ErekT's Forum Posts

  • Can anyone point me toward resources (in any form) which cover some of the big picture principles of 2D game design? For example, why are tiled backgrounds and tile maps recommended, and how big of a problem is it if they aren't used? (I've read through the documentation and understand the basic argument, but feel as if there's a bigger picture that I'm not quite grasping.)

    Tilemaps are really a leftover from the 80's and 90's when memory and storage space were super-limited. You'd use small tiles of graphics that repeated seamlessly to cover large areas on the screen, kinda like how repeating textures are used in 3D games to save on memory. Nowadays they're not as relevant (unless you go completely ape with your assets) and mostly used by indies on a tight budget since they're very cost-efficient too.

    I've been asking this same question for years now. I read this on Tigsource before I even started looking for game making software options but have not come up with a clear answer. The general here is C2 is designed to accommodate images of all sizes so this power of two rule shouldn't apply.

    Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

    Is this power of two thing a myth or was this really a requirement back in the day?

    From what I can tell this might be true during the SNES era.

    Yeah, old consoles like SNES and especially NES, Sega Master System etc had very strict sprite and tile size requirements which were all power-of-two. 32x32, 32x64, 16x16 etc.

    Here's a few fun threads from pixelation if you're interested in the kind of limitations NES developers had to wrestle with:

    http://pixelation.org/pixelation/index. ... ic=10057.0

    http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=1 ... #msg144531

    http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=19899.0

  • Yeah object variables are your best bet I think. I tried plopping all object variables into arrays once. Very cumbersome to deal with and didn't improve speed any, at least as far as I could tell.

  • Jayjay

    Yeah I went with javascript as the syntax is a bit simpler. But the scripting bit in Unity was actually fine. Apart from the platform behaviour I've built my own system for most things with C2 events already, more or less the same way I would with a regular scripting language. I think what rubbed me the wrong way was how you're supposed to integrate the scripting with the visual editor. Drag and drop scripts onto objects, and then they become components, and then you have to use GetComponent() to access other scripts and some other function to access other objects, and exposed variables that override the script and... I dunno, it just felt messy

    For Unity there's always uScript which is quite good actually. I agree with ErekT. Gimme an exporter like Chowdren and I'll be happy. Pretty much most engines and frameworks export to native.

    Yeah, fingers crossed Scirra start to take seriously the grievances users have with html5-only. I mean, it's starting to come around for the desktop platforms, but support for anything else seems either mediocre or non-existent.

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  • Just had a look. Sweet! Thanks, now I can avoid the extra loop

  • Thanks guys

    I implemented Colludium's solution and it works great.

  • I have myself a bit of a problem. I want to pick the nearest instance to another instance, both of object 'Chr' and tried doing it like this:

    Local_X            (reference x-coordinate for instance A, passed to function)
Local_Y            (reference y-coordinate for instance A, passed to function)

Chr | Pick nearest to (Local_X, Local_Y)
[/code:153lcdn6]
But as I found out, instance A gets picked every time of course because obviously that's the instance closest to my reference x/y values. I'd like to exclude this instance from the picking somehow. Something like 'Pick nearest to (Local_X, Local_Y) that is not instance A'.

Is that possible or do I need to do a manual bubblesort or something? Really hope I can avoid that.

  • Thanks for the post, very illuminating.

    I've been considering alternatives myself like Godot because of console support, apparently there are exporters for it available for licensed developers. But Godot 3 is still a few months away and Unity with its mixture of scripts and drag-n-drop component whatever is just too damned convoluted for me, so I'll stick with C2 for the time being at least. Doesn't seem likely, but if C3 turned out to have something like the Chowdren exporter that would be absolutely grand!

  • What exactly are people after here? I'm not going to start writing a feature until I have a clear answer that makes sense about what people want and why.

    My understanding is Rayek, Eisenhans and maybe others are concerned about legal hassles with 3rd parties if their assets are exposed, and that even a modicum of protection would cover C2 users legally. Me, I'm not interested in encryption at all so you can disregard my earlier post.

  • I'm more hyped about this than I was about Resi 7, it looks incredible

  • Tinimations, Jayjay, and — all made or are making fairly large games in C2. You could always try and PM them, ask them what they think?

  • So, is this really what people want? Do you really think this will make a material difference to anything?

    If it's quick and simple to do I think it would be a good idea to add, if for nothing else than to put people's minds at ease.

    On a related note, I'd actually like to see an option to make build code less obfuscated, so end-users can mod it more easily.

  • You could try:

    On Solid Disabled |

    | Player.Platform Set Jump Strength to 1

    | Player.Platform Simulate Jump

    | Player.Platform Set Platform vector Y to -Player.Platform.JumpStrength (you might not need this)

    ...to make the player jump just a teeny bit right when the solid gets disabled.

    If you want to submit a bug report you need to obey this regime btw:

  • Here's a little game that decided to leave all its assets out in the open.

    http://www.darkestdungeon.com/

    So far it sold about 1.1 million copies I think?

  • There's always the lure of other engines, greener grass and that stuff. But every time you switch there's a new learning period, time spent re-working things into the new mold, new frustrations to replace the old etc... So if you're not gunning for console (or mobile) I agree with —

    But you could always feel out some other engines a bit, see what's what. Godot seems pretty solid imo.

  • Thanks for the kind words guys

    purplemonkey

    Yeah, I'm gonna try that and see how well it works inside the current system.

    This looks great ! Have you made the characters in a 3D modeling program / animatede them, then render ?

    Yep. I animate in Blender and then draw pixelart on top of the render output. It's a good way to save time