Topics

1

Ask a Question / Inspector and Sprite Rotation in Scene Editor Ignore Sprite Origin?

« on: September 07, 2019, 11:54:33 pm »

From what I can see thats the case. Sprite origin is set to bottom right for the given actor (I'm having a character 'swing' onto the screen) and when I try to manually set the angle in the inspector panel (and likewise rotate the actor by hand) it simply rotates around the center instead of around the bottom right origin.

What am I doing incorrectly, if anything?

2

Chit-Chat / Where I've been, and What I've done.

« on: November 09, 2018, 11:04:56 am »

Pardon the narcissistic titling.

First, want to say thank you to people like Hectate and Ceosol, for all the help they provided just a couple years prior.

I ended up switching to GMS because I wanted more access to the file system and I had serious concerns about the state of flash. This was back when I intended to sell my game to flashportals, oh poor nieve me, the trials I was about to go through 

A friend told me that if I switched over I'd end up doing exactly what the devs behind Hyper Light Drifter did, building all my own tools in-game. I said he was wrong. Turns out, he was right. I ended up building a system for loading a 100k plus objects into game, completely ignoring tilemap options, dynamically loading chunks and only saving objects if they changed. I had to build a custom system for loading prefab-style level designs, and a dozen other headaches.

Ultimately, because of constraints, I shelved all the work. The game UI had changed a hundred times and now a critical element of the game was time 'passing' whenever the player changed maps, in much the same way resources were used when changing locations in games like 'Out There.'
Lesson learned, don't build tools and systems 'just in case', or because they're 'cool.' 

A big part of the original switch was the lower-level access I believed GM would give me. I'm not a tool maker. I didn't start with the intent of making my own tools. And now, the thing I learned is, making your own tools is expensive, so is reinventing the wheel, but I digress.

Cut to the chase, here I am, back in stencyl, implementing a flash game..in stencyl..as an advertisement for my larger game, and here I am like oh my god if I had avoided or cut out the desire for massive open worlds, and moddability, I could have been using stencyl the whole time.

And let me tell you, when you leave stencyl to use gm, and return after two years, it's the difference between night and day, it's a world of less pain you have to deal with.

Stencyl, I'm sorry I ever left you. Can you forgive me? 

3

Ask a Question / How to implement lighting without shaders? [SOLVED]

« on: October 01, 2017, 02:29:10 pm »

For my lighting I can't use shaders. I want to stick to normal, add, multiply, and screen effects. I've tried all of them without much luck.

My fellow stencylers, I ask you to rise to the occasion, and ask you one question: How would you implement lighting in this circumstance?

The way I'm attempting to perform it is by using transparent circles that overlay on a secondary layer above the main game, and the second layer blending is set to 'add', but I'm not having much luck. The lights should 'cut out' the darkness from the layer to show whats beneath, but I can't seem to accomplish that.

 All answers or solutions are welcome.

4

Ask a Question / Spawning actors off screen (solved)

« on: February 01, 2017, 12:01:46 pm »

I'm trying to spawn an actor (part of my UI) offscreen. When triggered via a custom event the actor should tween in from the top
of the screen.

The problem is I can't seem to spawn them at negative y coordinates, say at y -64.

If anyone has a solution or an idea for this predicament I'd owe you one because I've tried everything I can think of so far. Thanks.

5

Ask a Question / Blocks that take actors as arguments, can you use maps?

« on: August 09, 2016, 07:54:04 pm »

I was experimenting but ran across a few issues that I won't go into. The short version is that I want to use a get map key/value
block as an argument to a custom block that takes an attribute that stores actors.

So does anyone have experience with this, before I go wading in a little deeper? I realize when I click on the block to select and attribute, my map attribute won't show up, but for example, I should be able to drag a get-map-value block into the attribute slot for the custom block.

What say you stenclyrs?

6

Ask a Question / Lines between tiles at fullscreen

« on: July 27, 2016, 11:03:54 am »

So I noticed that blank tiles, when in fullscreen end up with lines appearing between the regular tiles and the blank tiles.
I saw a few posts from a few years back but I got the impression this was fixed.

Does anyone have the same problem, and if so, how did you solve it?

7

Ask a Question / Map and list copying shallow vs Deep.

« on: July 17, 2016, 03:27:18 pm »

So I'm saving a map object into a list during an event, essentially recording the x and y tile location of each mouse event.
However what I'm finding in the process is that the x and y of each tile location are all the same for every entry in the list.
So my 'tile' attribute which I'm using as an intermediate variable for my x and y values, before storing it in my list--when I change my tile attribute, ALL copies of it in the list are ALSO changed.

From what I could find in the manual and online, the problem is due to Stencyl using shallow copying. I found the 'copy map/list' blocks but according to what I read, these only do shallow copies as well.

I take it I need to use the 'new map' block each time I store a new entry, and then modify the entry itself after it is already stored in the list, or is there a better method that I'm not aware of?

I'm grateful for any help and insight that anyone reading this can provide. Thanks.

8

Ask a Question / So tiles are relative to the screen and not the scene?

« on: June 24, 2016, 02:06:47 pm »

I got some code that iterates through each column and row, and outputs the tile row and column. This uses the get column/row
blocks.

