After many long sessions and hours of tedious debugging, I'm being screwed by the simple problem of creating a high score table. I don't even want to get into details about how to move the landed troopers because it's an insane headache of (probably) sloppy code that somehow *just* manages to work.

I found a tutorial high-score table somewhere in the forums, and although it's rudimentary it pretty much works. The trouble is when I try to adapt it to be a little slicker. Eg. If the player doesn't put any text into the input box - play a "deny" sound.

On top of that, having the enter key pressed *while* the cursor is inside the input box (instead of only being able to press a submit button). And then there's the loading from disk and sorting the table. Ideally, I'd like to use something a little prettier than the listbox. Being no kind of game programmer, I simply do not understand hashtables and arrays (yet) but a tutorial would make for an excellent primer on how to accomplish this.

For once, I'd like something in Construct to be actually as easy as it seems.

I was messing around with this because it seems quite intuitive.

I *think* I fixed your problem:

<img src="http://i37.tinypic.com/1euec9.jpg">

I used a similar cooldown variable in a game of mine.

It's one of the first things I actually got working properly in Construct.

(I use 10 ms and multiples of 10 because of that warning that the milisecond rate isn't accurate

so cool_down = 100 means 1,000 ms.)

Trigger (eg Left mouse is down):

[subevent]

spaceship.value('cool_down') equals 0: fire BFG (or a loop subevent to fire 100)

Set spaceship.value('cool_down') to 10

Every 10 miliseconds

spaceship.value('cool_down') greater than 0: Subtract 1 from spaceship.value('cool_down')

If you hold the mouse button (or whichever condition you set), then each tick it checks the cool_down. If it is not zero, then nothing happens.

I may have run into a similar kind of error as yours using functions.

I worked around it using what is probably a dirty trick, but it works beautifully. Instead of calling the function directly, I have a global (or holder sprite) variable set and then use that to trigger a new function next tick. My problem was with Selected Object Lists causing hassles. It wasn't something that could be fixed with "Forget objects", and I can't remember exactly why now, only that it worked. :p

SomeEvent: Action: Do stuff, set global variable Schedule_SomeFunction=1

Always

Schedule_SomeFunction=1: Call Function "SomeFunction"; Set Schedule_SomeFunction=0

Alternatively, a variable holder sprite/box can handle all the private variables and won't clog up your app/game with globals.

Rebuilding the layout at runtime can be an annoyingly complex thing to do. Eg. If I have carefully placed all the multitudes of sprite objects used for specific detection, triggers etc. then having to handwrite all those x,y coordinates is too much of a task.

All we really need is a "reset private variables" action, and even "reset global variables" if we're being greedy.

Eg. I have a game that goes

Splash (sort of) -> Title -> Game -> (return to title)

It would save me a LOT of work and bug testing to simply reset variables in the layout on start.

Is it at all possible to suppress the Count error message? It's annoying as hell. It would be nice to have a toggle, because it's value is obvious *when* you need it to check for you.