Messages

31

Game Art / Re: Pixel Art Thread

« on: August 26, 2012, 12:55:52 pm »

Screen from some recent prototype:

Ignore the boxes moving onto walls, it was mainly for the purpose of checking if graphics look right, anyway. ^^'

32

News / Re: Stencyl 3.0 - Design Once. Play Anywhere.

« on: August 26, 2012, 12:52:24 am »

Tsk, so you don't want to pay for early access to potentially buggy, but most likely not game-breaking software, but yet you would like open beta so you could play around with new system? It's not that easy, my dear.

Generally, one of the reason people pay in advance is that they can play around with the software earlier, albeit potentially buggy one. And I don't really think they would release a beta where one of essential features from previous versions is missing or that would cause your game to be deleted or something. Plus they can get to know how software works with the new features earlier, and thus have faster start. For them option of being "a bug tester" doesn't sound so bad not to pay for that.
So yes, it's mutual advantage - Stencyl Team gets money and beta testers (probably devoted enough, given they're the ones who gave money), while they get an early version of the new features they've paid for, anyway.

Besides, if you're afraid of bugs, you might always not download the beta. ^^'

Also, I'm not even sure if there will be something like open beta; it's possible that team decides to release the official version, since there are probably more than enough people with beta access to find the most troublesome bugs, leaving only the minor ones. O.o' Though they might as well actually *do* release public beta, I don't know. ^^'

33

Game Ideas / [WIP][Kit] My little system

« on: August 23, 2012, 03:06:22 pm »

So, for some time now I had been working on a kit which could help making most of my games; first of all, its system would include (and apparently does include!) a way to perform initialization without those annoying "do after xx seconds" blocks inserted when one realizes that some behavior initializes later than the others. Also, this system makes updates and drawing synchronized (...by putting everything into one, large drawing event) and does some other fancy stuff I'm too sleepy to mention it all.

Anyway, I've recently made a scrollable text boxes. I don't know where and how I'll use them, but I'm fairly certain that I will, whether it would be for some ingame encyclopedia or tutorial or something. You can try them out here: http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/14308

Also, if you're really interested, you can download the current version of Kit from Stencyl Forge as "Sun Kit". Note, however, that it's by no means a last version, not to mention that it's not properly documented yet; while it's rather important to know that standard creation block should be replaced with some custom ones, Update and Drawing events have their counterparts and such. Also, it's not supposed to use built-in physics at all, and it works only for Flash (at least for now? O.o').

So yes, any bugs, questions, suggestions (apart from better documentation and such)? O.o'

34

Ask a Question / Re: sokoban like game

« on: August 23, 2012, 01:37:25 pm »

Well, I assume that field size in your game is 32, because you stated such shift in your post.
Now, let's say that you have bar at the top of height 64, and you display some stats on the left which have the width 160. It means that the playable part of map is offset by (160, 64).

Now, imagine a checkerboard, with both horizontal and vertical fields marked with some numbers. Field (0,0) will be at (160, 64), field (0, 2) at (160, 128), field (3, 1) at (256, 96) and in general, field (N, M) at (160 + 32*N, 64 + 32*M). So if you want to know at which field your actor currently is, you can make some attributes Field X and Field Y in a behavior and do something like that somewhere:

Code: [Select]

set Field X to [ [[x of self] - 160] / 32]
set Field Y to [ [[y of self] - 64] / 32]Then you can use these coordinates as arguments for 2D Array behavior.

Also, in "Snake Kit" there's a usage of my behavior applied to tile-based collision system, so I think it's worth checking out, too!

35

Ask a Question / Re: sokoban like game

« on: August 23, 2012, 08:11:52 am »

Since everything is going to be based on grid, probably "2D Array" behavior (to be found on Forge) might turn out to be helpful here.

36

Ask a Question / Re: Actor "Transformation"?

« on: August 23, 2012, 07:56:03 am »

What he said.

SHE! D:

37

Ask a Question / Re: Actor "Transformation"?

« on: August 23, 2012, 07:52:13 am »

i just have it so that the scene will change when i click a button, but with a different actor.

That's... quite a creative approach!

Anyway, you don't need to switch to other scenes. If you want to replace one actor with another, you can either use different animations, or when there are too many differences between one transformation and another, creating a transformed actor and then killing the old one.

So transformation would look like that:

Code: [Select]

create [Transformed Actor] at [x of self] [y of self] at [Front]
kill [Self]Create actor block can be found in Scene >> Actors >> Create Actor.

I hope this helps. ^^'

38

Resolved Questions / Re: Teleport in the same scene and fluid camera movement

« on: August 23, 2012, 07:47:01 am »

Rugerfred: are you sure that the player is set to "always simulate"? Not setting it is often the reason for things working bad when moving actors far (possibly offscreen).

39

Chit-Chat / Re: How bad is the stencyl stigma?

