Topics

1

Ask a Question / How do I bulk import?

« on: January 19, 2020, 05:12:34 am »

I was hoping I could drag and drop, or copy and paste 150 sound effects. Is there really no way to do that?

1) Do I really have to import them one at a time?
2) Do I really have to type the name of them one at a time, even though they already have a name?
3) Do I really have to import both the mp3 and the ogg file separately into the one sound in the dashboard? I guess I was hoping I could drag and drop the 2 file types that have the exact same name onto the dashboard for sounds, and have them magically appear in the one sound.

I also thought I could just copy the sounds into the resources folder for the game, but the ones already in there are renamed to numbers. I guess I could bulk rename all my sounds to numbers first, but would that screw something up? Like does Stencyl need to rename and organize these after I import them?

Version 4.0.1 lets me drag and drop, but then it tells me there's a problem that I should report. Then it's locked trying to save until I clicked the close button, then I can only close without saving. But then when I run Stencyl again, the sounds are there on the dashboard, but they don't have the mp3 in them yet. At least that way I don't have to type the name of each of them again. So I guess I'll just use 4.0.1 for the sounds unless someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong.

2

Ask a Question / [SOLVED for Windows 10] Can you help me fix the 90% memory problem?

« on: January 16, 2020, 02:40:51 am »

I built a fast computer with lots of ram so I wouldn't have to deal with this stuff, but I don't understand how to fix the 90% memory problem. The only fix I can find is here:

http://www.stencyl.com/help/view/ninety-percent-warning/

It says I'm supposed to put this in the Stencyl installation directory:

java^
 -Xms64m^
 -Xmx8192m^
 -XX:CompileCommand=exclude,javax/swing/text/GlyphView,getBreakSpot^
 -XX:-OmitStackTraceInFastThrow^
 -jar sw.jar

How do I do that?

The problem is annoying, but easy enough to deal with, but now I'm trying to import a small GIF and Stencil won't do it. The GIF is about 80 x 160 px, and has about 50 frames. What do I do?

3

Ask a Question / Would you have 1 actor and many frames, or several actors with less frames each?

« on: January 13, 2020, 05:48:54 pm »

Please consider my jukebox actor. It has 16 buttons with 3 states each (regular, hover, and active). Each button state is a frame. That's 48 frames total.

Which is better?
A) One actor with 48 frames.
or
B) 1 actor for the 10 song choices (30 frames), an actor for the 2 mute buttons (6 frames), and an actor for the 4 volume buttons (12 frames).
or
C) 1 actor for every button.

Does it even make a difference? I imagine all layers and actors get smooshed together to flatten the scene, every time the scene is drawn. If so, I can't imagine it making much of a difference, but I don't know. I guess I'm a little worried about several actors showing up in exactly the correct position for each device the game is played on. In this case the positioning would be fairly important.

Any thoughts?

4

Ask a Question / [Solved] Having problems. Can you help with a simple jukebox?

« on: January 09, 2020, 10:40:16 pm »

I have 2 buttons to play 2 different parts of a sound, with 3 animations each. For both buttons, Animation 0 (for the normal state) and Animation 1 (for the mouse enters state) have 1 frame, and Animation 2 has 2 frames (for the active or current state). So animations 0 and 1 aren't technically animated.

I have a looping 10 second sound that starts when the scene is created. I have a drawing event that checks the position of the sound. If the sound is within the first 5 seconds, animation 2 of button 1 plays. If it's within the last 5 seconds, animation 2 of button 2 plays. This works perfectly.

I have an on actor event for each button. When the mouse is released on button 1, the position of the sound is set to 0. When it's released on button 2, the position of the sound is set to 5000 (the 5 second mark). This also works perfectly, but that's where I'm stuck.

I can't get the hover state to work, which is Animation 1 for each button. I've tried making regions over the buttons, so when mouse enters the region, hover, or mouse enter (Animation 1) is triggered, but that does nothing as well. I've tried making behaviors instead of events, but I can't choose actors or animations in a behavior, only attributes or last created actor.

Am I going about this wrong? What would you do? Would it be easier to make several sounds instead of getting parts of one sound?

Goals:
- Songs, or parts of one sound play in order and start over when all have played.
- Clicking a song (actor button) stops current song and starts a new one, but songs will continue to play in order otherwise.
- Current song keeps playing on scene change.
- Animation plays on proper button (actor) when corresponding song is playing.
- Hover or mouse enter triggers Animation 1 on actor button (a single frame animation).

5

Ask a Question / [SOLVED] Confused. How do I add an image?

