Thank you for the responses. I searched for "Actor Picker" with no luck, but I will look at the API. Although I'm sure I can manually loop through the actors or use the "for each actor of type" block and do bounding box/radius collision checks, etc. I was just being a little lazy and expecting a block to already be made for me.
While thinking of this, one last idea to add to this thread came to mind, and that's the ability to set an actor's "parent". I know you can just duplicate an actor, but being able to just select an actor's parent from a drop-down list in order to inherit the parent's behaviors and whatnot would be better. That way I can change the parent's behaviors and not have to touch the children, since they'd automatically be updated. Another thing would be that I could use that parent actor as the argument to something like the "for each actor of type" block for example, and the operation will not only collect all actors of that parent type but all actors that are descendants of that parent type. Programmers know what I mean when I say "Polymorphism". Anyway...
What I meant was that you can't *create* a new behavior from an actor tab. You have to add a behavior that was already added to the library elsewhere. That's an extra step and more tab-switching and clicking around you have to do. So maybe have two different buttons on an actor tab -- "Add Behavior from Library" and "Create New Behavior". And when creating a new behavior, maybe have a checkbox that lets you decide whether you want to also add the new behavior to the library or just let it be local/private to the current actor, providing some sense of "security/encapsulation". Because, for example, what happens when you or someone you're collaborating with wants to change a behavior in the library so that it works better for a particular actor you/they are working on, but then you forget that behavior is also attached to one or more other actors that were expecting the behavior to work another way? One other idea to help with that problem is that when you click on a behavior in the library, a list of all the actors that currently have that behavior attached is displayed. Also, maybe have a minor warning that if you alter the behavior, these other actors that use it might not work as intended.
Scene-specific behaviors work now for some reason. Thanks. If I figure out why it didn't work before and it wasn't just something silly done by me, I'll report it as a bug later.
Being able to set the loop increment can cut down on some of the math operations needed to accomplish some things (increasing efficiency) and make the blocks/code leaner. Here is one scenario. I was creating actor instances that were meant to be placed 32 pixels apart (because their widths are 32 pixels) for the entire width of the scene. This has to be done in code and not the level editor because the value of 32 is actually read from a variable that can change. So with a loop block only incrementing a counter by 1, an actual "for" loop (Stencyl's "repeat" loop) would look something like the following: (Sorry to some, but I'm gonna use code here. Note that I know I could just write this code in the editor. I'm merely suggesting a way to make the loop blocks more powerful.)
var num = getSceneWidth() / 32, yy = 0;
for (var xx = 0; xx < num; xx++) {
createActor(getActorType(1), xx*32, yy, FRONT);
}
So in that example, I have to do a division operation to get the number of times I want the code to loop (num), and then do a multiplication operation on the loop counter (xx) to make the instances get created 32 pixels apart. What I'd rather do is this:
var num = getSceneWidth(), yy = 0;
for (var xx = 0; xx < num; xx += 32) {
createActor(getActorType(1), xx, yy, FRONT);
}
By incrementing the loop counter by 32 instead of 1, I avoid both the division and multiplication operations. So the code (and the equivalent blocks needed to produce this code) is more efficient and looks cleaner.
There's a difference between "simple" and "idiot-proof". If Stencyl was to be a "click up to ten options and press OK to generate your game", then sure, no tutorial needed.
lol. C'MON! Y STENCLY NO LET ME SNAP 2GETHER POKEMON MMO!!
I forget the name of it, but there's a 3D game authoring tool I tried out awhile back where you could do just that -- click a few options and then click "make game". haha.
EDIT: In other news, I just realized that sample "Maze Game" I thought I had prevented from getting published to the site has gotten 6 plays. lol. Sorry folks. I just removed it.
