NNGS

Unfortunately i've given up on this project. It works very well codewise, and I learned a lot, but the construct 2 engine is just too slow for this to work at any reasonable scale. When I have a small world, it runs fine. When you add enough blocks for the world to actually be interesting, or add any AI capable of platforming, it just bogs down. I also get horrible frame rate burps from garbage collection at random times.

To do a project like this in a reasonable scale and framerate, you'd need a non-interpreted language like C++. This engine just isn't optimized enough to handle thousands of blocks (even when using systems to turn off blocks when far away etc). Sorry to disappoint, and trust me, i'm bummed about it myself after all the time spent. I was hoping this engine would be more robust, but it really is only useful for simple mobile games, or simple 2d platformer games on pc.

Very cool, if you are able to integrate the steam API into your game, please let us know. I've been wondering for a while if someone would pull it off.   :)

Create a new family, and then add your current enemy to it. As you create new enemies just add them to the family list. When doing hit detection or picking of other kinds, use the family as the target, instead of the specific enemies seperately.

The link above will explain some of the more in depth stuff you'll need if you make your enemies more complex, and require instance variables for tracking monster type and health etc.

Families are great for grouping objects to simplify code, however they do create some issues when trying to pick particular objects and referencing instance variables etc.

scirra.com/tutorials/556/understanding-picking-with-respect-to-families

But, used properly you can use them to optimize your code quite a bit. Basically they group objects so you can do things like hit check against all objects in the family "monsters" versus checking against Troll, then Archer, then Grue, etc etc.

There are a number of ways to pick the object, but they're also picked automatically after spawning them. So in your example, just spawn the object that contains the imagepoint you want to use to spawn something else. So for example:

1) Declare variables xPoint,yPoint

2) spawn objectName (which contains imagepoint 4) at whatever XY you want

3) xPoint = objectName.ImagePointX(4)+50

   yPoint = objectName.ImagePointY(4)

4) Spawn second object at xPoint,yPoint

Or, am I completely misunderstanding you and you just want to spawn the object centred on its own imagepoint 4?

Use a variable to hold the position info. Example:

1) Declare variables xPoint,yPoint

2) Pick object that has the imagepoint 4 you want to use (otherwise you can't access that info)

3) xPoint = PickedObject.ImagePointX(4)+50

   yPoint = PickedObject.ImagePointY(4)

4) Spawn object at xPoint,yPoint

Thanks for your response Geometrix, it certainly simplifies the code. However, I am still having trouble... it still reacts the same way- unpredictably and broken. 50% of the time it works perfectly, the other 50% it just blinks 5 times and stays on the same frame.

Make sure you have the animation speed set to zero, otherwise once it gets to the specified frame it will attempt to loop.

I'm hoping to eventually take one of my C2 node-webkit executable games and try to go for greenlight on steam. I'm quite capable of making a game (been a developer for a few years) but writing the plugins to include the steam api is beyond my current coding abilities. Is anyone working on this?

Very cool guys.     <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

No problem.   <img src="smileys/smiley20.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I got to take a look at it, works well and plays smoothly. I did get a bit confused when I was at the top of the level and it was all dark. I am curious how you did the lighting though, how did you implement that?

I hope you keep going with it, I'll be looking out for the thread :)

Thanks. :)

When you're at the top/spawn point there's supposed to be a light that spawns next to you, need to look into what broke that.

The lighting is my favourite part, it was fun figuring it out. Essentially every block/prop in the world has a brightness value. Every time it needs to be recalculated I find the nearest light to each block/prop and use distance to calculate brightness. It's then "baked" and I don't need to recalculate lights again until something specific happens like breaking a block, placing a light, etc. As well, since it only uses the nearest light to calculate, adding more lights doesn't slow the game down.

Despite the fact that it runs well and looks good, i'm considering switching to the method shown in the construct example files (using blending). My lighting method only works if you support webgl, which I don't like.

Check origin point on the two animations/frames. If they're not the same (usually anchored on the feet) you'll get that. If it's an origin problem, the walk animation probably has the origin point at its knees instead of its feet.

To avoid this I usually set up all the animations, and then go to the first frame of each one, set origin and right click and use the "apply to all frames in animation". This kind of stuff is really annoying at first, but once you get the hang of it it's easy.