Most wanted/least wanted in MMF3

Quote from Danny

It seems a wide majority of users use this "sub-app technique" for pausing but since using MMF2 I have never used Sub-App to pause any of my engines. I just throw the core coding for the engine into a group called 'Game' and have another group named 'Paused'. When the game is paused deactivate the GAME group and enable the PAUSE group, vice versa for unpause. You can quite easily create a top layer that contains all your images/components for the pause screen and just hide/show it between those two groups.

I do this slightly different.

I have a Flag, representing if the game is paused or not.
And i simply include 'is Flag ON' in ANY kind of Event/ Function i want to be pauseable.
This way i can easily Tag or Untag any function in the Event Editor without having to rearrange things or change the structure of my code.

I had a cool idea a few days ago.

Instead of having one long list of all AlterableValues, how a about being able to create 'Named Tabs' for the AlterableValus.
So you can creat a 'Movement' Tab containing all AltVals for Custom Movement, a 'Equipmen' Tab containing all equipment and weapon data, a 'Character' Tab for characters Stats and Abilities etc etc
This would mainly be for organizational purposes for the developer.

It sucks when all an Objects different data is just stringed together in one long list with no apparent structure.

The whole system of alterable (and global) values should be totally revamped.
Instead of having separate values / strings / flags, they should all be replaced by a single "variable", so you never need str$() or va() - and variables can also contain other variables (in other words, they can also function as arrays and associative arrays, and are infinitely nestable), and can be defined at runtime. Just the same as in Javascript etc...
These variables could be easily browsed using a tree-view control (no need for tabs).

eg. The player object could have a variable called "movement" which contains other variables such as speed, angle and another variable called "position", which contains two other variables - "x" and "y".

Personally, I'd like to see MMF3 built on top of a scripting language, such as a subset of Javascript (that's what Flash's Actionscript is) - keep the traditional point & click interface, but make it so all events translate directly to code in the scripting language, and all code written in the scripting language (there'd be a new script editor) translates directly back to click-style events.
That way, beginners still get the benefits of the easy point and click interface, while experienced users can type their code directly, which is much, much quicker when you know what you're doing.
This also makes it easy to share code - whether it's posting code on forums like this to get help, or writing "extensions".

+1, the current system with strongly typed variables is great for programmers but bad for people new to MMF2. They don't understand why they have to convert a string to a number or vice versa and when they do they don't even understand what it actually does.

Quote from Danny

It seems a wide majority of users use this "sub-app technique" for pausing but since using MMF2 I have never used Sub-App to pause any of my engines. I just throw the core coding for the engine into a group called 'Game' and have another group named 'Paused'. When the game is paused deactivate the GAME group and enable the PAUSE group, vice versa for unpause. You can quite easily create a top layer that contains all your images/components for the pause screen and just hide/show it between those two groups.

One issue is that stuff like animations, movements and sounds do not pause just by deactivating a group. You still have to go and manually stop built in movements and stuff.

As for what I want in MMF3, if I didn't already list it:

SUB CONDITIONS for events. PLEASE. It would make working with events so much easier if I could just use sub conditions. I mean it's literally night and day difference.

ELSE. nuff said.

An improved animation/picture editor... No more predefined animations we can't delete. Let us be able to define animations and order them however we like. Events should call animations by name, instead of list number. Unlimited action points. Again, let us create these and sort them how we want. Call them by name from events. Display preview animations in the animation editor at the proper speed according to the frame rate.

Quote

Instead of having one long list of all AlterableValues, how a about being able to create 'Named Tabs' for the AlterableValus.
So you can creat a 'Movement' Tab containing all AltVals for Custom Movement, a 'Equipmen' Tab containing all equipment and weapon data, a 'Character' Tab for characters Stats and Abilities etc etc
This would mainly be for organizational purposes for the developer.

Add my proposed Please login to see this link. and and any type of array/variable/extension/widget can be attached to any object to work as a single entity together - and you'll get tons of other possibilities at the same time.

I try not to be to annoying about it, but I really like to push this feature because it's simple, elegant, and super versatile.

The one feature I miss the most right now is to be able to have unlimited values and to be able to rearrange, group or delete old values without having to delete the ones bellow them. This always makes my project very messy. Also it would be extremely nice to be able to somehow see all the unused values in objects so you could delete them. It often happens that you create a value in an object that you later dont use because your code changes.

Most wanted in MMF3 for me are the exporters (iOS and Android at least). If it launches without them I won't be able to upgrade until they appear for MMF3.

Otherwise I think better use of qualifiers (i.e. can be used in behaviours and global events) and being able to see the names of alterable values and custom animations from within other objects' behaviours and global events.