« on: December 26, 2019, 06:27:38 pm »

I've spent about 5 hours on this and I feel like an idiot. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to draw an image in a scene. I realize I'm supposed to make an image, and then the image instance, but I can't exactly figure out how to do that. I'm trying to load an image from a file. I've put the image in a folder I made called "extras" in the particular Stencyl game folder on my computer (per instructions). When I click the drop down triangle under draw "image from file", my only choice that makes sense seems to be from game attributes, but you can't make an image or image instance game attribute. I've tried making image and instance attributes everywhere, like in behaviors and events, but they don't ever show up as a choice. And yes, I checked the boxes for those attributes to activate them (I assume). I'm very frustrated, as it seems like it should be a simple thing to add an image. Could someone please provide a clear, simple step by step? It would be very much appreciated, either that or I'm going to try making a whole new scene using screen shot, with a one frame actor, and completely forget about using images.

6

Chit-Chat / "If a tree falls" thought exercise

« on: December 20, 2018, 11:19:07 pm »

Now that I'm sober I don't sleep. While laying awake last night I was thinking about the popular thought exercise "If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" (There was a storm, and I live in a hundred acre wood.) One might be tempted to say that one knows from experience that it of course makes a sound. Well first of all we must clarify what we mean by "nobody" or "somebody". Can "somebody" be an animal of some sort, or does it have to be a human? The answer to this determines the answer to the original question. If there are no animals or humans, there are no eardrums. If there are no eardrums, there are no sounds. The tree, or whatever it smashes into does not make a sound. Eardrums and brains working together is what makes sound. The tree falling makes variations in air pressure, which travel though the air. If an eardrum gets in the way, it vibrates. The brain turns the vibrations into sound sensations.

Somebody please argue with me. I'm not really sure about this. Also, do plants hear? I know they respond to sound (or actually, pressure waves in the air), but I don't think that they hear sounds in the traditional sense.

7

Ask a Question / Is publish for web automatically html5?

« on: December 20, 2018, 10:03:51 am »

When I click “Publish” in Stencyl, for web I have 2 choices, not including Chrome Web Store. I can publish to Flash or I can publish to html5. Let's say I want to put my game on a web site, but I don't want people to be forced to download the swf file, put it on their computer, then click it, only to have it open in their default web browser. It seems most people don't have a stand alone Flash player, so swf files on their computers open in web browsers.

I seem to be having problems with html5. Please consider this html5 game:

https://gamejolt.com/games/LazerGrrl-Lite/349963

When I play it in Google Chrome it works perfectly. When I try to play it in Firefox, I get the message to update Flash to the latest version, even though I just got done doing so. When I try to play it in Microsoft Edge, it loads then disappears, then Edge goes back to the page I tried to play it from.

Now please consider this html5 game that I uploaded:

https://gamejolt.com/games/MyFoot/385733

When I try to play it in any of the 3 aforementioned browsers, it appears to load to 100%, but then just sits there without actually opening the game.

For the swf file already on my computer, the same stuff happens when I open it with browsers, but it works perfectly when I open it with a stand alone Flash player. This would indicate there is a problem with all 3 of my browsers, but I can't know for sure since I can't get anyone else to check it for me. Could someone please take a look and let me know?

1) If I want people to be able to play the game directly from a web site, is my only option to publish in html5?
2) If my browser plays an html5 game from a web site, is it playing an actual swf file, or is it playing lines of code in the hypertext mark up language only?
3) Does my game (My Foot) on gamejolt work in your browser?

Thank you for your time.

8

Windows / Mac / Flash / HTML5 / Here's the start of My Foot

« on: December 19, 2018, 04:19:58 pm »

https://gamejolt.com/games/MyFoot/385733

Please let me know what you think so far. Be sure to try and get out of the two traps before the checkpoint, to see what happens.

The game page says it's for Windows, but it's just an swf file. I'll wager there's an app for that for Mac OS as well.

9

Ask a Question / Where do you upload partial projects to share for criticisms and suggestions?

« on: December 19, 2018, 04:39:33 am »

My first project is coming along, but I'd like some comments and suggestions. The swf file is too big for attachments. Does anybody have a suggestion for a good (free) place to upload it to, so I can share it with fellow Stencylers?

10

Ask a Question / [Solved] Jump sound effect only while on ground

« on: December 17, 2018, 04:29:42 am »

Hello, and welcome to my first post. I'm trying to make events for an actor so that when the jump button (enter) is pressed a sound will play. Since I don't have a double jump, I don't want the sound to play if jump is pressed while the actor is already in the air. I can't figure out how to do this, except with regions, so in my scene I have 5 regions on the “ground”. If the actor leaves the ground it also leaves one of the regions. So I tried setting up my block like this:

when enter is pressed
   if Self is inside Region
      Play Jumpsound

My problem is that I don't see how to choose certain regions. The choices are Self is inside Region, or Self is inside Last Created Region, or Choose Attribute. There are no attributes for my regions that I drew into my scene. With the block set up like this I get no jump sound. Take out the “if” and I get jump sounds while already in the air.

Am I going about this the wrong way? I'm new to Stencyl, so please forgive my ignorance. I imagine that there's some simple way to accomplish this, and I'm just not seeing it.

Thank you for reading my question.