raycasting) but this still allows for edge cases (such as when the corner of the object is visible, but the rest of the back face is obscured, it will still display).

  • This is an odd one that I am having very little luck fixing or pinpointing. At specific camera angles the back face (only the back face) of 3D objects display through other 3D terrain:

    I have checked and re-checked that my transparent/opaque layers are setup properly as outlined in this documentation, and I have double checked that I am not manipulating the back-face of these objects during runtime.

    I do have some effects that I thought could be contributing (fog exponential and set color) but even after disabling them on the objects this issue still occurs.

    The obvious thing is to just disable the back face, but in these cases I am using it as a shadow for things like tables or couches that have legs and transparent parts to the sprite where a shadow would be seen.

    Any suggestions on things to look out for or check?

  • I've been using the fog exponential effect for my project and up til recently been quite happy with it. However, I discovered that it doesn't really create a radius around the player from which fog starts, but rather just draws a straight line in relation to where the camera is facing, to illustrate this point, here is a screenshot where I bumped the fog density up to 100%:

    I get why, for most projects this would be perfectly acceptable. It's not ideal for mine though, I was hoping to have a radius I can fiddle with to give the game a bit more moodiness. Any ideas on ways I can recreate or work with the existing fog exponential effect to achieve more of a ring of fog around the player?

    Tagged:

  • The two methods that immediately come to mind would be updating the players deceleration value, or for more granular control you could tween a value and update the players speed to reflect that while the tween is running.

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  • Thank you so much for the reply R0J0hound!

    It took a bit of futzing with, but I did get it running in my game and I am pretty happy with the results. For anyone who hopes to do this in the future with 3D shapes as I did, the easiest way is to basically just copy your example and then add a "for each sprite" event afterward that replaces each sprite with your 3d shape and updates its size to reflect it. Make sure you add a centered image point to your sprite and spawn the 3D shape there. I spent a couple hours trying to spawn the 3D shape instead of a sprite and just offset it but that never worked properly for me.

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jwilkins

Member since 17 Dec, 2016

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