Posts by Nifflas

So, it's time for me to phase out of the community.

I've pushing MMF2 lately further than it seems designed for, and gathered enough programming skills that it makes more sense to me to switch to a more advanced platforms that allows me to write more efficient code and work with things that MMF doesn't do (meshes, vectors, 3d). Since I'm getting quite okay at C#, it makes most sense that I don't use a visual language.

That said, I owe Clickteam the fact that I was able to get into game development and make a living off it. Back when Klik & Play was released, it was the easiest thing out there, and going from it to The Games Factory and finally Multimedia Fusion was great as it allowed me to focus on learning about game mechanics, level design, graphics and music before figuring out programming syntax, functions, OOP, data types, and so on. For a lot of beginners, having to learn a language first is the bottleneck and CT's products has always been great at getting around this very scary step. It's also a very impressive product for such a small development team.

I won't develop any more in MMF2 and won't be active here on the forums (maybe I'll swing by the chat channel every once in a while), but I feel that CT is doing something awesome and wish you all the luck developing your platform. Also, I'm thankful for this community and all it's friendly people. I'll be back for MMF3 and give it a serious chance, and I'm open for the idea of creating content for it and help out in any way I can.

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And Nifflas, yes Journey is good, but it really isn't worth buying a console for.

It's not about one game, it's a lot about attitude. Sony secured a three game deal with a cool company to do unique games, and the third happened to turn out being one of the most beautiful games ever (not talking about graphics now, but the interaction between players, though it looks and sounds incredible too). They also have exclusives like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. There's The Unfinished Swan and Dyad (the latter being PS3 exclusive at first but is now for desktop too), and some cool PSN stuff (Locoroco, Patapon). Point is, Microsoft doesn't support this kind of stuff, they're very generic and uninteresting and mainly brag about games where males kills other males with guns or swords, like their entire target audience is fourteen year old boys. I can see why Journey showed up on the PS3 among other cool exclusives, rather than on the 360 - the whole point being that if the pattern repeats, the PS4 is where we'll see good stuff.

Then, when it comes to Journey itself, I'd actually get the PS3 over it. The first time I played it, the game paired me with an amazing person and I was really moved by the whole experience. That's something that happens extremely rarely. It can be years between each film, game, or album that can do that to me. I'm seriously addicted to the game, it's a good learning experience for anyone who's developing online games and want to go beyond "either we fight each other, or we fight together", and on top of that, it has some of the most amazing glitches I've ever seen in games.

Yep, and Journey. Seriously, you don't want to miss that game out.

Completely agreed. Got to have a console I can take to a summer house without an internet connection, and I've always liked trading games - which will now become so much less interesting. As I see it, it's important that the xbox one fails and everybody gets the PS4, for the reason of xbox one's intrusive DRM. Maybe then, the giants will get that they can't punish us users with unwanted restrictions just to stop a few pirates, when they should really aim at creating the best possible product for us. After all, we are the ones who gives them money for their products. It's thanks to us they can make consoles at all.

They Please login to see this link. about this, talking about a future without discs, and how these game trading restrictions doesn't appear to make sense now, but they will later. But how's this the future in the first place? Steam has sold downloadable AAA games for a long time now, which you can use on any computer if you log in with your own username. Oh, and there's an offline mode too. Sure, you can't trade games on Steam, but in that context it's more acceptable as each game isn't strongly associated to a physical object you can carry around. So, if Microsoft sticks to storing data on physical objects, people will want to trade those because it's such a natural thing to do. They can't both eat the cookie and keep it. Imposing weird restrictions and say "but it makes sense for games that aren't on discs" - for games on discs... what?

Yes, but it's still a bit limited with those. If you jump from a moving platform, it won't be as easy using the platform's movement vector as a reference point for the player, which changes how jump strength, speed, maximum speed works. With the PMO it'll be hacky. With a custom one, it can be part of it's core programming.

Outcast: Impossible to say, depends on how the custom movement is programmed. The PMO is faster, but with most runtimes it won't matter.

