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Messages - Jason

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1
Chit-Chat / Re: Leave School?
« on: June 07, 2012, 03:08:20 pm »
Irock/others: I believe games are important for many reasons actually. I am just speaking from personal dissatisfaction and actually only from just a few posts from small indie developers (though maybe "indie" isn't appropriate for some of them). Those posts were from many years back. I tried to find some of them again on google, but couldn't, so I understand if you think I be trollin'. Though I'm sure there are many others like myself and DigiLusionist that have felt less fulfilled at SOME point. I'm glad he came to enjoy it. But it is recently my belief (through, let's say "research" that most people would probably call crazy) that if you get a bad gut feeling about your direction in life even once, that's your inner self telling you your life purpose and greatest success and satisfaction are likely elsewhere. I won't get too deep into that here though.

Blob: I actually just recently decided I no longer wanted to make games, or at least the sort of games I was making (quick thrills). But don't get me wrong. Clearly those games are important too, to relieve short-term stress and whatnot, as mentioned.

Sorry if I "belittled" anything. Everything has its place.

2
Chit-Chat / Re: Leave School?
« on: June 07, 2012, 12:00:32 am »
Those of us in the US obviously won't be suffering from a horrible economy forever. All of those people with degrees and no jobs right now will obviously be the first ones to get most of those new jobs when they do roll out, not people with no diploma or college degree.

Still, you have to ask yourself, do you REALLY want to be making games for a living? I know I'll probably get flamed for this, but why not do it on the side and do something else that will likely make you feel more essential and fulfilled, like something more beneficial to society in the long-term? I'm not saying necessarily becoming a doctor or something like that, but maybe something like someone that develops a website or other software that makes people's lives easier. I'm not calling game developers worthless to society, but really, you almost never read (or at least I have never read) of many people that are truly happy in game development--indie or otherwise. It's just the opposite, in fact. I read of people that feel like they are not truly making their mark on the world so eventually end up dropping game development as their profession.

And when you think about it, in the grand scheme of things, what real long-term fulfillment is there in making tiny distractions that people these days will most likely forget about quickly and delete, or even in making longer games that take years of your life to develop? Not to mention that a huge portion of games are pirated anyway, so not only may you end up feeling like people don't appreciate your hard work, you'll likely barely make enough money. Sure, it may be possible to make it rich, if you're extremely good or extremely lucky and make a simple, silly distraction like Angry Birds that everyone wonders why is making so much money in the first place, and if money is all you care about, then by all means.

Please, finish high school. Then look at colleges and make sure you really don't want to go through the college experience. Don't just think about all the work you have to do, but also think of the special bonds you can usually only form in a school-like environment (particularly if you live on campus), the tons of gorgeous females you will see every day (Chicks dig smart college guys, even ugly ones like Zuckerberg.), and so on. If you worry about college being a waste because of having to learn too many things you'll never use, then maybe consider a 2-year technical college. Most of what you'll take then should be the stuff you need to be successful in your field.  You could even go to one of those colleges that many video game geeks dream about like Full Sail or Digipen.

3
News / Re: Stencyl 3.0 - Design Once. Play Anywhere.
« on: June 02, 2012, 07:39:21 am »
As pointed out, haXe already supports Flash, iOS, Android, and more - no mention of HTML5 support, alas, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's trivial at this point.

Just wanted to note that there are a few haXe libs like jeash and easelhx (this one a wrapper for easeljs, which is a part of the createjs suite, which Adobe sponsors) that give you the HTML5 support for haXe. jeash is pretty much a direct clone of the actionscript 3 api, but at the moment it's pretty slow when compared to easelhx/easeljs (which is somewhat close to as3 classes), in my personal tests.

4
Ask a Question / Stencyl Market
« on: June 01, 2012, 12:39:47 pm »
Any idea of the general time frame for the opening of the Stencyl Market?

5
News / Re: Stencyl 3.0 - Design Once. Play Anywhere.
« on: June 01, 2012, 12:32:43 pm »
Using the haXe language, my personal favorite, would make the most sense. I hope you're using that for 3.0.

