Just bought my license. For now the standard license suffices well enough for me. I plan on making commercial games at some point in the future, and if the early adopter plan runs out before I hit 5000 (likely). Hey, more money to you guys! =)

if you view the source. Some of the games have over half a megabyte of javascript code!

Well, I guess they'll have to keep consistency between products. I've always thought GameMaker was bloated.

The way I would do it is to have two variables, one for checking if the character is doing anything, let's call the variable 'idleCheck' and the other for a countdown, 'idleCount'.

So you set up so that whenever the player does 'anything' you change idleCheck to 1 (or true or yes, whatever works for you) and when the player doesn't do anything it reverts back to 0.

Now, when idleCheck equals 0 you start adding to idleCount, effectively counting upwards, and when the number goes beyond whatever amount suits the time you want you start your zooming event. If idleCheck turns to 1 (player does something) you set idleCount back to 0 and reset your zoom.

That works really well ROJO (and if you give the tile sprite a variable you can use that as an index for what animation to play, using the same frame hierarchy as the current one you can use that for separate tilesets. =P

Definitely gonna have this in mind if I ever do a level editor.

Anyway. This does what I want to do, but even so it's not efficient enough for actual use. I want to use this real-time on a larger level. Updating every sprite with a loop pretty much constantly will make the framerate drop like a stone.

So I tried to make it more efficient. First, a "for each" loop that runs once at the start of layout, then with a second I tried to limit the loop to only updating the 8 tiles surrounding the tile that was destroyed.

box.net/shared/v990kh0t3c6xse0y5jp1

It seemed to work alright. So I increased the resolution and filled the layout with tiles, and the framerate is still dropping. As I'm typing I realize I made some mistakes (running the loop 8 times and essentially picking all of the eight tiles each time, for instance)

I'm not there yet, but I'm getting closer! =)

Edit: I think I did it. If so, wooh!

box.net/shared/qrib8jot0ejpz5io5q5c

I'd say what you want is to use the path behaviour.

A trajectory is something entirely different. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajectory

newt: That article looks great. I only skimmed it now, going to take a closer look at it tomorrow.

ROJOhound: That was a much better way than what I did. I messed around with it some and it seems like it doesn't want to update all of the sprites (or any at all) if you, during runtime, take some away and run the "for each" loop again.

That's definitely clever, it's kinda doing what I had in mind backwards though.

What I want to use it for right now is terrain that is more or less interactive (think of Terraria's terrain system for instance).

Maybe this illustrates what I mean better.

<img src="http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j135/mr_norris/relative_vars.jpg" border="0">

I actually managed to do something to that effect after messing around with the cap you linked to. But it's convoluted and I'm sure there's a better (ie, more efficient) way of doing it.

http://www.box.net/shared/pvhrdvmy872bs0cdm1tk

Any thoughts on how to make this more efficient?

<font size="2">When I get to that other game idea I had it's going to involve A*, and that's a whole other level of complexity other than mere terrain handling.</font>

I'm not currently working on anything game related but I had an idea I wanted to test some days back. However, to do it proper I'd need to be able to check, on a square grid, if any objects were adjacent to another.

I ran into this problem a while ago with an idea for a grid-based tactical rpg engine I had (though I decided to wait with that game 'til C2 had everything needed for it), and now I find myself facing the same problem (albeit from a slightly different angle), and I've no idea of how to do it. Hopefully some of you guys do.

So, I have object laid out on a square grid basis (have no actual code/events for the grid, I'm just using the grid feature in the layout editor) and I want to be able to check if an object on the grid is adjacent to anything else, so I could change its attributes depending on what surrounds it.

I'll definitely get the Standard version as soon as I get some money. =)

Originally they were going to make Spider-Man 4, but Raimi dropped out of the project and with him both Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst went. My guess is that Sony had allotted a budget for the fourth movie and simply used that for the reboot instead when Raimi dropped. The announcement of the reboot and the cancellation happened virtually simultaneously so I'm quite sure this was the case.

I wouldn't mind a change in casting and/or director. Heck, Peter Parker is the easiest character to cast in the world, he has no distinguishable features other than... brown-ish hair. And anyone reading the comics would be used to the characters being portrayed extremely different depending on current writers and artist. So a change in cast wasn't really a big deal. The part that pisses me off so much is that they do the origin story again. They just HAVE to have it occur during the highschool period. Sigh.

(<font size="2">Edit by Ashley: no need for gratuitous gory cartoons! :) Thanks!</font>)

bit.ly/q2kzIB

What can I say? As a Spider-Man fan I'm... disappointed... =(

I hath plussed thee up another number. =)

I might use this +1 button thing for my own site.