SwatHound's Forum Posts

  • dop2000 , mrcgkh

    Thank you both so much. I've been inputting CSV commands assuming CSV, Arrays, and Dictionaries were all the same thing. Somewhere along the line I stopped using Rex's CSV addon and it all melted together.

    I have a better understanding on "current value" now as well. Thank you both.

  • I need help understanding arrays a bit more. Let me preface this by saying I've read every array tutorial available here but my specific problem does not seem to be in any of them.

    Feel free to point me towards a tutorial you think might be able to help me out.

    I need help with column A in the image. Basically, I want to be able to use the "id" number to decide which piece of dialogue is referenced.

    Assuming I learn how to do that, being able to test if instead of a number, "|END|" is in its place, I want to be able to "close" the dialogue window. I think I can manage this with the other bit of info.

    I wanted to test the "NAME" column and grab any name in there to place into the dialogue box.

    So instead of saying "ARRAY.AT(6,3)" which would bring the line "This is the text thats on id 105" ,

    how do I instead input "ARRAY.AT("105")" ?

    ----

    I'm not sure if my problem lies with attempting to use "Array.at", instead of "Array.indexof" , or if I need to test something with a condition instead. I tried using "Array - for each X element" , and "Contains value X", but everything keeps returning either 0 or -1 in the case of IndexOf.

    Tagged:

  • R0J0hound Thank you for input and help! This definitely helps me a lot and its pretty much what I was looking for.

    Unfortunately I am not a clever man so I'm going to be staring at your capx for quite some time trying to reverse engineer it/understand it.

    Thank you kindly, once again. I was hoping someone of your caliber would be able to help me. This is truly beautiful.

    And now I feel like i'm staring at hieroglyphics, but this will surely help me.

    Thank you.

  • Taken from my post here - viewtopic.php?f=147&t=152366&p=962278#p962278

    Hello Hello. - Would anyone be so kind as to educate me on how I would achieve this effect?

    • Subscribe to Construct videos now
      - <---- Notice the way that the little units spawn out of the buildings neatly side by side? This is what I'm trying to achieve.

    A straight up "This is how its done" would be appreciated it, but I wouldn't mind a hint in the right direction

    At the moment my units kind of just cluster all over each other and it makes it difficult to see how many are coming.

    I can't wrap my head around how I would get overlapping units to slowly spread away from each other until they are not overlapping anymore, and continue their trajectory.

    how do I tell the sprite to move away to the side that its closest to? (So it doesn't go 100 pixels to the right, when 10 pixels to the left would have accomplished it)

    I don't know the proper string to type in to do something so dynamic. The best I could come up with was

    "-1x, -1y"

    repeat until not overlapping.

    But that would cause issues if the bullets were heading towards that direction anyway and it would just accelerate them awkwardly.

    ------

    I think what I need is a way to spawn my bullets but in a spread pattern that they don't collide with each other.

    If anyone could point me towards a tutorial that handles something like this, would greatly appreciate it.

    Anything I found was relating to setting bullet angle to random to simulate shotgun spread, but that won't work so well for me I presume.

    I think I might need to create another invisible sprite in a rectangular shape of sorts, pin it to the building spawning and have it rotate towards the building being attacked.

    But I still have no idea how I would get the sprites to slowly shuffle away from each other.

    If anyone has any ideas, I would really love to hear them. This has been the only thing on my mind all week and its slowed my development to a crawl, and I'm thinking I might just forget about it and attempt it in another game, but that won't solve the issue of "I have no idea how to do this" in the first place.

  • Holy crap I can't believe you're finished with this. I was reading a thread about your development process and was pretty excited for this release.

    Good job man, I wish you good luck on your future projects.

  • [SPOILER ALERT] - to those that have not played the game yet, look away from my post!

    Forgive me for my bluntness! But here comes some feedback...

    • Start - The disclaimer - its quite difficult to read whats going no and it's straining my eyes. I can read it but I would just prefer I never had to again.
    • "Press Start Menu" - Maybe some little ambient SFX playing while the guy is running away as the game waits for you to press space to start would be neat.
    • Gameplay - I don't like that (it seems) you move at the same speed as the monsters do (That's just personal preference, but then again I guess a lot of this feedback is)
    • [SPOILER] - I stopped playing after the cave with the glowy eyes. After I got past him, rocks man. rocks. That upset me. Quit the game right there.

    Then came back to right this review, and I'm actually playing it again right now - Maybe a pause button would be nice / since the game doesn't pause on focus loss.

    I agree with paulscottrobson - every time, after the first ladder.. the jump wont register.(I'm sure its cuz im bad and not an in game error or anything) I understand you're most likely going for a difficult platformer, but theres difficult and then theres "Pissing me off" - Consider adding a 0.10 second delay buffer after not on platform to be able to jump (Almost like falling off the stage on Super Smash Bros? - Also I think the original Super Mario had this? Might be wrong....)

    AUGH THAT SECOND JUMP! .... It's pretty hard.

    Bug? - I jumped over a monster and got my 100 points :s but still died. - Consider adding a run button next time - so we can get through some of those hard to reach jumps.

    Again, I understand your desire to make harder than average games, trust me, I love getting destroyed and coming back again and again until I get it right, but with this I'm just getting aggravated. I got to right before the torch on the wall and died and said... "Well that's enough of that..."

    I like how you showed the monsters coming from the caves before they spawned to give the player a heads up, that was pretty cool, and I think the musics fitting.

    So basically

    -It's not so much "hard" as it is "frustrating"

    -Consider a run button and pause, and consider tweaking the jump mechanics next time

  • Hello Hello. - Would anyone be so kind as to educate me on how I would achieve this effect?

    • Subscribe to Construct videos now
      - <---- Notice the way that the little units spawn out of the buildings neatly side by side? This is what I'm trying to achieve.

    A straight up "This is how its done" would be appreciated it, but I wouldn't mind a hint in the right direction

    At the moment my units kind of just cluster all over each other and it makes it difficult to see how many are coming.

    I can't wrap my head around how I would get overlapping units to slowly spread away from each other until they are not overlapping anymore, and continue their trajectory.

    how do I tell the sprite to move away to the side that its closest to? (So it doesn't go 100 pixels to the right, when 10 pixels to the left would have accomplished it)

    I don't know the proper string to type in to do something so dynamic. The best I could come up with was

    "-1x, -1y"

    repeat until not overlapping.

    But that would cause issues if the bullets were heading towards that direction anyway and it would just accelerate them awkwardly.

    ------

    I think what I need is a way to spawn my bullets but in a spread pattern that they don't collide with each other.

    If anyone could point me towards a tutorial that handles something like this, would greatly appreciate it.

    Anything I found was relating to setting bullet angle to random to simulate shotgun spread, but that won't work so well for me.

    Thanks in advance guys.

  • SwatHound

    there is a Pick Highest/lowest option under Instance Variables for an object...

    so, Sprite > Pick highest/lowest > choose highest and HP

    Another way would be

    System > For Each (ordered) > Sprite > Sprite.HP Descending then stop the loop after the first one...

    but you would only do it that way if you were looking for a value that wasn't an instance variable, like the Sprite with the highest Opacity, or Angle or some other attribute.

    Ah hahaha. AND THIS IS WHY I ASK QUESTIONS!

    THANK YOU! LOL I never .... used that.. function.. haha.. lovely I see it now yes yes... I must have gone over that a thousand times.

    Thank you AllanR ...

  • I'm going to assume that I need to be using the System pick conditions, but I can't wrap my head around getting the system to pick "the best" out of all of the selections.

    I'm using "System pick sprite where sprite1 HP > sprite2 HP"

    and I'm also using "pick sprite1 Nth instance" to pick the first available one but....

    I can't wrap my mind around how I would get the system to choose the largest one.

    I imagine its something along the lines of.... "For every sprite1...." and maybe ... grab it's HP value, and set it to a Global Var HPVALUE_Max

    And then grab another sprite1, and if that value is larger than the previous, replace it... and repeat for all...

