Yann - The master strikes again, thanks man! I will give it a shot and post a capx when I got something, but this seems very straightforward, thank you!!

You can create as much object as you have frames and swap them during runtime :D

A big pain but that should work

What your saying is replace the tiled background with another tiled background, creating the illusion of a single animated background animating?

Would this not be resource intensive?

So for a simple 3 frame, 1 second, animation, the basic setup would be

tiledbackground 1 is on screen

wait 20*dt

destroy tiledbackground 1

create tiledbackground 2

tiledbackground 2 is on screen

wait 20*dt

destroy tiledbackground 2

create tiledbackground 3

tiledbackground 3 is on screen

wait 20*dt

destroy tiledbackground 3

create tiledbackground 1

Is this going to ruin my performance, the water covers more than half of the playable/viewable area.

Is there no way to create animated tiled backgrounds without editing js scripts? I started to create water and realized there's no way to add animation frames to the tiled background object. Would be a ton of sprites, so a tiled background would be ideal, but if there's no animation it does not look like water.

Very cool topic, thanks for bringing it up!

To do a camera move in a birds eye view style game (zelda, space shooter) how would you make the camera move away and then back to the player?

Brainstorming about it makes me wonder if you would use a sprite as a "target" for the camera with a scroll to behavior. When the cut scene starts the player's "scroll too" would be disabled, and the camera target's "scroll to" behavior would be enabled for the cutscene. After the cutscene ends shift the "scroll to" back onto the player character.

1. Are you asking if it's OK to use lots of instances of the same sprite? That's pretty much what the manual was talking about. It doesn't matter which object types you use, lots of instances will cause a slowdown, period.

In UDK and the proprietary engine we used at my last job there is a performance boost when using instances as opposed to unique sprites/meshes. Is this not the case here?

If you have two sprites that are the same object, placed as instances, it would not perform better then two objects that are unique?

A+B > A+A in terms of resource use?

Make a variable "score"

Make an event. Give that event a system condition of "every x seconds." Set the amount of seconds will pass to the amount of time between adding to score. Give the event a system action "Add To Variable". Make it add to "score" and set the number it adds to how much you want it to go up by every time the event plays.

Whatever you set the time to for every x seconds, is how often it will add to score. Whatever you set the add to score value to will be how much it increases.

For instance, every second add 1 to score would make it add 1 to score each second that passes.

Here is an example of what I am talking about:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/30187917/plaatforming_with_score.capx

Plugin is awesome, going to be implementing it into my project today, will cut down on a lot of duplicate objects created for effects.

In my experience "additive" and multiply are opposites of each other.

Additive makes all of the white information "add" to whatever is below it,and black is shown as invisible, used for glows and highlights etc.

Multiply makes all of the black information "add" to whatever is below, and white is shown as invisible, used for making shadows and grunge etc.

First make a layer for the timer, and set the parallax to 0 so that it will not move when the view does. Position your text where you want to show the time measure (score.) The dotted line represents the border of the players view, so use that to reference where you want the timer to always stay. Also add a "keyboard" object to your project so you can map the spacebar action later

In the event sheet make a variable "score". Make an event with a condition of every x seconds, and use the amount of seconds you want to pass before another point is added to the score. make another condition for the object to not be touching (overlapping) whatever object you want it to pause et. Make an action for your text box that will display the score and set it to "add to variable" action. Select the amount you want the score to change by with each second passed.

For instance,

every 1 second            | add +1 to "score"

is not overlapping object |

Make a second event that is "every tick", and give that an action using the text box you made for score set the text to "score".

for instance:

every tick | set text to "score"

make a third event with the keyboard condition "on pressed" and select spacebar as the button that should be pressed. give the event an action of setting the variable "score" to 0. This will make it so that whenever you press spacebar you will have the score reset to 0

I am not sure if this is what he's talking about, but I wouldn't mind having the ability to group a selection of objects (sprites, mostly) and assign a "group" to them. For instance a tree with a trunk, canopy, and apples could be 3 seperate sprite objects, with different properties/behaviors. trunk is a plain sprite, canopy is a solid to platform on, and apples can fall to the ground. To do this now you would have to select each object (either with a marquee selection or by clicking each). If it were possible to make a "group" of objects, such as in illustrator or flash, you can more easily select and duplicate/reposition a series of objects. Families to me are more for event sheet work, where as group would be a for the layout view and would make multiple objects selectable by one click.

Not a problem bro! I thought I was going crazy!

Downloaded it, installed it, and it works like a charm! No more bug while using webGL and so now my game is looking much better.

I wanted to mention, having the ability to use effects with the text is invaluable for making stylized text. Being able to make it glow, use it as a mask, and creating "flashlight" text opens a lot of doors for stylistic choices.

Thank you so much for your hard work, I owe you a beer! <img src="smileys/smiley32.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I would set them to "Additive". Then you don't need to add alpha channels and you can get additional "glow" when they overlap eachother.

I have never used gimp, but to make the background tileable you need to offset the entire canvas by 50%, so if the background is 512x512, shift the entire image to the side 256 and up 256, and then remove the seams that appear after this shift. In photshop there is an "offset" filter, if you have to do it by hand, cut the image in half and swap it manually.

If it would help the forums, I can make a "creating simple tileable texture" tutorial.

I hate to insist, but I can not find the Set Effect action or an effect option in the properties. I cleared my internet cache, deleted my spritefont folder, redownloaded your may 7th update, and installed it again. I create a new project, added a sprite font, and checked the properties and created an on on created event and checked the actions, and still nothing. The icon in the zip is the old spritefont icon, and the most recent file in the zip is edittime.js 2/21/2012. Is there another download location I am missing, it appears what I am downloading is out of date.