jayderyu I would lose 9/10 posts I make on this forum if I didn't copy first and get ready to paste. I've never seen a forum so picky...

Excal

I agree with most of your points. It would be interesting learning with someone, but there would need to be good communication otherwise we'd just be doing it alone essentially. It might be hard to get going.

As for most people wanting a skilled programmer, I don't know maybe there are more artists drawn to C2 than programmers. I'm good with computers, but I'm no programmer. I figure I could learn it. It might take a while though. C2 is straight forward enough that I can get "most" of what I need, but I keep needing to look for tutorials, example capx files, or forum tips to do the advanced stuff (usually one problem at a time).

It's difficult to say how well a team will work together. If there are two artists, I can see some problems. There may be style differences for example. One person may be an expert at anatomy, and the other can only do cartoony work. This would lead to a visible difference if both artists did characters for the same game. Now, if one guy did backgrounds and the other did characters, maybe it would be better. I'm not sure.

I think that most people that come here already have either a vision of what they want to create or inspiration to do a certain type of game. That's just my theory of course, but it would seem odd for someone to want to get into making games if the had no idea what to make. Now, if they simply had a hard time deciding what to go with, then that's fair enough. I have to make choices and prioritize and settle on something as well.

When you say you want to make the game more accessible, and the other guy wants it more narrow, well it's really hard to say which I'd prefer. I hate casual games. Or rather, I hate it when they dumb down a game to make it appeal to wider audiences rather than sticking to their guns. It would be like Skyrim vs Dark Souls. One game is trying to be more accessible, the other is trying to kick your face in. I fall into the latter category. But like I said, it really depends on what you mean by accessible. I didn't know if you are talking about difficulty or just making the gameplay more intuitive.

Instead of combining like-minded people and making "great" games, each of us would rather retain full control and make "good" games.

I do admit I'm kinda guilty of that. Although to be fair, this is my first game, and I just signed up a couple months ago. I can do art on a professional level, and my music skill is pretty close. That's why I am getting into game making.

I do like being in control, and there is some satisfaction being able to say I did it all by myself. Of course, I don't plan to put out rubbish. I don't know how you define "good" vs "great" but my game is going to take a few months to finish.

I might be willing to work with someone if they were an advanced programmer. Then, I could concentrate on the art and music. Of course, there's still the issue of whether they would want to make the same kind of games that I do. I'll most likely work alone on my first project. After that, I'll either continue to work alone, or I'll see where the road leads me.

I've already followed many tutorials, even paid for some video tutorials. I can do most of what I need to get my game going. C2 is plenty deep enough that there's still plenty for me to learn though.

Aphrodite

That's interesting. I'm going to play around with that a bit when I get some time.

After some experimenting, I have found out a few things.

The only way way to scale pixel art with no distortion is to scale it using a value of 2x, 3x, etc. also called an "integer" as ErekT said.

So, I tried this manually. I turned off full screen mode, set my window size to 740x416 (which is widescreen), and then on start of layout > set canvas size to 1480x832 (or 3x= 2220x1248).

That produced the same effect as letterbox integer scale, albeit with a gray box around the layout. The pixels looked perfect though.

Unfortunately, doing this does not allow for much play. It does not adjust to a screen size automatically. And since 2x is the lowest you can go, it does not have many uses. 3x is too big even for a 1080p monitor.

I don't think it'd be worth it since the result would not be different than letterbox integer scale anyway. Unless I'm wrong, of course.

I will do another quick test of letterbox integer scale on my laptop which is a lower res than my desktop, but ultimately, I think we will just end up using scale inner or some other mode that fits better to our monitor's resolution.

Letterbox integer scaling on my desktop looks okay, but the black bars all around are a bit blagging. I don't know if it's worth the trade off.

I guess at normal viewing distance, and with everything in motion, it would not be so big of a deal having some slight distortion. The picture is mostly intact, just with a few areas being a bit different. It's disappointing, but I guess there's nothing that can be done.

Hmm, after doing another test with a couple more objects, it looks like there is still some distortion no matter what. It was more apparent with certain patterns.

Letterbox integer scale was the only option that was true to the pixel art with no distortion. But unfortunately, it is not really "full" screen since it has black bars at the top, bottom, and sides.

