Scirra.com redesign

For a few days now you can enjoy the completely redesigned Scirra website, which keeps the green color scheme, but has a much cleaner and more professional look to it. Definitely an overdue step in the right direction regarding Scirra's future business plans with Construct 2.

Most importantly the new site now properly integrates the forum, forming a single community-friendly entity. There are more interactive features like a blog you can comment on and a special section to post indepth tutorials. All that's complemented by a reputation points system, which is supposed to reward you for contributing. A nice little touch, which will hopefully encourage good content rather than wake some of the spam devils.

As expected there are a few minor quirks to be worked out, some of which already have been addressed, like the too big font in forum posts. Also it seems to take some time to spread the word about gravatar.com, which is now the service used for displaying the avatar image (many reputable sites use it, this is not evil ;).

Overall I'm quite happy with the new face of Scirra and the efforts that are made to make the site a better community. They promise there's more to come and with Construct 2 dropping new builds left and right at the moment, it surely seems this will gonna be a good summer for all users!

Construct 2 release 43

I have to admit I skipped a few preview builds, but this one introduces some features that have me instantly interested again.

Time scaling is now available in Construct 2, with the ability to set the scale individually for objects instead of only globally. Pretty sweet!

Another important addition is the Custom Movement behavior, which should open up a whole lot of new possibilities. Also a few other minor behaviors have their debut, like the "Destroy outside layout" or the "Wrap" behavior.

Head over to the official thread for the complete changelog and download the release. Have fun!

Have a happy inventory!

Do you like inventories? Oh, I know you do. Because everybody does. It's a shame though that in the last few years, probably in a misguided attempt to make RPGs more accessible to console players, many games feature bothersome lists of objects you have to endlessly scroll through to find the desired item. Better take a look at the awesome inventory from Deus Ex:

My absolutely favorite kind of inventory: a grid of cells, with bigger objects eventually taking up more space than just one cell. It just feels right to me. Now you might not share my preference on this, but let me roll a bit with it as I try to talk briefly about including such a feature in a Construct project.

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.