I have a placeholder that moves with WASD, and I noticed my tiles always go from 0 to 12, no matter where the character is in the scene.

Do I need to factor in the camera position? And if so, why does the get tile blocks not account for camera position?
I tried putting the tile retrieval code in the placeholder, but anything to the actor suddenly is a negative tile, and everything to the right of it is a positive tile, and so forth.

What am I doing wrong?

9

Shared Resources / Anyone willing to share the preloaders for NG?

« on: June 15, 2016, 04:01:18 am »

Looking for Newground preloaders as precompiled swfs. I've given compiling .fla a crack and it always ends with needing manual input to start the actual game, or a preloader that loops endlessly.

I'd be grateful for the help, as would others probably.

10

Ask a Question / Getting the type of an actor using actor-on-screen (Answered by noxtudios)

« on: June 15, 2016, 12:27:13 am »

So I'm writing an actor that targets the nearest enemy each tick. But the problem is no enemies are actually being targeted.
I appreciate any help anyone can offer solving this. I've tried several different solutions and no luck. Thanks.

Heres what I have so far.

Edit: So what I determined is 'Last Distance' is ALWAYS equal to 64, according to a print statement. For no apparent reason.
Maybe a rounding issue? I'll try rounding the distance attribute before doing   "last distance = distance", and see if its that.

11

Bug Archives / Actor Positions update on layers with scroll factor 0 but not collision bounds

« on: June 08, 2016, 03:53:08 pm »

Actor Positions update on layers with scroll factor 0 but not collision bounds. To duplicate, start with any template
game that has movement controls.

0. Create an actor and a new map layer. On the new layer, set scroll factor to 0, and place an instance of the new actor in the upper
left corner
1. Start the game.
2. Move your character down
3. Assuming camera follow, attempt to move your character onto the empty spot where the blocking actor WOULD be if the camera had not moved and the layer the actor was on was not set to scroll factor 0.
4. The attempt to move into the 'empty' spot should fail.
Conclusion: Sprites and onClick events are updating location on scroll factor 0 layers, but not collision bounds of those same actors.

As a work around, just create a new collision group in the settings screen that doesn't collide with the player actor group, or any other group for that. If you need it to be dynamic, you can go into any actor, under the appearance tab, create an animation thats a clone of the actors regular animation, name it 'ui' or something, and then in the collision tab set its group to something like doodads or a custom group that doesn't collide with actors.
Then whenever you need to prevent something on a higher layer that scrolls, from colliding with anything below (in the wrong location no less!) just change to the 'ui' animation for the given actor.

12

Suggestion Archives / Calling Custom Events in Actors from a behavior

« on: May 28, 2016, 04:32:31 pm »

I'd love to be able to call custom vents in Actors from a behavior attached to the actor.
That way actors can hold actor-specific logic, and logic thats more general and behavior oriented, or controls
how actor logic works, can be isolated in behaviors.

13

Suggestion Archives / Can we have a 'Last Returned Value' drop down?

« on: May 27, 2016, 06:06:08 pm »

We already have a 'last created actor'. Additionally a 'last returned value'
(such as from get behavior block), would make event-local variables and temporary
attributes unnecessary. I find myself constantly having to create attributes to
pass data between blocks so I don't end up with single lines that are overly long.

A 'last created actor' would make it unnecessary to create attributes for all of
us who break up single lines into multiple blocks just for the sake of readability.
I don't know how possible this suggestion is, but it would go a long way, and
I'd owe you a beer if you implemented.

Anyone else want this, or think it would be useful, chime in.

14

Resolved Questions / Parallax Scrolling moves sprites, not logical position? (Fixed in build 9171)

« on: May 16, 2016, 04:32:37 pm »

So I'm still grappling with the same UI problem I've been dealing with for a while.
I saw that certain problems with parallax had been fixed so I though I'd give it another go.

Long story short, if I add a print statement to a click event on a UI element, and then move my character around, the UI layer (scroll factor 0) moves with the camera or screen, but the click handler only fires when I click on the original spot on the map that the UI element was placed..instead of the click handler reacting to input *relative to the screen* position of the UI element.

Also for a variety of reasons I can't just anchor my UI elements. Basically I'm looking at changing how my UI functions and is laid out just to compensate for this limitation. Any heads up on why layer parallax changes the position of actor sprites, but not, say, the actual position of the actor? I was under the impression that the whole layer was actually moving or scrolling, relative to the other layers.

Edit: Thanks Devs for the quick fix. And thank you Rob for letting me know! This is the reason I chose stencyl 

15

Ask a Question / Creating and storing an actor?

« on: May 13, 2016, 03:02:16 pm »

Is there any way to create actors, and/or store them in a list, without explicitly spawning them onto the map?
I'm using actors for items, and I'd like to run code on them, even when they are stored in a characters inventory.
Not all inventories are stored on screen, or as part of the UI either.

I take it some of you have dealt with this? What did you do, store them on screen, and just hide the sprites? Store them off
screen, and just keep them active? I can't see any way of spawning items *without* spawning them on the map.
Any help, experience, or special insight is appreciated. Thanks.