I thought it was my crappy old pc, it seems I was wrong. But I suspected more the graphics card in conjunction with DirectX. That pc was running with WinXP.

With a first look at your cap I noticed that the "on shoot" event (event 25) contained a wrong action. It spawns an "EnemySoldeirBullet" but sets the angle of "SoldierBullet". That last one isn't picked and so all "SoldierBullet" will be randomized again and again with every shoot from one of the enemies.

Also there are targets constantly added without clearing the targets in between.

It seems that with those corrections it works?

When I was forced to use a very old computer for a while, I experienced something similar. I had some success when I right-clicked and selected "center layout" once before scrolling around and always repeated this whenever it happened to blink again.

I don't know what causes it, and don't experience it anymore, now with a more up-to-date pc.

Thanks, i've read some articles and that's very interesting. However i dont get why most of indie games dev stick with 1980 pacman rip-off graphics...

with such amazing powerful software we have nowadays.. that's beyond my understanding

Because most of them are not graphic artists, they are artists in game design.

Example: I know how to manage game flow, I can play around with code, I know how to realize nice effects, I am quite good in music and sound - but I can't draw. If I could, or if I'd found a graphic artist to collaborate, I wouldn't keep it simple. It is just beyond my possibilities <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Let me start by saying this: I was lost around the middle of part 2...but maybe some dedicated programmer wants to take the chance and make this a plugin? Yeah, I know there is one WIP by lucid, but it depends on extrenal libraries and is somehow limited. The following, on the other hand, contains the bare core with all you need, every formula, code examples, etc. Heavy.

Here is what you learn about the author of the guide:

"Dr. Michael J. Gourlay works as a Senior Software Engineer at Electronic Arts. He currently works as a senior lead software engineer on Madden NFL. He previously worked on the procedural animation system used by EA, and on Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). He was also a lead programmer on NASCAR. He architected the visual effects system used in EA games worldwide and patented algorithms for interactive, high-bandwidth online applications. He also teaches at the University of Central Florida (UCF) Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA), an interdisciplinary graduate program that teaches programmers, producers and artists how to make video games and training simulations. Prior to joining EA, he performed scientific research using computational fluid dynamics(CFD) and the world's largest massively parallel supercomputers. His previous research also includes nonlinear dynamics in quantum mechanical systems, and atomic, molecular and optical physics. Michael received his degrees in physics and philosophy from Georgia Tech and the University of Colorado at Boulder."

Here is the link to the first of ten parts of his article:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/fluid-simulation-for-video-games-part-1/

Just counted your rep, looks about right. There's still some 'rep leaks' that can build up over time. Sorry about that :( I'm still trying to find them. There's still a lot of changes taking place as well (I deleted a couple of other badges recently).

Ah, I see. I was just so happy to reach the 3k. Well, no time to talk, I have to write another 200 posts in the help section *takes some ice, to cool the fingers down in between* :D

Hurray :D

If only it would be that simple all the time :)

With that reset I lost about 400 reputation points - and I was NOT awarded the pirate princess badge.

If the layout isn't restarting, the music should just keep on playing. If it is restarted it should start playing from the beginning.

"on load" will only be triggered if the game state is loaded with the system action "save/load to disk" (which may of course be the case here)

I would assume some events interrupting the music playing, but it is hard to tell without looking at the events.

Of course, you can.

There are the conditions "On selection changed" and "On double clicked". I provide an example that also uses .SelectedLine, .LineText and .LineData

listbox.cap

Omg. I should start to math all over again.

"RGB(clamp(lerp(GetRed(particle('fadetoColor')), GetRed(particle('fadefromColor')), particle('currentcolortime') / particle('colorfadetime')), 0, 255), clamp(lerp(GetGreen(particle('fadetoColor')), GetGreen(particle('fadefromColor')), particle('currentcolortime') / particle('colorfadetime')), 0, 255), clamp(lerp(GetBlue(particle('fadetoColor')), GetBlue(particle('fadefromColor')), particle('currentcolortime') / particle('colorfadetime')), 0, 255))"

What are you talking about. How did you calculate it :). lerp inside of clamp. Sin, cos, tan. I wish I had listened my math teacher on my collage years.

Thank you for sharing.

You're welcome :)

But don't get too afraid just of long phrases. It really is simple, as soon as you follow the logic behind it.

The values of the three color channels are linearily interpolated, so that all three change in the same amount of time. This is what lerp is for. The t-value of lerp ist calculated as a ratio of the total time given to interpolate and the actual time.

Clamp just serves one purpose: timedelta is constantly substracted from currentcolortime, and so can get negative, which would make the t-value negative also, and the color would continue to change (but in an unwanted way). Something was needed to prevent that the color value will get negative and clamp is one way of doing so. You could also just use max(formula, 0).

The fun of sin and cos is that they are so easy to use. Just give it an angle and it tells you a position, I love it ;)

And when used to animate something it also has some kind of built-in deceleration/acceleration. I did go into detail somewhere else, so I won't repeat it, but if you could only learn and use two functions, I'd say go with sin and cos. What you can realize with only those is so versatile.

It is possible not only to move the particles slightly, but to do anything you want with them. You have full control over every single particle at every tick.

The particles don't "slide" because their positions are recalculated on every tick. If you just stop that, they will "slide".

Here is an example of a fire-like ring:

customparticles2.cap

EDIT

Tip: Hold 'space' and slightly move the mouse to get a burn-in effect.