Topics

181

Ask a Question / Help with tile based movement

« on: January 22, 2015, 12:06:33 pm »

Hello,

I'm having trouble getting this tile based movement to work.  I have followed a tutorial and everything appears to be correct but my Player isn't moving.  I've debugged the key-press and they are registering so I'm not sure what the problem is?

Thanks

182

Ask a Question / Saving a 'restart position' for when player loses a life

« on: January 20, 2015, 12:52:09 pm »

Hello,

When my Player actor loses a life, I'm wanting him to restart on the scene where he last picked up an object.

I thought I could do this by passing an X & Y coordinate to a couple of X & Y Attributes in Scene when that object is picked up along with a SavedGame? boolean.  Then a check for when the scene is loaded if SavedGame is true and if it is, set x of actor and y of actor to those X, Y saved attributes.

I did this using 'For this scene set...' as you can see from the code below but it didn't work.

Any ideas?

Thanks again in advance!

183

Ask a Question / Direction of fire affected by collision...

« on: January 20, 2015, 05:09:58 am »

When my player character shoots (via a Player Fire behaviour) a separate behaviour gets the direction he is facing and uses that direction to fire the bullet.

My problem is, if an enemy character runs into my Player, when I go to shoot he shoots in the direction he has been pushed / opposite direction he has been hit and I have to move away slightly and then fire again in that direction.

My code from both behaviours is below, any ideas on how to fix this?

Thanks

184

Ask a Question / Can someone explain the FPS monitor to me please?

« on: January 19, 2015, 02:56:49 am »

Hi

What are the green dots representing?  and is there any way to tell from the monitor what part of your game / code is using up the most memory resources etc?

Thanks

185

Ask a Question / Performance hit for behaviours?

« on: January 17, 2015, 12:39:40 pm »

Is there a performance hit for the more behaviours you have per actor?

Also, is there a performance hit for using 'get attribute from behaviour'?

My game has grinded to a 5 fps halt and I can't for the life of me figure what's done the damage. 

186

Ask a Question / Game slowing down due to off-screen actors?

« on: January 16, 2015, 07:16:56 am »

I am making a vertical scrolling shooter (old commando stylee) and to begin with I was getting good FPS.  But now I am approaching the latter half of the level design and there are more enemy actors in place within the scene my fps have dropped quite a bit.

Is there a way for the enemy actors not to be created until a certain point, or to remain 'dormant' or something?

Thanks

187

Resolved Questions / Are recycled actors no longer used in 3.2?

« on: January 16, 2015, 06:44:05 am »

I have read in the optimisation tutorials using recycled actors is a good way to keep fps up, but I don't see any blocks for this.

Are they now redundant? 

188

Ask a Question / If 'Member of Group' = {particular actor}...How to call this?

« on: January 15, 2015, 07:46:11 am »

Hi,

I have a Group called 'Quasi_Weapons', in which there are various types of weapon actors.  The code below is from an 'Enemy Health' behaviour attached to an Enemy Actor.

The health part of the behaviour works fine, I am now trying to detect which actor from 'Quasi_Weapons' actually collided with the enemy actor, as to play the correct sound effect etc.

I used a print debug to print the 'member of group', which returned 'Quasi_tomato', but when I tried entering that as text in the IF 'member of group' = 'Quasi_tomato' it rejected it.

Any ideas?

189

Ask a Question / What am I doing wrong? Actual game not representing Scene

« on: January 13, 2015, 09:21:59 am »

I'm trying to re-design my game for Android device making sure scaling is correct.  My plan is to:

1) Draw my scenery and characters on a canvas size of 960 x 640 with a grid size of 64px
2) Import artwork at x2 scaling
3) Design and test on a screen size of 480 x 320
4) Create my scene at tile size of 32px x 32px
5) Import my Tileset at x2 scaling
6) 'Test Game' at 1x scaling for replicating what it would look like on a mobile, or 2x scaling for Table representation

The problem as you can see with my screen shots is although everything looks correct inside Stencyl, when I run the Scene in Flash it's not displaying correctly.  I've also included a screen shot of the created artwork.  As you can see the grid size is 64px- ,my thinking being that this imported at x2 scaling should be correct?

Any ideas?

190

Ask a Question / Considering buying Studio

« on: January 13, 2015, 04:59:27 am »

Hello,

I've been using Stencyl for 3 weeks now and I am pretty impressed with it so considering buying Studio so I can take things further and begin to test on a mobile device.

I've just read that to test on an Apple device I would also need to pay for an Apple developer license so I'm thinking starting to test and develop for Android may best place to start?  Any thoughts on that?

Also, can someone recommend a good (but cheap) phone to get to test on? I don't want to test on a high-spec phone but at the same time I don't want to break my back optimizing the game for a device that is obsolete.

Many Thanks

191

Ask a Question / Flash or Photoshop for artwork? Setting resolutions

« on: January 12, 2015, 01:57:49 pm »

Hello,

I have been doing my artwork in Flash but have just read on the subject of scaling that I should be designing the artwork 1280 x 1920 and then setting the scaling to 4x.  I'm wanting the game to be able to be played on mobile & tablet.

Flash doesn't allow you to set any resolution with it being vector based, so do I need to use Photoshop instead?  If so, I've noticed the default resolution is 72, and I know for print this wants to be 300 but this isn't what I'm after... How do I choose 1280 x 1920?

Or am I getting things wrong here?

Thanks

192

Ask a Question / Performance loss issues- animations or maths calculations?

« on: January 11, 2015, 01:20:16 pm »

I have Square Root and Tangent calculations always running in a behaviour to work out the direction my enemy actors need to run in and shoot at to kill my Player Actor. 

Sometimes there may be 5 enemy actors on screen each running this behaviour- would this account for the loss in performance I'm experiencing?  Or would it more likely be the multiple 'switch animation' commands going on? as I've read this also can have an impact on performance.

Thanks

193

Ask a Question / How to keep Frames Per Second up?

« on: January 11, 2015, 11:02:56 am »

Hi,

My game currently dips to around 24fps when the screen gets busy.

I have ready the optimisation guides on here and noted what it said about drawing images on top of each other....

on my scene in many cases I have a Floor layer with a grass tile, then another layer with a tree stump, and another layer with the top of the tree on that- could this type of image layering be responsible for poor performance?

194

Ask a Question / Are these 2 games made the same way?

« on: January 11, 2015, 05:55:32 am »

Outrun:
http://youtu.be/mhG6Qn1UG1c?t=49s

Street Surfer:
http://youtu.be/em553coKuqA?t=21s

195

Ask a Question / Fully tiled background, or 1 big 'background image'?

« on: January 11, 2015, 01:49:05 am »

Hello,

I have a scene that is 270 tiles long x 23 wide (8640px x 736px).  My playable screen size is 600x600, though this will change as I'm wanting to develop the game of mobile.  And I have a 'Floor' layer that is purely made up of 1 grass tile repeated.

Would it be better in terms of using less resources to use a background image instead of grass?


When I run the scene it just seems slightly 'stuttery' and I haven't even put any actors on it yet...

Thanks