I think it also highly depends on the company that you may be borrowing assets from. Case in point: Nintendo. I think they're a little less litigious when it comes to people using sprite sheets from their old NES/SNES games in free PC games. I mean, if you go to the NewGrounds website, there are literally hundreds of platformer style games using their assets. Another couple games which heavily borrow graphics from Konami, Capcom, Nintendo, etc is Super Mario Crossover, another is Mario Kingdom Fusion which I believe was written in Game Maker.

Reasons why they might allow this:

1. They don't produce computer games, so maybe those games don't compete with their primary market

2. Fan games are non profit

3. Fan games may help to promote their image (assuming they are not used inappropriately)

In the past, I've used an invisible rectangular platform object to which I would pin the player's animated Sprite. The platform object would also act as the collision object since it only has one frame of animation.

Now that I think about it though, given that you can apply a single bounding box to "All Animations" in the Sprite Editor, why not leave the collision detection in the animated sprite itself? Occasionally, the collision box is going to change (for example if the player ducks, changes size, etc), and that way, when you set the Sprite's Animation to "Anim_Ducking", the game will automatically use the collision polygon in that particular animation. This would also mean that you could switch the player to a different sprite (for example, if the game had multiple playable characters), and the sprite would contain the appropriate collision polygons.

This is my line of thinking:

Generic Platform Object (contains local variables for the Player)

Family.PlayableCharacter (pinned to generic platform object)

-- Sprite CharacterX (contains bounding polygons)

-- Sprite CharacterY (contains bounding polygons)

-- Sprite CharacterZ (contains bounding polygons)

Doesn't that seem okay? Are there any downsides that I'm missing?

This is more of a design-level question, but I'm really fussy about keeping everything nice and hierarchical.

Thanks,

-- cacotigon

Confirmed:

Specs:

Intel Centrino

Windows XP 32-bit

Construct 2 Release 99 (32-bit) Beta

Repro steps:

1. Create a new project (capx)

2. Import a png file(I used drag-and-drop)

3. Select picture in active layout

4. In Left-Column Properties Bar and under Properties tab, click Animations->Edit

Result:

An unhandled win32 exception occurred in Construct2.exe

As near as I can tell, this only happens when using the Properties Bar. Right-clicking on the image and clicking Edit Animation works fine, Right-clicking on image under Projects Bar also works correctly.

As I don't have another computer to test this with, I can't verify whether this problem is limited to my particular configuration or is more general in nature.

-- cacotigon

If you are worried about performance due to for call being run multiple times, you could have a separate dictionary object, a key exists for each integer in the array, the key's value is set to the number of times aforementioned key exists within the array. Then, whenever you make changes to the array such as adding or deleting an integer, update the corresponding key's value in the dictionary. Then, whenever you want to find the number of times any given integer exists within the array, you can just do a vey quick dictionary check instead of a 'for' call.

If you are doing lots and lots of lookups, this would probably be faster, however if you are constantly making lots of changes to the array, the performance gain may be negligible.

Yeah, Scirra has been really cool about accommodating us "keyboard warriors". :)

StephenC:

Well, the primary inflammation as reported by my doctor was located in my forefinger of my right hand (even to the point of incurring trigger finger where the tendon sheath itself is inflamed), one other thing that helped is that I own an microsoft ergonomic keyboard, whereas I had no equivalent for the mouse. I even had to give up playing RTS-style games for a while when it first happened <sob> :)

R0J0hound:

I'm not sure I understand, are you saying you check the tile position of the player (and the the tiles which surround him), and for any tile that is solid you spawn a temporary invisible solid box?

Music track is very nice, really good use of arpeggios, I'm curious what tools you used to compose it?

I guess that makes sense. I was just trying to make a single webapp that people could navigate to regardless of whether they're mobiles or laptops. Maybe I could do a single regular webpage that detects the platform using some javascript (navigator.platform) which redirects to the appropriate page based on that.

As has been mentioned before, even with AppMobi support, playing sounds only works after a user interaction. (too bad there isn't a way to simulate a fake user input event for this purpose though)

Seems like if I really want sound at this point on a mobile platform, I'm going to have to build a dedicated app for it, guess I'll have to pony up 100 bucks a year for ios development license. (sigh)

Thanks again for your help.

Ashley

Well, I've tried out AppMobi a little bit.

Steps:

1. Created a AppMobi sample project

2. Exported as AppMobi experimental directly into the Appmobi project directory, looked okay in XDK viewer

3. Built as a distributed webapp

4. Copied into my dropbox folder for testing.

My results were.... mixed to say the least.

Sound seems to work a little better, and everything works with my ipad 1st gen as well as an ipod touch. Downside, is that it doesn't view in firefox properly, three question marks show up and nothing loads at all. Chrome loads the game but the Touch plugin with mouse control is oddly disabled.

F5 Preview works on both browsers perfectly, and so does exporting as standard html5 and testing on a local wamp webserver, so I'm not really sure what's going on.

Any ideas?

—

I can't really get either (tiledbackgroundfromurl, or loadurl) plugin to work very reliably. By disabling WebGL I can get loadurl to display an image on Firefox (though not on Chrome). The tiledbackgroundfromurl plugin makes use of a wait_for_textures call which I think is only useable in the object constructor, thus disabling the ability to load pictures at runtime. I do appreciate the hard work you put into this plugin though.

Thanks,

-- cacotigon

I'm playing it in the browser, it actually looks pretty nice on my ipad, given that it's not running fullscreen, and I haven't made any special changes to accomodate for mobile platforms.

Hmm, I was afraid that appmobi wouldn't work because the ajax call goes out to grab a file that resides in the local dropbox directory. But I'll give appMobi a go tomorrow.

Regarding the sounds:

Interesting, that explains why the sounds are working on the buttons, but not anywhere else in the program.

Thanks for the assistance~~