Thanks guys.

Yeah, I'm thinking I'll put a more fleshed out tutorial area in the final thing that explains the controls in more detail. And the difficulty will start out lower.

My work in progress, started on 2-16-10:

<img src="http://i48.tinypic.com/ipwrqv.png">

<img src="http://i45.tinypic.com/2eewhew.png">

<img src="http://i49.tinypic.com/r88pkx.png">

<img src="http://i48.tinypic.com/aujqts.png">

Try it out: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4846308/Squirdblast.rar

Collect rings to build up your chain. The long white bar that appears at the top when you collect a ring shows how long your chain will last. The upper left corner shows your high score. The upper right corner shows how many rings you need to get your next boost and how many boosts you have. The number in the upper middle shows what your current chain is. The safe zones stop your chain timer from going down. There's no health limit, but if you get hurt your chain ends.

The problem is that when I move the sprite 60*timedelta pixels or whatever, it's moving at fractions of pixels, which screws up my collision detection. In my current thing, if you're stuck in a wall, you'll be moved out by 1 pixel until you're out. But if you were 2.47 pixels into the wall or something, you'd be moved out 3. This means that falling down a hole the size of the player is pretty much impossible, because your pixels aren't lined up exactly. And it won't know to move you out exactly 2.47 pixels, because that just happened to be the time between ticks at the time of entering the wall, it might be different by the time it's detected. I tried rounding the number, and though that happened to work at 60 fps, you always stop one pixel away from walls at 20 or 30 fps. And you seem to move more quickly at 20 fps than at 30, so I'm clearly doing something else wrong anyway.

Ugh, screw it, doing this is going to be so much more work than it's worth. I don't want to have to figure out if the player teleported through any walls due to a low framerate either. The game wouldn't be fun in chop-o-vision of any kind anyway.

I guess this means I can't use any built-in behaviors, because they all use timedelta, right? Pretty annoying.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/9wsxos

This is the custom platformer movement that I'm working on. I know, I should just use the built in one, but it's all over the place right now. I'll switch back over in the next version assuming everything gets fixed. It's good experience for me though, this stuff will be useful in other situations.

Anyway, I've read about how I should use TimeDelta and after running this at a low framerate, I see why.

Problem is, I have no idea how to inject it into this context. Partially because I still don't really understand what it's doing.

So if someone could take a look at it and let me know how to get the movement to be the same rate over time at different framerates, that would be a big help. Any advice on how I should change this would be great, really.

I didn't make any comments in it, unfortunately. Ask away if you have questions.

By the way, the reason I added the built-in platformer behavior to the player is because even without controlling movement with it, it works wonders for collisions with moving objects. I wouldn't know where to begin putting that stuff in on my own.

Perfect. The only problem I'm still having is copying the canvas to a sprite, but I'm sure I can figure that out. Edit: Yep, got it.

Wow, you guys knocked out my questions so quickly and effectively, thanks so much.

This program and this community make it so easy to do such complex things.

This is kinda hurting my head.

I've been playing around with these canvases and the updating of the collision masks, but I can only get it to add solid parts to a canvas. Like if you copy a wall object into the canvas, it takes all of the wall in the area no matter what's in front. So I thought I could add a non-solid object to what the canvas copies from, but as long as there's some picture there, it makes it all solid. And if you copy transparency, you're copying nothing. So how do you add negative space to a canvas? Or to a sprite for that matter.

The other problem I'm having is copying the image all at once. For instance I'll have it set so that when the mouse is clicked, copy from object to canvas, copy from canvas to image manipulator, and then copy from image manipulator to sprite. The first click will copy the image to the canvas, and then the second click will update the canvas to the current image, and the previous image will go to the sprite. How do I go about updating it instantly?

Oh wow, I hadn't experimented at all with the canvas object, I really didn't give it much thought. This seems to do exactly what I want as far as image grabbing goes. And it seems like it could do the animated thing too, if I just keep pasting something from a specific spot onto the canvas.

So I guess the only question I have left is about any way I could make holes in objects. It would have to be a method that lets the player move through the spots that were taken away. All my experiments with changing the solidity of objects while the game is running have run into brick walls so far.

The idea I want to play with right now is allowing the player to grab pieces of the scenery and move them around.

I know I could make the levels out of tiles and allow the player to grab those tiles, but I'm really going for a feeling of pulling a piece out of the screen. These pieces could include multiple objects, blank space, and even the background which scrolls at a different rate.

I'm thinking the game takes a small screenshot of a square in front of the player, and if at all possible, makes a kind of transparent hole in that spot.

Can it be done? At least the small image capture part?

And this might be way out there, but if there's any possible way to rearrange parts of the screen while keeping them animated, that would be amazing. Like if an enemy walked through the hole in the screen that was cut out, it would briefly show up in the block taken out of the scenery. Like looking through a window on one side of the screen that corresponds to another part of the screen.

They're not changes that just alter stuff like jumping and acceleration, a lot of parts just seem broken. If you jump while not standing still, you just barely leave the ground. If you're running left and start turning right, the deceleration is horribly low, but in every other circumstance (including the mirrored version of this), it's fine. There are some times when jumping off of an edge causes you to slowly float up for a little while.

Maybe I could sort of mask some of these problems by altering my settings, but since it's so inconsistent, I'm probably better off building my own custom movement. Especially if it's less likely to drastically change from version to version.

Yeah, with 99.82 there are several things about the platform movement that don't work anymore, I can barely control it. Sigh.

Thanks for your help.

My player right now is a non-animated box, so it's not a problem with shape changing.

Here's the .cap: http://www.sendspace.com/file/nvw2sz

Z is jump. The first platform is a good place to test this, just jump to the top while holding right and you'll probably see the jerky motion I'm talking about.

The problem I'm having is when the player jumps up over a corner while hugging the wall beneath, the platform behavior propels it up a few pixels. It also happens when hugging a wall and hitting a lower corner, the player gets flung down ever so slightly.

Normally this probably wouldn't be much of a problem, but I'm working on a very small scale. My player sprite is 8 x 8 and the camera is locked on it and zoomed in quite a bit, so the sudden jerk is very noticeable (and a little too helpful for the player :P).

So, any ideas for how I could counteract this built-in behavior? Maybe there are more options to edit it than I'm aware of? I was thinking about narrowing my player box and adding some side padding around it that does its own wall collision stuff, but maybe there's a really simple way.

I hope I don't have to build my own custom movement, because I just got all the settings to just the balance I want. Also it's a pain. And I'm lazy. D: