New plugin: Data Structures

It seems Arsonide is on a mission to spam the community with high quality plugins. I can't say I disapprove of course.

His latest plugin Data Structures provides you with three new objects: Stack, Queue and Deque. What these exactly do can be found out from the detailed description in the official plugin thread.

But let me try to find some own words to describe the functionality: think of it generally as a way of organizing a group of  elements lined up in a single row. Now you can add to that, either in the back or the front, and you can remove as well in the same manner. At least that's true for deque.

With the stack you just add and remove elements at the front, while queue adds to the back and removes from the front. If I'm not completely mistaken deque can actually do everything that stack and queue can, and then some. There are also more expressions available to deque, like getting an element at a certain position.

New plugin: Audiere Sound

Especially for those who regularly use tracker music, there's a cool alternative now to the Xaudio2 object (and MOD object for that matter): the Audiere Sound plugin by R0J0hound.

Apart from the expected WAV, MP3 and OGG-formats it also plays FLAC, AIFF and various tracker formats like MOD, S3M, XM and IT files.

The only real downside is the inability to play MIDI files. According to R0J0hound the sound library does support it, but has no means for volume control, which is why he decided against including the feature.

Go grab the plugin while it's hot in the offical thread.

Forum rescue #004: Bitmap font damage

This will be a pretty lengthy one, so prepare yourself.

Okay, from just reading what Shiru wrote (original thread)you can't really figure out the problem. He linked to a gameplay video of Casltevania, where enemies are being hit, displaying the damage they took above their heads.

How would one do that in Construct, using a custom bitmap font of course and not just plain text? The answer is relatively simple, although there are a few things to consider. But let's start at the beginning, shall we.

Forum rescue #003: Respawn an enemy

New scirra forum member darklad posted the following help request (original thread):

Let's open a new game project in Construct and add two sprites. One for the enemy and one for the nest, which is supposed to spawn the enemy. Additional to that we will make use of the Function object and also be needing the MouseKeyboard object for this tryout.

Say hello to Construct Classic

Many users were disappointed by the abandonment of Construct 0.x, although this decision might have been an inevitable step for Scirra.

With the responsibility for the further development of the original Construct in the community's hand, one could only wonder if the software would be seeing any major updates at all from this point on.

All doubt can be set aside once and for all, now that there's a new major Construct build out, which is even complimented by a new name: Construct Classic.

Let me tell you the changlelog is long, very long! Most notable changes concern physics and platform behavior, but also so many improvements in other departments. My favorite three changes straight from the log: