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.

Finally got my computer back up and running...

Before I discovered Construct I was using Gamemaker (just a little) and the RPG Maker series. RPG Maker XP had a very handy feature called "self switches", and I was wondering if Construct has an equivalent function to it.

Basically, if I wanted to make a treasure chest I would have the first page of events be triggered by the action key, and that would turn on self switch "A" (the first switch). Under the page for switch "A" I would put the actions that I want the chest to perform (increase party gold by 500, display message "found 500 gold", change graphic to "chest opened", etc.).

After all that I would turn off switch "A" and turn switch "B" on. Switch "B" would simply display an "Empty" message to prevent you from gaining an infinite amount of gold.

Now, the difference between doing this with regular switches and self switches is that once I finish creating the chest using self switches I can copy and paste as many chests as I want and each of them will be treated as a new, unique item. Normally if you simply copy and paste an object then all of them would open at the same time and they would all be considered one single chest.

Soooo... what I'm wondering is; "Does Construct have an equivalent function to 'self switches'?"

Or, rather...

Is there any way to make an object like a treasure chest and have it possible for you to simply copy and paste new chests that all act the same but are considered new and unique objects?

The "paste clone" command doesn't do what I want...

http://www.mediafire.com/?csagmnte034

The .cap is pretty simple, just a character and a treasure chest with some events attached to it. If anybody understands what I'm looking for I would greatly appreciate your help.

**I won't be online again until Sunday so if anybody posts between now and then, thank you!**

The memory fix took care of the problem I had with it trying to resize sprite when I import them due to lack of video memory.

However... when I import a sprite and click on any part of it with either the wand tool or the color select tool it erases most of the sprite, even if I click on the background color and not the actual character itself.

It has no effect on the sprites that I have already imported though, so if worse comes to worse I can just import them all with .93 and then do my eventing in .942. No biggie, really.

Glad to hear that your wife and kid are unharmed. Well... she's close enough to unharmed for it to count, I suppose.

Let this be a lesson to everyone... BUCKLE UP!

That accident could have been awful if they both weren't.

I didn't copy it down...

I'll post it tomorrow if uninstalling and reinstalling when I get home tonight doesn't change anything.

(I assumed that someone else had the same issue by now... oops)

On a positive note the platform movement works for me now.

Is it a bad idea to have both .93 ad .94 installed on the same drive?

.93 works the same as it did before but I have two errors with .94 that haven't been mentioned yet.

When I import a new sprite it says that my video card doesn't support a 32x32 image (does the same with any size) and it says that if I choose yes it will be resized. It doesn't look like it is actually changes size, though.

Also, in the picture editor if I click on any part of the sprite with the wand tool it makes the whole image disappear.

I'll try uninstalling both versions when I get home and just installing .94 to see if that fixes it.

(I'm using Windows 2000 SP4 and a Radeon 9800pro... I should probably grab the latest drivers to see if that makes a difference)

Wow... looks like I joined at a good time!

(glances at clock)

Damn. Four more hours until I can go home and give it a try.