Posts by TheSynapse

Okay, so as promised (and prompted by Mehrdad - cheers!), here's the point and click demo stuff I was working on.

It's all crappy graphics and animation, but point of it is to show some systems stitched together to form the potential for a point and click engine. In particular, it took AGES to make the dialogue trees system. There are two simple puzzles in there and I hope that I've shown how the scripting system can be extended.

I'm sure that all the stuff here could be improved upon, but it's a start. It seems that no-one else has ever been interested in doing a point-and-click in MMF2 (and I can understand why, with the availability of AGS), but there could still be great potential in working on this - not least because you get more control over how your game could work (even if you have to pump a LOT more time into the venture!).

So here's the link to the file on my public dropbox.
Please login to see this link.

If someone could compress the graphics and re-upload it to the forums for posterity that would be great.

I hope this helps someone.

Bluetooth dongles can be bought for less than 2GBP, so they're less than a beer and that's not your problem.

Actually, getting a wiimote to talk to a pc can be a bit fiddly at times but generally it's fine.

If you look into the WiiMote Project and the stuff they've done on making an interactive whiteboard (Please login to see this link.) then you'll find all the stuff you need to get Wiimotes and PCs talking to each other.

I'm a (soon to be ex-)teacher and played around with this a couple of years ago - you can use 2 wii remotes and some infra-red pens to make a pretty good replacement for a couple thousand pounds worth of interactive whiteboard (which I always thought were a bit crap and over-hyped anyway).

Hope that helps.

Cheers people.

At the moment I've got a few deadlines to focus on. But in the next couple of weeks or so I intend to try and really nail an extendable system that can be adapted.

At the moment I'm also using a program called Chat Mapper to map out conversations and then export them to rtf or xml, so ultimately the best thing is probably an xml system of some sort, but I'm not sure.

Plus, if it stays in ini files that gives games the maximum portability to other runtimes. My interest is Flash and iOS personally.

Cheers again. Have a look and see what you can do with it and repost if you make any improvements.

Just thought I'd post what I've done so far.

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So here's a sort of rough-around-the-edges version of the dialogue system I'd like to use in a game - something just like Lucasarts/Sierra games amongst others.

Comments and feedback welcome - especially if there's any tricks that I've missed to simplify it (other than removing the various numbers/strings I have for tracking what was going on).

Cheers and thank you to Tree Hugger for the original example file.

By the way, my example uses INI rather than INI++ because I'd like to learn how to do things in MMF which mean I can publish to Flash later on.

Hang on - doesn't spread value put values in the alterable values so that you can reference them to each other? I think I've missed something in my understanding here....

Couldn't you easily do this though without that kind of option?

On Collision with <wall maybe?>
Set object's X,Y to that of the edge of the wall.

Quote from MuddyMole

No, you don't.
In most cases, that's inefficient and needlessly complicated.

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Oh, okay. Sorry. How *would* you do it then if you had several tanks with turrets (or equivalent), and how is the method I learned from that tutorial overly complicated?

Not being aggressive - just eager to learn!

And if you want to have more than one tank then you need to start using spread values and using them to attach the relevant turret to the appropriate tank.

If you look in the tutorial on moving body parts using maths in the tutorials list then it has a good example and explanation on how this is useful.

I've looked at that PNG and I can't for the life of me work out what you want to do.

What are you trying to achieve?

Also, why do you have overlapping AND collision as an event? I would have thought that would create problems. You probably only need one of those conditions, and that would be overlapping since it doesn't look like those objects are moving.
Also, don't put that deactivate group test action under always. Link the deactivate group to a trigger variable or condition of some sort.

Use an active for the area around your character. You can probably get the effect you want by playing around with effects and/or shaders. Make sure you download the complex shaders pack. I don't have the link to hand (someone else might well do) but if you search for a couple minutes you'll find it.

To make it move round with your character just make sure that you have the rectangle to always set its X,Y to that of your main character.

Always
>>X,Y of rectangle = X,y of character.

You may have to play around with hot spot/action spots to get it to line up correctly a bit.

Hope that helps.

I would also suggest doing the custom platform movement tutorial. Personally, I learned alot more about fastloops and loops in MMF2 in general from that than from other sources.

Can you not set the autoscroll function to be on at Start of Frame?

Apologies.

Thanks for reply.

Bump.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that book. Unfortunately for me, the Uni project that I need to build and hand-in is due in about 2 weeks time!

But I've still pre-ordered the book already. Like a dream come true for me!

1) Sorry, let me make it clearer.

What I meant was would the string be picked up in the following:

[1]
This is an example sentence.

Or do I have to make it do this:

[1]
1= This is an example sentence.

I think the answer, through trial and error, is the latter. But I was hoping that there might be a way to do otherwise. It's to do with how another program that I'm using exports to text. Trying to cut time and be lazy!

2) The parser seems to work well enough, maybe the tokenizer is faster because it's simpler and therefore leaner? As long as I don't need the other parsing functions, maybe I should use the tokenizer?

The reason why the dialogue entries are in a seperate file is for ease of editing and ease of use. Another program I use exports to rtf and then I edit it down into ini format and save it as pure text. I'm trying to think about the future when I will be handling LOTS of lines dialogue.

However, I may restructure it yet. My system works well for conversations, but I'm not sure about options. Another system on the board works well for options, but not conversations where dialogue alternates between two actors. Now I just need one system to bring them together (and in the darkness bind them.....!).

Nothing is ever useless. It's just that sometimes you have to work at something hard to appreciate that there are better ways to do it. I've done that a few times now, especially with a custom platform engine I'm working on. When I pick it up again I'm going to have to wipe the whole lot and start again from scratch!

But the next time it will be better because I've learned so much already from struggling before!

Hi Bobafonts.

This is the basic walking system that I've come up with so far. Uses the integrated path planning object since that seemed more useful/powerful that the Advanced path planning object.

I also hated the idea of having to redraw paths every damn time you wanted to change anything. I could see that getting very messy very quickly.

This example uses invisible objects to mark out the base of obstacles/furniture, therefore telling MMF2 whether the player should be in front or behind the obstacle.

Maybe it could be redone with layers, but then objects don't collide in layers, and how would you be able to tell MMF which one should be in front then.

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Let me know what you think of it and how it works for you.

Hope it helps others as well. Would be nice if I could finally help someone!

(oh, and marvel at my beautiful hand drawn graphics! )

NOTE: I'm having problems with the file size (it's 4.14mb) which is too big for the inline forums attachment. Haven't got time to redo it now, but if someone could rejig the assets so they're smaller and can upload it permanently then I'd be grateful. For now there's a link to my public dropbox.

Is there any way to remove values/strings that you're not using from the debugger window?

E.g. if you're only using 3 alterable values in an active, then you don't want to have to keep on scrolling past values D-Z in the window to get to other objects.

Right, after help from Burfelt, found out this:

To run the example, go into your extensions folder (which is in your Multidemia Fusion 2 <Developer?> folder). Rename INI++15.mfx to INI++.mfx. You can now load and run the example.

Thought I'd post this here for anyone else trying to make conversation trees. Was a big help to me. Hope it helps others.