Networking is here!

For the longest time people have been asking about networking in Construct Classic. All these aspiring developers of the next great MMO can rejoice now, as Scidave did release the first alpha version of his plugin fittingly named 'Network'.

Although this is still an early release, working online games are already very much possible with this. I tried one or two sessions with Scidave's test game 'Net Shooter' myself and was impressed. While there are still some quirks to be worked out, hosting a game and making connections is a breeze.

Since there isn't built-in lag compensation or prediction, the man himself only recommends this plugin to use for not too action-oriented games (turn-based or similar). That shouldn't stop creative minds to come up with their own methods to make up for these lacking features.

Go gather all information and grab the plugin from the official thread.

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.

New plugin: Noise 2.0

Developer Arsonide is well known for creating the very useful Perlin Noise plugin. Now he took the concept to a whole new level with the Noise 2.0 plugin, which includes awesome stuff like ridged multifractal noise, voronoi noise, planatery noise, color mapping, lighting and even integrated camera controls!

So apparently this opens a whole lot of new possibilities for creating procuderal game content. Think about entire universes created by this wonderful plugin. Hot damn!
Go ahead, learn all the details and download Noise 2.0 in the official thread.

Oh, and if the plugin proves useful to you and you'd like to support the developer, you should consider donating.

Lerp that angle!

Before this gets buried all too deep within the depths of the official Scirra forum and will be lost to future generations, I thought I do the little that I can and mention it here on the blog.

If you ever had trouble interpolating angles properly, you don't have to resort to more or less sketchy workarounds anymore. All thanks to Construct-uberuser lucid, who made a mini-plugin with one single purpose: providing an anglelerp expression.

Yes folks, you better believe it and get this useful tiny thing asap from here.