    Then go to the sprite1 who's HP = HPVALUE_MAX , and of course pick the Nth instance of it incase of multiple's ....?

    And then.... use that to "Pick the best" ?

    Sorry for my rambling, I think it helped to type it all out.

    But I still wonder, is this how you would do it? (Hello reader!)

    As usual, I'm just wondering if this is "pretty much correct" and I'm not looking something.

  • From the manual

    "loopindex

    Get the index (number of repeats so far) in any currently running loop."

    My question is... would someone explain this to me in layman's terms? - I understand that, you can use it to 'fix' wait loops as explained here

    I saw it referenced in this thread about infinite spawn enemies - viewtopic.php?f=147&t=151820&p=960011&hilit=Disable+group#p960011

    And I was wondering what other ways could you apply this?

  • I hate to bump this thread, but I'm also curious about this. I assume JS = Javascript.

    stasuss -

    " there is another way to secure the valid url - request it from the server via ajax. but this is not a total security, because response could be spoofed..

    and there are some more. we can put our code into the png image.

    [can't post links. lol. google for "script to png"]

    but this way requires to implements a js-coded unpacker for this png image"

    Does anyone know about this? 90% of google searches just show photoshop batch run files converting layers to PNG.

    I'm assuming this "script to PNG" takes your code, and turns it into an image that cannot be modified as easily by malicious users?

    Its easy for people to people to steal your assets and such, but can they also take the code you used to create the game (Since you're using the C2 engine I mean)

    Are there more (as in, if anyone would be so kind as to link) advanced ways or tutorials or, maybe a "Not so simple way" of protecting your games after publishing?

  • The plugins are not too bad. You unzip them into the exporter folder for html and they appear as Objects in Construct to add.

    Getting them to work isn't my biggest problem, I think I just really fear the day that they stop working/aren't updated as quickly, and I've heard they could ruin your project until they're updated.

  • I have a capx that I used to test the global objects capacity: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-xiqK ... sp=sharing

    Note: This requires rex rainbow's Hashmap plugin.

    Hopefully it helps out some?

    Thanks for the help but I think that went way over my head.

    I still have a lot of reading up to do, and plugins scare me haha.

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  • Have you tried to duplicate layout?

    Hello again MadSpy and thank you again for your help in the past!

    Yes, I eventually learned I should just duplicate the layout.

    I was just wondering if this was "The best practice/correct" way to do it, and was wondering if this would cause some sort of memory leak or excess data or something weird down the line.

    I guess the issue with me was, I created my initial layout and used that as a training ground / sandbox / debug zone to test everything and make sure the ai ran as it needed to.

    I then proceeded to make new blank layouts and, of course, everything broke (either because I went back and set all my objects to global because I thought they would do something else, or because I did not have every sprite loaded into on the side of the layout so some things were not moving / spawning correctly / being represented)

    So, I was just wondering if this is the "proper" way people do these things, and if I'm missing some sort of "Load all information from X Layout" or some thing of the sort.

  • In another topic I asked "How do I keep my sprites/code/etc" consistently working between layouts, and I did get an answer that helped me.

    But this ended up actually breaking my game and causing all sorts of glitches due to the way I coded everything before hand.

    on /restart layout/ and /reset global variables/, replaying the same level after the game was over (either on a victory or defeat) would create artifacts from the previous game, and I realized that global causes sprites to not be destroyed on layout change / restart I guess.

    This is great for something like a platformer game, or I assume, 90% of every other situation.

    -----

    But what I needed was basically, a way that I could "Create another layout" without having to copy and paste everything from the first layout.

    It seems that, in order for my new layouts to work properly, unless I duplicate the first layout, things don't work 100% (assuming because there are things I move in and out of view of the player)

    But I was wondering, does this mean that every new layout needs you to spawn every object you have ever made onto the sides, and then simply destroy them all upon start of layout to conserve memory?

    tl;dr - do I have to copy paste every object every time I make a new layout to make sure things work - and is there a way I can just have one layout "read" the information that another layout contains so I don't have to load sprites and such?