« on: August 23, 2012, 07:19:49 am »

Well, if we're talking about refusing to sponsorship, then sorry to say that, but I think... I can see why your game was rejected. O.o' Sending instructions and story to game description, as well as weird working controls are quite a turnoffs. >.<

So yes, it's quite possible that Stencyl wasn't the reason here. ^^'

40

Chit-Chat / Re: Stencyl is still too difficult to use

« on: August 22, 2012, 02:48:08 pm »

Well, maybe not exactly 10-15 minutes, because setting up the text field properly might require a bit of experience, but I think it would be matter of hours, maybe days, rather than weeks or months. ^^'

As in, "if <[A] [was pressed]> set Field Text to [Field Text + [a]]", "if <[space] [was pressed]> set Field Text to [Field Text + [ ]]" (if you're not comfortable with red cross appearing next to fields filled with space, you can check my Emptiness behavior which has BLOCK FOR SPACE CHARACTER!!1!1) and such. Of course, it would require adding a lot of controls (and some symbols, unfortunately, still don't work), but as far as typing in alphanumerispatial sentences goes it's pretty much sufficient.

However, if Scratch does pretty much what you need there, I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, is there? O.o'

41

Windows / Mac / Flash / HTML5 / Re: Cube Block

« on: August 22, 2012, 12:05:33 pm »

It's very annoying when it *doesn't* show! That is not a good way of making the game challenging!

If the game needs something like that not to be too easy, then it means that somewhere, something went wrong. My guess goes for level designing. -. -.'

It's not a horrible game, but I think that it could use more creativity; I've seen enough of Drop Block clones, and most of these actually added something new and more interesting than lacking information about blocks destination. ^^'

42

Ask a Question / Re: Math in Behaiviours

« on: August 22, 2012, 09:15:26 am »

Operation blocks act like brackets themselves.

Try printing [2 + [2 * 2]] and [[2 + 2] * 2]; the first one will give 6, the second will print 8.
(also, if you preview code, you can actually see brackets there)

43

Chit-Chat / Re: Stencyl is still too difficult to use

« on: August 22, 2012, 07:54:22 am »

how i can let a player type in sentences

Well, as long as you need only letters, numbers and spaces, it should be perfectly doable even without code mode at all (some symbols keys aren't working properly, though). The largest issue would be a horrendous number of controls to be added (one control for each letter), but once you do it, you can e.g. add them all to the list, assign characters to be typed in another one and use some repeat loop to add the text to some "Sentence" attribute or something.

i can cut the sentences in words that i can use to analyze and respond

There's a block "split [ text ] into words" in Numbers & Text >> Text >> Split. It makes a list of text pieces, and you can analyze them however you wish!

Reading/writing files is another matter, but I suppose it's the limitation of Browser Flash rather than Stencyl itself (and if browser Flash actually *can* do that, I'm pretty sure you can do it in a Code Mode as well - and how would it be more difficult in Stencyl compared to Flash itself, which is a large Code Mode?); I hope that such option will arrive in Stencyl 3.0 with Windows/Mac/Linux applications export.

Also, you can use many of Flash possibilities when you use Code Mode, and I don't exactly see what Flash can do which Stencyl cannot; unless we talk about option of completely disabling Box 2D physics, whose lack actually is quite annoying and is one of the main reasons I await Stencyl 3.0 so much.
But yes, instead of doing a base from the very beginning in Flash, typing in stuff and hoping not to omit a semicolon or make a typo when writing a large chunk of code, I snap it all with some fancy blocks, sometimes enhancing the possibilities with Code Mode when needed, e.g. by making blocks for BitmapData class, which I've found extremely useful. Plus, there's a possibility of my projects working on other platforms; while I'm not sure if this'll actually happen and what that new language can do and what can't, but I hope that some basic classes would require at most rewriting a little bits of code, while the rest would be done with blocks.

who know the most are the least they share

I'm not sure if I'd count as the one to "know the most", but I'm currently working on some system which would later be applied to many more specific ones, such as, I don't know, Visual Novel Kit? Granted, that system isn't supposed to use any built-in physics at all, but as far as it's about me, I'm onto something as well. ^^'

44

Ask a Question / Re: "Do every x seconds" slow with lag

« on: August 21, 2012, 02:58:34 pm »

Generally, in behavior which is supposed to count time:
 - make an attribute e.g. "Count millis"
 - when you want to start counting time, use "reset stopper" and set "Count millis" to 0
 - in "when updated", do "increment [Count millis] by [time difference]"
That's it. You can then use "Count millis" as a number of milliseconds passed since the timer was started. You can also divide them by 1000 when you need full seconds or something.

45

Ask a Question / Re: "Do every x seconds" slow with lag

« on: August 21, 2012, 12:37:40 pm »

Unfortunately, there aren't blocks for retrieving date and time yet, but here's a thread about certain behavior of mine, which contains custom blocks for that:
http://community.stencyl.com/index.php/topic,7891.msg49626.html#msg49626
(it'll work only on Flash, I think, but I hope it's not such an issue? O.o')

Generally, you can make a timer by counting up milliseconds (using "time difference" block) and then converting them to seconds.
I hope that you can figure out the rest on your own? O.o'