Caspis Sinclair's Forum Posts

  • http://www.mediafire.com/?xpuj2n10jzh

    After installing .952 I started up one of my files and noticed that the 4 Direction Behavior still has the same problem when you press two keys at the same time.

    If you are walking up or down and you press the opposite key of the one that you are holding down your character stops moving and does their walking animation until you let go of one of the keys. This is fine.

    If you press left or right while moving up or down nothing happens, you just keep going on your way.

    However, if you are walking left or right and you press either up or down at the same time you moonwalk in that direction, rather than having nothing happen like when you are walking up or down. Note that if you are walking left or right and you press the opposite key your character does stop moving, like they should.

    Sorry to bring this old problem up again...

  • Well... what I was planning on doing was just having multiple layouts and switching to the next if you decide to go up to a larger number of chests. You would start off with three chests in a triangle, the next four chests in a square, five in a pentagon, etc.

    Have a variable for each chest to identify them and generate a new variable named 'contents'. If its the first level generate a random number between 1 and 3 and if it generates a 1 it makes the first chest the one with the gold, a 2 the second, etc.

    Or... would having lots of layouts be bad for performance?

  • No, no. I welcome any and all ideas... odd or even.

    I think if I can't get my original plan of keyboard only with a single action key then I'll either go with a hybrid mouse/keyboard control scheme like you suggested or a mouse only.

  • Well... I'd like to keep the controls to just the keyboard, but moving the character with the keys and interacting with objects using the mouse wouldn't be too bad. Or I suppose I could mimic the controls for Ultima 7 and have it so that holding the right mouse button down moves your character and clicking the left performs actions.

    Man, I love that game...

  • Have you considered having the player click a chest for this mini-game? They can still have to be near it, but that would save you a lot of hassle I would think.

    Well... actually, the chests aren't the real problem. They won't be right next to each other so I can just allow the player to control the main character as they normally would to open the chests.

    I used them as an example because solving the problem with duplicating them and having them right next to each other without triggering both would also enable me to have patches of ground that can be dug up.

    I was trying to kill two birds with one stone... or one .cap, if you will.

    Ugh, what a terrible analogy.

  • Otherwise, rethink the entire concept and not use a detector

    Thats always a possibility... I'd hate to spend a lot of time on the problem only to discover that it can't be done this way.

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  • I was pretty sure that it was TheInstance that you were annoyed with and not the thread, Jeswen (I've been spelling it with an "i" for a while ). I know he has shown a certain lack of, well... social skills in other threads but I really do appreciate the help that he gave.

    He was under no obligation to help out and he not only did, but he even addressed a problem that I didn't mention. So really, I don't mind at all.

    Anyway...

    What you suggested about the chests will probably work, but my original question had a dual-purpose to it. I'm making a mini-game where you pay a certain amount of money and three chests appear. You choose one of the three and you either break even, make money, or lose money. If you want to go on the number of chests increases each new round until you either run out of money or decide you've had enough.

    The mini-game will be a part of the larger game that I'm currently planning out, and I'm actually not going to have the chests sit directly next to each other. There will be enough space for you to walk in between them.

    However...

    One important thing about the main game is that I want you to be able to dig up any empty square of ground that is not part of a road or anything else that should not be altered, and for this to work properly I need to have the grass/dirt made up of lots of individual squares, and they have to be right next to each other with no gap in between (it wouldn't make any sense for the shovel not to work just because you're standing in the gap between two patches of grass).

    Well, I'm not sure if I'm going to work on solving the gap problem first or do some other things that I know for sure I can get done without problems. Hmmm... probably the latter. I'd like to have something worthwhile to post in the "Your Creations" section next week.

    And again, thank you both.

  • I hope I'm not fanning the flames, but TheInstance's example actually works very well. It fixes the problem where if you have a chest above you and to the side, or any other combination of two or more chests adjacent to you, all of them open.

    I actually tried something similar to what he did back when Jeswin first helped out, but I messed up a few details and it didn't work quite right.

    You can still trigger two chests at the same time if you are standing exactly in the middle of them, but as far as I can see that is the only remaining problem. I found out today that I'm going to have all of Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening off, so in addition to trying to fix that myself (although I very much appreciate the help, I really should stop asking for help whenever I run into a problem... ) I can get some more spriting work and begin a real demo.

