Ashley's Forum Posts

  • Construct is mainly an event-based programming tool, as you will see if you look through the examples and tutorials. Python is designed to circumvent the limitations of events.

    However, I'm making a fairly large RTS in Construct, and I get by fine with simply a combination of families, containers, and private variables. Look them up on the wiki for more info. And as newt said, definitely check out the RTS basics template.

  • The .cap file linked in the post is no longer online.

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  • I was wondering recently why retro, low-res games are so popular in the indie gaming community and was hoping some of you could offer your opinions.

    If you look around, an awful lot of games are deliberately pixellated, use tinny square sound effects like early consoles, and have similarly simple gameplay (ie not too many objects, as if the game were even designed for NES style hardware with limited processing). I understand that many people see NES/Megadrive/retro games as the 'glory' days of gaming when gameplay, not graphics, mattered (and disillusion of modern commercial titles) - but it seems disproportional. Why do so many people, the majority of indie game makers it seems, ignore the new creative possibilities modern technology allows for? For example, you can trivially create a thousand objects and barely see an FPS hit. Or you can mix a hundred sounds playing simultaneously and it has almost no impact on performance (none if your audio mixes on another core, which XAudio2 does). Or you can run several advanced layer effects and a modern graphics card won't even get lukewarm. This just makes me think of all the cool things I could do to make games more interesting.

    I can think of a few reasons people stay retro. Low-res artwork is probably easier to do, as for the sound. Some people still use really crap computers, and you know your game can run on that as well. Maybe some other tools like Game Maker really start to creak under their own inefficiency if you try to get that far. Or just to try and reach in to the previously mentioned 'retro glory'. But of course the fact a game is retro doesn't necessarily mean it is good.

    What do you think? If you still make retro style games, what is it that makes you want to keep to that style? What are the main detractors to hi-res gaming?

  • What version pixel shader does your hardware support? Does the error message give the details of the error in the .fx file? Which effects are you using and does it work if you remove all effects?

  • It rounds down. Construct allows a floating-point value 0-100 for opacity (which is more sensible for the end user than 0-255). When you set opacity to 40.3, it multiplies it by 2.55, rounds it down, and stores as an integer (= 102), then when you next retrieve it, it divides by 2.55 and returns a float (= 40). This is one of a few annoying design mistakes which is difficult to correct, but will be sorted out in the next major revision of Construct (some way off).

  • It looks like it should work, but opacity has a rounding problem which might affect this. Because opacity is really stored as an integer 0-255, Construct's opacity values (0-100) will round to about the nearest 0.4. This can affect timedelta'd stuff involving opacity. You can either store the opacity in a private variable and set it from that, or (much easier) use the Fade behavior which does not suffer this problem.

  • Can you post a little .cap file which just has XAudio2 trying to play a .mp3 on start of layout from AppPath & "myfile.mp3", and if it doesn't work, upload the .cap and .mp3 somewhere so I can take a look?

  • The crash detail seems to include something about accessing the internet. Have you tried disabling automatic update checks? Change UpdateCheck=1 to UpdateCheck=0 in Construct.ini (C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Scirra) to disable.

  • XAudio2 can play WMA too, have you tried that?

  • Welcome back Good holiday?

  • Some upcoming composers are willing for their compositions to get used anywhere they can just to spread their work around and improve their portfolio. You could try finding a composer with some tracks online, and just ask them if you can use their work in your game with credits. (Make sure you tell them if it's a free project, or offer them royalties otherwise)

  • You could try informing the WINE project that WINE doesn't work with Construct. They might be able to fix it then.

  • XAudio2 has always been able to play music just fine for me... when you're loading a music from file, are you sure the filename exists? You could try AppPath & "myfile.mp3" and it'll load it from the same directory as the .exe/.cap.

  • When you create two objects in the same event, both are picked, so a 'set private variable' action will modify both of them, not just the last created one.

    Try creating them in separate iterations, eg:

    + For "i" from 1 to 3

    -> Create object

    -> Set variable to loopindex

  • Compare values: random(100) is less than 33