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Ben Hickling

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A member registered Oct 23, 2015 · View creator page →

Creator of

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Sorry about that, I've just added some more Steam keys, please try again! :)

Sorry about that, it should be fixed now :)

(1 edit)

Please take a look at this post, hopefully it will help:
https://itch.io/post/801676

Problem has been resolved and new versions have been uploaded :)

Development has definitely slowed right down as most of my time is now spent developing Ex-Zodiac, but I still try and update BlastFX when bugs are found etc.

I don't think I can make use of  native file dialogs as it's not available in Godot currently, which is what BlastFX was made in. I should be able to get it to remember the last directory you opened though. When you say it forgets where you loaded from last time, do you mean when you quit BlastFX and open it next time, or do you mean during a single session of using it? 

I would like to add sliders but it would be quite a bit of work with how everything is organized, so I'm not sure if/when I'll be able to get around to it

Okay cool, I'll get that sorted soon. Do you have an email I can send the link to once it's ready?

Sorry for the delayed response, sometimes I don't get notifications for new forum posts.

That's definitely a bug I somehow over looked. I've just tested a fix for it that seems to work, but as I'm so busy with my main game project I haven't really had the chance to extensively check that it hasn't broken something else by fixing it, so I don't really want to publish it formally at the moment. In the mean time I can provide you with this custom build if you're interested? Are you on win/mac/linux?

Sorry for the super late response, I wasn't notified of the latest posts :/

You can do whatever you like with the effects you produce, including selling them if you so wish :)

sorry for the late reply! Is the text too small to read on the surface screen, even when the application is maximised?

Do you have any examples of this? I searched around, but couldn't find any visual examples of how those blending modes would look

No worries! I'll experiment a bit and see what works, I might randomise it so that there's a chance of them being returned 

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it. Did the shots get returned in starfox (and did it damage the enemy once returned) ? I thought they were just deflected, but I might be misremembering.

Thanks!

The shadows are done using an orthographic camera that views the level from a top-down perspective and it follows the ship as it moves through the level. The camera is inside a viewport so that I'm able to access what the camera sees as a texture. The viewport is setup to have a transparent background, and things like the ground in my levels are on a different visibility layer so that they're not rendered by this camera, only the main objects such as the ship, enemies, scenery etc are.  I then use this texture mapped onto a flat plane positioned just above the ground (also on a different visibility layer so the top-down camera doesn't see it) and I use a shader to draw the checkerboard effect. Any part of the viewport texture with a transparency < 0.5 is discarded, and anything greater is where I draw the checkerboard texture, which is just a repeating 8 x 8 texture and it's drawn using screen space UVs. 

Hope that helps, let me know if you're unsure of anything :)

Whoops, almost forgot!

BlastFX community · Posted in ZOOM

I've just updated it to also use +/- on the keyboard (or numpad) to zoom in or out, hopefully this helps :)

More steam keys have been added now, so please try again :)

Ah sorry, the current batch must have run out. I'll get some more generated and let you know once they're available 

Hi,

Unfortunately I haven't found a good way to tile the effects yet, but it is something I'd like to add if I can figure it out

Thank you! I'm happy to hear you enjoyed it :)

I'm having to prepare a demo for EGX in October, so I imagine I will release that demo online shortly afterwards :)

I tried adding you on discord, but it's saying it's invalid?

Sorry for the late reply, what engine are you using?

Thanks for the project file, it took me a while to figure out what was going wrong (been a while since I've worked with my own software!) but here's what you need to do:

Output Frame Count = Output Frames Per Second x Emitter Lifetime

So in your case, your emitter lifetime is 2, your desired frame rate is 16, so your output frame count should be 32

That should give you a seamless loop. I'll try and change it so that those settings are updated automatically when you enable seamless looping, as a lot of people keep running into this problem (understandably).

The delay capture thing is a bit of an ugly work around for a bug I haven't been able to solve yet, but I think it's more to do with the engine I'm using. Hopefully I'll be able to avoid empty frames without relying on that eventually.

Hope this helps!

Sorry to hear your having issues, the seamless looping is a little tricky sometimes. 

Could you possibly upload your project file somewhere so I can take a look at it? That'll probably be the fastest way for me to diagnose the problem 

Thank you! I'll try not to ;D

I'm glad you've decided to keep working on it, I'm certain they'll turn out quite differently, and it's not exactly a saturated genre :)

Sure, I'll be happy to hear everyone's feedback once I put a public test out :)

thanks, I hope you'll enjoy it once it's out (or even just the public test demo) :)

Thank you! Yep, managing the scope of the game is super important (still not sure if I've bitten off more than I can chew, but I guess we'll find out) and I think having at least one other person to work with must be super helpful too. Unfortunately I don't have that luxury at the moment, although that's mostly down to me wanting to do everything myself (bar the music, which is still out of my skill range currently, but one day...), but maybe that'll change if I find the right person to work with.

Thanks man, you're absolutely right with everything you said! Sometimes it's hard to look past a finished product and realize the amount of time and effort it took to get it to that state. I'll keep working away at what I've got and hopefully it'll work out. I've gotten this far by doing that! 

Also, great work on Fight 'N Rage! I bought it a while back on Steam and it's very impressive and professional. Feels just like a real arcade game :)

haha, not at all! It was a good reminder that I hadn't actually used the dev blog since opening it.. :)

I do enjoy the concept of game jams, but it usually takes me too long to think of something and I end up getting frustrated with myself!

I definitely think releasing some kind of public test/demo will help me, at least then I'll be able to get a general idea of what I'm doing right/wrong

thanks! Yeah, just talking about it on here felt good. I definitely need to get out of my personal bubble with this stuff and stop being afraid to show others and get their feedback. I always want to do everything myself, but I think everyone needs a hand sometimes.

It's not dead, it's just a placeholder page for now. I post more updates on my twitter @benhickling although I haven't been posting much about it lately 

I understand what you mean now. I've had a quick look into it, but it turns out it's not as straight forward as I hoped, so I'll need more time to think of a good way to implement it without breaking anything else

Okay, so when you have multiple emitters, you'd like to control exactly when each one starts when everything is rendered/played ?

I'll see if its possible to allow frame-by-frame rendering in the live view, in the mean time you should be able to render the animation and then view each frame in the preview window that pops up.

For the pause, have you tried the delay option under the general section? Not sure if this is what you're looking for, let me know if it's something different you're after

It's worth grabbing the latest version I've just uploaded as got some updates the one you had was missing

Oh I see what the problem is now, I accidentally included the files twice in the zip file.. :) 

You've probably got a folder structure like this:

BlastFX.exe

BlastFX.pck

Windows 


If you go into the Windows folder, you'll see blastfx.exe again, run that version and it should work okay. I'll get the zip files fixed later 

When you extracted it, was there a 'gradients' folder present in the same location as the exe file? 

The error is caused if that folder does not exist 

What operating system are you using? and are you using the itch.io version, or the Steam version?