Every other way produced distortion to some degree. Pixels are either getting squished or stretched slightly. The effect is hard to notice, but it does look nicer without it.

Is there really no way to resize pixel art to full screen without distorting it?

Here is a test I did with beta 153.

As a professional artist, I am extremely picky about how my images look. In fact, if one pixel is out of place, it bothers me. While it is not so big of deal on a rock or something, on a very small face it could be huge.

So, here is a comparison of pixel art I am working on for my first game. This is for a health bar and power-up.

I have labeled everything. On the left is low quality, and on the right is high quality.

Both are set to scale inner in Chrome using point sampling. Resolution is 540x960px. Low quality is fullscreen low quality and high dpi set to no. High quality is fullscreen quality to high and high dpi to yes.

I am using a 23" 1080p monitor with a nice, sharp picture. You may need to save the image and zoom in if you can't see the details.

A. This skull is full size, and is about 21x26px. As you can see, they are both the same either way.

B. Perfectly round objects are a bit of a problem when resized. This image has been downscaled from 40x40px to 32x32px in C2. Low quality has rougher edges and missing pixels. However, even in high quality mode the edges are rough and the pixels are squished.

The small square shows some missing pixel data and "squished" pixels for comparison.

C. This is a different image entirely with transparent edges to make it smoother. Again, the image was resized in C2. Low quality is obviously worse and has missing pixels as well, but even high quality suffers from squished pixels even though the edges are nicer.

D. This is the ball at full size. There is really no difference in either.

In conclusion, the only "safe" way I see to render pixel art is to keep everything at full size and simply draw it the correct size in your art program (I use photoshop cs5).

Well, it seems that nvidia released another graphics card driver for the 680 last month. I did a clean install, and it seemed to fix the problem.

I thought I had updated not too long ago, but this year has gone by so fast, who knows.

Anyway, it works for now. I'll let you know if I have any more problems.

Here is a screen shot of right clicking on a sprite. You can see that only the options that my mouse cursor touches actually show up. It's completely invisible when I first right click. You can also see a faint outline of the pop up menu. It never actually fills in entirely. If I moused over the other options, they would show up too. They are not actually missing.

And of course, once out of every 30 clicks, it will show the menu as normal. Oh, and I'm not sure where the auto hide feature is, but I don't think it would be that.

I don't know if this counts as a bug or not, but I'm sure it's not 'intended' so I'll post it here.

This does not seem to be specific to any one capx, so there's no point in posting one. I have upgraded to version 152 (64 bit), though I may have had this problem before. I honestly can't say.

It happens all the time now. Basically, any "menu" will be invisible until I mouse over each option in the menu.

These include things like right clicking on a sprite (insert new object, edit animations, clone object type, etc.), the drop down arrow at the top of the screen (customize quick access toolbar, etc.), and things like right clicking on an animation (add animation, add subfolder, etc).

Now, this is not a crippling glitch. It does not affect performance. It is a bit annoying though, and slows me down a bit.

Sometimes, like I said, it will work fine, but I'd say that 90% of the time, I end up with an invisible menu that I need to mouse over before I can see what's there, and they show up one at a time.

I don't know what's causing it. This is the only program on my computer that does this.

It's a fairly new computer, Win 7. Let me know if you need anything else.

What did they change in the new release? How is it different?

Well, this has already been pushed back to page 3.

The only solution I have come up with is to use multiple families, and in each one have a different sprite entirely (even though it's the same enemy type).

So, it'd be like warrior1, warrior2, ninja1, ninja2, etc. Each with their own sprite.

For example:

family 1: warrior1

family 2: warrior2

Etc.

So, it'd be more code to write, but each spawn area would only spawn from its list of enemies. So, warrior1 could only spawn from family 1. Then, there would never be a duplicate and I can still have it be completely random.

Does that sound good guys? I was unable to come up with another way, possibly due to my lack of coding skills and inexperience with C2, but this looks to be the easiest way. What do you think?

Of course, there are going to be maybe 10 to 20 spawn points per level, so I don't know how well this is going to work.

Well, I originally had it set to system > create, rather than object spawn another object. And I had some coordinate ranges typed in.

I'm still not sure which one I will use, but either way, I need to get the issue sorted out with duplication or I'm not going to be able to do any of them.