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I’m currently studying the relatively new open source “code free” game engine GDevelop, so I will write some tips and tricks regarding it here.
One basic thing you should learn to do in any game engine is mixing strings and variable values together. The way to do this varies in different game engine.
In GDevelop, you can do this:
"Score is " + GlobalVariableString(myVar)Here is a collection of various procedural/non-image based EEVEE materials embedded in a single Blender-file and mapped to spheres.
This has been created based on the Cycles Material Library here:
https://blendswap.com/blend/6822
Here is a render:
Here is the download link to the Blender-file:
The 3D industry has been buzzing about Nvidia’s Instant NeRF (which stands for neural radiance fields) ever since they published their first demo video.
This technology has since been in rapid development and we now have a free iPhone app called Luma AI that anyone can use to capture NeRFs.
I tested the app with a toy robot, here’s a automatically generated video of the result:
The amazing thing about NeRF renders is that they can handle light reflections and bounces in a very realistic manner. This makes it a good fit for VFX work. We can also export a textured 3D-model from the Luma AI app, but it’s not as impressive as rendering with NeRFs. It’s still quite good compared to a basic photogrammetry process, especially considering that the surface of our object was quite reflective. Here’s a screenshot from Blender:
Here is how the mesh looks like (very dense):
Here’s another cool shot from a Robotime Ball Parkour toy:
Here is an open source web tool for making branching dialogue trees for games. The alpha version is aimed specifically at Construct 3 but there are also plans for more generic JSON exporters.
Check out Game Dialogue Maker here:
I have been searching through the webs for a long time for a good, easy to use tool for recoloring pixel art to a specified color palette. The perfect tool should make it easy and fast to test out different palettes for a provided bitmap image or a sprite sheet, but it should also make it possible to fine tune the color mappings and add new colors to the palette if needed.
This has provided to be a rather challenging task. Photoshop and other similar graphics programs do have the possibility to switch to indexed color which lets you force the image to a new color palette, but I find that workflow to be rather tedious and time consuming. Illustrator has the recolor artwork tool, but it works only with vector images.
Here are some of the tools that I did find:
Continue reading “A tool for recoloring pixel art to a new color palette”Many people are reporting issues with various gamepads/game controllers and Macs. I was able to get a USB gamepad to work on my MacBook Pro (running MacOS Monterey) by installing (from the App store) a tool called Gamepad Mapper. Then I simply mapped the x-axis (which didn’t work at first) to keyboard keys (which my game also supports). I also had to allow this software in the security settings (accessibility submenu).
Now my Retro-bit NES USB controller works just fine with my Construct 3 video game. Check out the game King David RPG here:
Construct 3 has received a long-awaited feature when the Timelines got introduce a few years back. They have been built to be incredibly powerful, but getting started with timeline animation in Construct can feel confusing even for professional animators who are very familiar with concepts like keyframes and eases.
Here are the basic steps you should perform when you want to use the Timeline to create a rotation for an object:
-Right click somewhere in the layout editor and choose Timeline -new timeline
-Drag and drop an instance to the timeline
-Turn on editing (the pen icon)
-Select the instance and change it’s angle value in the properties bar
-Record this change as a keyframe by clicking on the + button to set keyframes
Here’s a few other tips:
-If you want to open the Timeline properties like the name of the Timeline, you need to click on the headers for things like the timeline name or a specific track. Then they will open up in the properties bar. Simply clicking on the Timeline bar itself is not enough.
-If you want to access the Timeline with events, you need to add the global timeline object to the project.
-You can zoom the timeline by scrolling while holding down ctrl
-To change the value of an existing keyframe, you don’t click “set keyframe” as in many other animation programs, but instead change the value, right click on the keyframe and choose “update”.
You can set any instance to play with the timeline using the “Set instance” action. Very handy for giving different objects the same animation.
One way of uniquely identifying a timeline is to give them a unique tag, possibly based on the UID of the instance involved.
If you want to do something with the instance you play with a timeline, one easy option for that is using the “system –> wait for previous actions to complete” action, which will wait for the timeline to finish and allow you to operate on the instance right after that.
One really powerful feature is the ability to add tags to master keyframes (the round ones). These tags can then be used to trigger various events in order to make things happen in sync with your animation.
If you have trouble remembering how Construct 3 calculates rotation angles, here is a quick chart for you. Note that movingAngles (which I believe are directional vectors) use a different coordinate system in which values can be also negative.
If you want to to make the movingAngle of the moveTo behavior change the animation of a character to left or right, one option is to do this:
The (angle+360)%360 expression converts the values to a range of 0-360 and then we can simply check if we are within a certain degree of 180 which points left and if that’s true we set the animation to the left one.
Key tips for the spin tool:
-3d cursor location will be the center point of the spin
-3d viewport orientation matters
-select the spin direction from the top bar
-hold ctrl to snap to increments
Solid collision filtering is a really useful feature in Construct 3, but it’s not very well documented.
Continue reading “How to use solid collision filtering with Tile movement in Construct 3”