6
I use my desktop computer for any sort of development. It doesn't have an internet connection since the network adapter was recently fried. So I download Stencyl on my laptop. It runs perfectly fine on the laptop. I transfer it to my desktop, and it has issues. First, on the desktop, the program does open, but it doesn't load any of the sample games. Also, after clicking the button to create a new game, I see the "Saving..." message, but that message never disappears, and nothing happens after that. It doesn't exactly "freeze", since I can close the program, but I can't do anything useful with it either. It's impossible to create a new game. There's nothing wrong with the desktop computer besides the lack of an internet connection. The desktop is actually new. Windows 7 64. Ran program as administrator and all that. Will you make it so you don't need an internet connection to use this?

7
Archives / Re: Suggestion List
« on: June 15, 2011, 06:04:43 pm »
Ok, sweet. Thank you.

8
Archives / Re: Suggestion List
« on: June 14, 2011, 09:37:45 pm »
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.

9
Archives / Suggestion List
« on: June 13, 2011, 11:40:36 pm »
I tried submitting all of this via the StencylWorks feedback dialog, but it didn't seem to send. Sorry if any of this has already been mentioned.

1. When you want to add a behavior to an actor, it would be nice to be able to do that straight from the actor's tab, not have to go somewhere else to create the behavior and *then* add it to the actor. Also, you shouldn't have to place the behavior in a category either. It's just another impediment. If you want to provide that ability, at least make the first category listed and automatically selected be called something like "Any". I guess I get your thinking about defining external behaviors and categorizing them to encourage behavior reuse/sharing, but it's just troublesome. Please reduce the amount of clicking around done in this program. My hand hurts!

2. Scene-specific behaviors didn't work for me at all. I added a simple one just to create an actor somewhere "when created", but all it did was laugh at me.

3. Your loop blocks increment a counter by 1, but I should be able to set the amount of the increment on the loop block itself. Otherwise, I seem to have to create an attribute named "i" (an attribute for a temporary variable???), set it to 0 whenever I want to start a loop, use a loop block that increments its own counter that I'm not using, and then increment my "i" by the amount I want.... Seems pretty inefficient. I don't want anyone complaining "OMG! UR GAEM  LAGGED MY FLASH!11!"

4. Ah, Scratch. The Programming Model That Was Foretold To Come.... More like, The Programming Model Forged In Hell!! I was forced to use Scratch for one of my Computer Science courses, and I absolutely hated it, for a number of reasons. Almost all of my classmates hated it as well, so we switched to another engine for our finals. One problem is that this block editor was horribly slow and often buggy on the computers at my college, and it's horribly slow on my computer at home also, which can certainly handle more complex things. I know you won't toss the block system. Just venting my and others extreme dislike of it.

5. Need toolbar buttons for common things like undo and redo. Clicking on Edit --> Undo or Ctrl+Z is too much for my carpal tunnel.

6. There were some things I didn't immediately know I could do because the buttons were on the bottom of the screen and "camouflaged", whereas the only thing most people expect on the bottom of the screen is a status bar. (Well, I'm a Windows user and haven't used a Mac in years, so I don't know what you crazy Mac users expect. Yeh, I know Windows sucks.)

7. Let me change the interface's color scheme! My eyes shed blood looking at all this dull gray and black.

8. I had clicked on Publish from an example game just to see the steps that it would take me through. I assumed it would've notified me that I was on the final step and the next click would push the game to the site. It wasn't until I saw a progress bar and "Publishing..." that I said "OH CRAP!!" and realized I wasn't provided such a notification. So, to avoid publishing the example game to the site like a n00b, I quickly shut the entire program down. lol. No Cancel button???. The publishing step should be much more informative/user-friendly.

9. Sure, I could've read the tutorials, but no program that's meant to be simple for the masses should need one right? Speaking of tutorials, clicking on the 1-hour course did not launch anything at all. The first tutorial did launch however (but I didn't read it). Although, even if the 1-hour course button had worked, I doubt I would've felt like going through it. Yeh, I know,  lazy.... But I'm a guy who sat down and read the entire Game Maker manual before even starting the program. So with my general patience level, you just know most of the other slack-jawed yokels and whatnot on the net won't read that thing. Also, the tutorials should start with a Table of Contents with links that I can click to quickly get to the parts I'm interested in and maybe some breadcrumb navigation. Just having Next and Previous buttons is not enough.

10. Having some sort of "place_free()" and "position_free()" Game Maker-like functions for blocks would be useful. I mention Game Maker, which I actually hate because of its brain-dead interface and company, but it currently has the best, most expansive list of functions for 2d development out of any other package out there.

That's all for now...

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