1)Script editor or code editor for fast edit (copy - paste)
2)Add timline vector animation (like Flash)
3)Unlimited flags and rename them

I'd love to see some sort of in-built enemy ai path movement that, when ticked, makes the enemy (and instances of) move towards the player while avoiding background and active obstacles(including instances of itself).

1) 3d engine or at least a better 3d support.
2) 2D Physics engine.
3) more than 2gb compiled exe

Quote from Crian

3) more than 2gb compiled exe

This is 100% likely to make it in

A few things that comes to mind

- A much better debugging tool, one that can actually help you to track down what is causing problems, slowdowns etc..
- The debugger should show which objects is currently inactive
- Better overview over variables.
- Easier to replace anything in an event.
- Better structure for fastloops.
- Better structure of global events. Be able to assign events to frames at runtime and edittime.
- Able to select collisionmask.
- Multiple hotspots and actionpoints.
- Able to position hotspots and actionpoints at runtime.
- Better organization of objects used in application. One object pool for the whole application.
- Extensions that have no visible surface should not be placed in the frame editor, but in another window.
- Bring back the morphing tool
- New and better default movements.
- Built-in vector objects.
- Easy implementation of isometric games

Re: Debugging -
This is another area where I think Clickteam could learn from Javascript. The major browsers all have debugging tools (opera dragonfly, mozilla firebug, etc), with useful features such as the ability to run through the code one line at a time, or one function at a time (in MMF, you might want to pause after each iteration of a loop, or only after the loop has finished), or have it pause at specified breakpoints - and allow you to inspect object properties etc. Also, while the script is paused, you can mouseover page elements to view info about them - that would be handy in MMF3 (at the moment, when you have many instances of the same object, it's pretty hard to find the one you want in the debugger).

Re: Fastloop Structure -
Assuming sub-events are added, I think it's very easy to imagine how loops (fastloops & foreach loops) would work - events that are executed during the loop would just be sub-events contained within the trigger event. It would be nice if you could pass arguments to loops too, so they work like functions - I know it's possible now (using global/alterables) but it's a bit clumsy.

Re: Collision Masks -
It would be good to have more options on collision detection. At the moment, we have fine collision detection which can be *very* slow with large objects, and we have box mode which is fast but obviously not very accurate for non-box-shaped objects. I think it would be good to have the option of polygon / circle based collision detection, which would be fast but still relatively accurate.

The rest doesn't particularly interest me personally...
And without wanting to get into a debate about it, I'm not really a fan of the hierarchy idea either.

1, 3d engine
2, Camera object with focus and zoom (z axis)
3, Sound filters- alterable reverb, cutoff, effects?

I'd like

1. Removal of the 20,000 object limit - MMF2 can handle much more than this (with reasonable frame rates even) with work arounds so the limit is un-necessary for MMF3. This isn't major as I can work around the limit, its just more annoying and I'd like to hope MMF3 could pump out way more objects on the screen than 20,000 which despite being impressive as is.

2. As everyone else has suggested, being able to put Child objects into Parents would help clean up the Frame Editor and make everything feel more Object Orientated.

3. Frame Zooming inbuilt into the engine to save us having to do dodgy stuff with Viewports and Effects- as the result is in many cases ugly, buggy and doesn't give the desired result half the time. (This would be a big one for IOS titles I would think). But yeah this is really really hard to get right with the current work arounds so having the engine do it standard would be awesome.

4. Pathfinding (A* and Waypoint preferred), some form of stock AI would be AWESOME as some of the extensions do it well.. but they're not the most user friendly and again tend to bog the engine down. Generally this is the hardest part from going from a n00b to a pro user with MMF currently. So It'd be cool to see this. I'm pretty sure though that I'm asking waaaay too much here. But I'd love it if it did happen.

5. Definitely better collision detection.. Hands down this has to happen.

These are some nice suggestions. As far as number 1. I don't know the plans for this for MMF3, but wow. You would want more than 20,000 objects (actives) per frame? That is a bunch to my little brain.

Marv

How is this weird? In many dev platforms, you can have way more objects and particles than that without problems. Don't think in the limited scope of what we do with MMF2 right now, if MMF3 is meant to be more resource efficient and be a valid choice for developers exploring far more crazy ideas than what we see in MMF2 today, a limit like that will be problematic.

I got several experimental ideas I want to try that are fully possible in many other dev platforms and require over 20000 simultaneously visible objects. I'm however most familiar with MMF2, which is why I hope to be able to try out these ideas in MMF3.

I didn't say it was weird Nifflas. Have fun.

Marv

I suppose X)