    (looks up to the heavens and calls out in a loud, strong voice)

    Oh mighty Mod Powers that be, your humble servant requests that you lock this thread... lest we all suffer the wrath of Jeswin's growing annoyance with it!

  • Just wondering how you guys/gals/ambiguously-gendered pronounce Scirra. I'm not sure if its Ashley's last name or if not how it was chosen, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess "Seera". I don't know why, but that "c" looks pretty damn silent to me.

    Yes, this is more or less the quality of posts that you can expect from me. Stimulating and thought provoking conversation? Feh. I'll save that for when I'm drunk.

  • Thank you, Ashley. That sounds like a much better solution than what I've been trying to do.

  • I was wondering if this is already implemented in Construct, or if it could be a possible future feature.

    By customizable, I just mean being able to change the shape and size to suit whatever needs you have for your particular game. It would be very helpful for top-down games but I imagine just about any project could benefit from it.

    Maybe... when you open up an image in the editor there could be an option to draw a bounding box around the sprite?

    If there are better or just-as-good solutions then feel free to smack me for making pointless requests...

  • Jeswin and The Instance, to the rescue!

    I'll try out the caps when I get home, but I probably won't be able to get any serious work done until this weekend (holidays tend to wreak havok on newspaper deadlines...).

    I tried to explain to my boss that I'm learning how to use a program to make games, and that any of my peers would agree that it takes precidence over "real" work, but he wasn't convinced.

    Thank you for the advice as well, Instance. I'm not sure if you can edit bounding boxes in Construct yet but it would be a great addition. When you're facing the front of the chest it would look much better if the top half of your character overlapped it.

    Oh, and the sprites are just ripped from RMXP. I'm not all that concerned about how these test games look.

    ...and no, I take no offense whatsoever.

  • I played it for a few minutes last night before I tried out some of Ashley's new tech demos...

    Are the games random, or do they occur in a set order? The first game was a "catch the object with the mouse cursor" game and the second was a "arrange the planets in the correct order" game. I asked my friends if they remembered which order Uranus came in and things rapidly devolved from there.

    Ugh, have Uranus jokes EVER been funny? You're better than that, Caspis! Well, maybe not "better"... but certainly more clever. Okay "certainly" might be a stretch, but-

    ...anyway, I'll give it another try after I get home. Even if some of them have been done before, I still like minigames.

  • Thank you again, Jeswen! That was exactly what I was trying to accomplish. I figured that it had something to do with families, or containers, or grouping...

    I have to ask, how did you know that attaching a box to the main character's sprite makes copy and pasted objects work differently than usual? Is that just how most other programs do it, or are you just clever?

    Accuracy is a problem, unfortunately. I didn't have a lot of time to work on it today but its surprisingly tricky to get your character to trigger only one chest at a time when they are lined up in a row.

    I'm probably just trying to do it the hard way, though. I have an image point for every direction that the hunter is facing and the chests are set to be triggered if they are overlapped by one of the points. The annoying thing is that the "hit box" (for lack of a better term) also has to be touching the chest for the multiple copies to function individually.

    I tried changing the hit box from solid green as you made it to a one pixel-wide cross, and that *almost* works. You can still trigger two chests at the same time if you are standing in exactly the right spot. I'm at work right now so I can't check, but I think I remember a "choose closest object" function? Could have sworn I saw it, at least... if so, that should probably do the trick.

    http://www.mediafire.com/?lzjj102x7qy (the new .cap, complete with some ugly usage of image points... )

    I also tried making the hit box solid and giving it four angles and and image point for each angle like I did with the hunter (and included an "always set hitbox's angle to hunter's angle) and I removed the hunter's image points, hoping that it would be more accurate that way... but for some reason its very selective about where exactly you are standing.

    Well, I'll give it some more work tonight and tomorrow before work. This might be useful to someone so if I can get it working properly I'll post the .cap.

    -later!

  • Thank you, Jeswen!

    *sigh* I won't be able to test it until later tonight when I get home, but I'm crossing my fingers.

    Oh, everyone else probably figured it out already but if you want to trigger objects using image points you have to have the name of your image points in quotation marks or it won't work. I realized this oh... I dunno, maybe 15 minutes after I posted the question.