Messages

226

Windows / Mac / Flash / HTML5 / Re: Drip's Drop! My first ever video game.

« on: June 14, 2012, 03:03:16 am »

Well, currently I feel that at the beggining there is no risk on going too much up, unless you hit literally every plant for first 10 seconds and it's very hard if you play for the first time. Later on there are more plants and it is in fact easier to not die (it is easier to go too much up, but that's not so big problem, avoiding plants is easier then jumping on them).

You should check the sound settings, it seems to be bugged. When I click on the note (in menu), it starts the game without sound. IMO it should just set sound to off and do not start game (more intuitive). That's not the bug though - the bug is I can't switch sound on again. If I start game later, it is always without sound, no matter if I click the start leaf or the leaf with note.

227

Windows / Mac / Flash / HTML5 / Re: Drip's Drop! My first ever video game.

« on: June 14, 2012, 02:41:45 am »

Congratulations! It's really well-made game. Pretty hard though, you may want to make the start easier (more plants to jump on?). Especially since the graphics imply that it's casual, easy game. Ofcourse the difficulty can and should increased later in game.

228

Resolved Questions / Re: [SOLVED] Senseless sensor trouble

« on: June 14, 2012, 01:53:37 am »

Watch out when you are changing an actor only frame/animation. If your new frame (that replaced the old one) has different dimensions, origin point and collision shape don't update. So you can have origin point not in default center of the image and collision shape can be different (including the shape of the image shown in the collision tab).

For this reason when changing animation of your actor to something with other dimensions, best way is to delete animation and make a new one.

Also remember that if you set physics for actor to "no", collisions are also disabled. And ofcourse triple check the group of the actor .

229

Ask a Question / Re: chasing missle

« on: June 14, 2012, 01:47:01 am »

You have everything you need in the palette, I don't see any need to use custom code for this. All you need is set Target in you missile behaviour to the actor that was clicked. There is a block for that (input > when mouse pressed (or released) on actor), you can use it inside "for each actor on screen" (or group or type) loop.

230

Ask a Question / Re: chasing missle

« on: June 13, 2012, 02:24:19 pm »

Nope, it's created by blocks. There is one code block too, but it's not connected to your problem at all. However downloading the example in Stencyl is not going to help you if you can't see the tutorial itself. I have no idea why can't you see the website, it works for me.

This is the part the matters (event "when always"):


Target is an attribute that holds the actor that the bullet is chasing.

Basically what it does is check distance to target(in x and y), then if both are are below minimum distance it does something to the target, if not, it sets velocity of the bullet in direction to target and with given speed.

231

Ask a Question / Re: chasing missle

« on: June 13, 2012, 08:53:51 am »

Check the TD tutorial:
http://blog.publysher.nl/2012/04/tutorial-creating-tower-defense-game-in.html

In part 4 autor creates a behaviour for a missile-like bullets that chase after their target. You should read it from the beggining though, otherwise it may be hard to understand.

232

Old Bugs (1.x/2.x) / Re: Anchor to screen changes drawing position

« on: June 13, 2012, 07:28:03 am »

Yeah, I learned to always switch to actor space or screen space before drawing anything. Otherwise sometimes it looks like it remembers switching to screen space in other events or even in other behaviours (though that may be only my imagination). In other words -don't assume that the drawing will be in actor space if you don't put any switch at the beggining.

233

Archives / Re: Always run once (sounds odd but stick with me:-))

« on: June 12, 2012, 05:12:30 am »

His problem is that the event would be triggered every frame anyway. I would do it the way captaincomic descriped it.

234

Bug Archives / Re: How to Suppress the 90% Memory Usage Warnings

« on: June 11, 2012, 06:17:38 am »

I'm getting 90% memory usage window from time to time. Not often, usually after I kept Stencyl working for longer time, especially when I test game a lot (usually the window appears when I click "test game" button).

I didn't download the .exe from the article since it's supposed to be installed already (I have 2.1 version).

Is there a way to manually assign Stencyl more RAM? I have 4 GB RAM installed and IIRC Stencyl use not more then 2 GB. I usually have around 30% RAM free when Stencyl complains about 90% memory filled. I guess it could use another 1 GB.

Actually it's not that bad now, but my concern is it will get worse later. Currently my game after publishing weights only 800 KB. The problem is that if I have to restart Stencyl I have to open all tabs manually + sometimes after restarting I can forget what exactly I was trying to do, in which behaviour etc.

Hope you can help me. Thanks.

235

Resolved Questions / Re: Why is vertical jump distance affected by adding a horizontal force?

« on: June 11, 2012, 02:14:19 am »

I'm not sure why it doesn't work, but instead using force you can try setting x and y speed. The difference is that force take into account actor's previous movement (so if actor was falling down, applying force to top would only slow him down, while setting y-speed to positive would send actor up).

236

Resolved Questions / Re: [Solved] Difference between an input listener and "always"

« on: June 10, 2012, 01:32:32 am »

Always runs 100 times a second (this is not a frame. This is an update "step")
When drawing runs, ideally, at 60 times a second. This is your framerate.

When the processor can't handle the game at 100 steps and 60 frames a second, the game continues to run 100 steps a second, but the framerate slows down. You can think of this as "frameskip".

When the framerate goes below 30, the game also begins to slow down (less than 100 update steps per second). Update events are never skipped.

Thank you for this information. Stencylpedia says something else or at least it is misleading. I hope someone could change it to simply state that update runs 100 times per second and drawing runs at framerate speed. Currently it says update runs every frame and drawing usually too.

http://www.stencyl.com/help/view/events-reference/

By the way, does time counter count time or update ticks? I mean, will I get always the same result if I manually count to 100 in update event and when I use block "do after 1 second", even if the game would lag? Or is the time counter always counting in real time, so in case of lag, counting via update could be slower?

237

Ask a Question / Re: My character won't shoot to the left!

« on: June 09, 2012, 11:35:30 am »

You need only 1 boolean to keep information whether actor is facing right or left (unless he can face other directions too). So you can change facing left to facing right and keep that "false".

238

Ask a Question / Re: Damping with no gravity or any other forces

« on: June 09, 2012, 04:26:57 am »

You're welcome. I'm happy I could help you.

239

Ask a Question / Re: Damping with no gravity or any other forces

« on: June 09, 2012, 03:49:02 am »

"Push self towards (direction of movement - 180) at force x" must push them in the opposite direction of where are they moving, if you calculated direction of movement correctly. I know it work, I do it in my project. Direction of movement is not "direction of self", instead you need to calculate it.
There is no need to calculate force, use simple number (at least first, to check if it works). The objects will appear to slow down in a natural way.

Edit: one more thing - you want to add something like "if speed > 0.2" around the hole "push self" block and "otherwise set speedx and speedy to 0". Without that it might be pushing object even when it wasn't moving. To calculate speed use sqrt(x-speed^2 + y-speed^2).

240

Ask a Question / Re: Damping with no gravity or any other forces

« on: June 09, 2012, 02:37:30 am »

You can use "push self towards (direction of movement - 180) at force x". However I think it doesn't work if actor has physics disabled.

To calculate direction of movement use (atan2(y-speed of self)(x-speed of self)) as degrees.

Edit: I think in your case you should choose "push gently" over "push sharply" and use small amount of force.