Reading the original topic (I need to get better at reading that carefully) which is a request for the motivation of using a custom movement, here are some things that are hard to do with the PMO and easier with a custom movement. Many can be done with the PMO but will require some hacky solutions, often to the degree that a custom movement will be easier.

* Automatic sliding down slopes sideways.
* Rotated gravity, jumping from walls and the roof.
* Wall and roof climbing.
* Moving platforms.
* Jumping against a pixel in the roof and being pushed down a pixel without losing X speed instead of colliding with it.
* Conveyor belts, wind, and other modifiers that affect the vector which the player speed and maximum speed is to be measured from.

Once, I read review about a hex editor that stated "it's very unclear what the purpose this software is". My own answer would be "It's so you can edit the binary content of a file. If you don't know why someone would want to edit the binary content of a file, you're not a person who needs a hex editor". It's the same with custom movements. If the PMO does everything you need, stick to it because it is a great object. If you at some point happen to make a game that requires a movement beyond what PMO does, you'll notice. Then it'll become clear why you'd want "total control" as you put it.

My main reason to not use it is that if I make my own movements, I can customize them better. Like, making a sloped roof that pushes the player down when you hit your head against it, or better wall climbing. There's no reason not to use the PMO if it covers everything you need to do. If it doesn't, it can be better to to create your own custom movement rather than trying get the PMO to work with something it isn't made for. If you find yourself building weird hacks around the PMO to make it work with the features you need, consider building your own movements, you may learn more about programming that way too.

PMO and evented movements both has it's advantages, so it'd be silly to say that one option is always the best.

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However, i just tried that and you have to run the loop a couple of times to get rid of all the lines....... anyone know why this is? logically to me it seems like it should work, but it doesn't?

It doesn't work because the line indexes changes every time you remove a line. If for example line 3 is blank, and it is removed, the next line you want to check will also be line number 3, not 4.

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EDIT: Workaround is adding in an action to restart the loop. effectively keeps going until all blank lines are deleted. Example MFA is included!

That's not a good solution. For each non-blank line, you recurse and run the fastloop another List Nb Lines( "List" ) times. In your example, the fastloop is triggered 336 times. Both Popcorn's and my solutions runs the fastloop as many times as there are lines, no more.

Here's an alternative that doesn't need a counter, but needs to re-create the entire list (in other words, you may want to stick to Popcorn's solution)

Start out like in Popcorn's example:
0 based index list.
Run the loop as many times as there are lines in the list.

* On loop
+ line at 0 <> blank
- List: Add line [text of line 0]

* On loop
- List: Delete line 0

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Paul: The idea of animating and then exporting to an image sequence is really what i'm after, so that sounds great. Is this possible in Anime studio aswell?

Yep. If you want to do bone animations with either vectors (which you can do within ASP itself) or raster (which you can import) in a simple yet quite-but-not-super-powerful program that's fast to work with, ASP is a great choice. However, I distrust SmithMicro, the company who acquired E Frontier who used to develop ASP. SmithMicro have adapted some insane sales model where getting a demo requires you to give the company their credit card information, and they'll charge you if you don't uninstall the demo in 30 days or something. When I found out, I had to cancel an ASP course I was going to hold at a school because it would be unreasonable for me to ask the students to get the demo.

I don't like when I want to recommend a product, but not the company that sells it. The same goes for Adobe too.

Or, you can just blit Upper$(String), you don't need to change the string to do that.

Those fangames aren't covered by fair use because they are named after existing trademarks and uses assets from other games. Yet, the Please login to see this link. that does all this aren't taken down. In this case, we're talking a game that doesn't use Castlevania assets or infringe on its trademarks. And if somehow "Hasslevania" gets into trouble for having a name similar to "Castlevania" (which will never happen), I'm sure fair use would cover that.

And on topic, check out the Please login to see this link. which is lovely.

When I went to GamesCom in Berlin, Mari0 by Please login to see this link. was on display, and the extremely popular Please login to see this link. is soon reaching version 3.0. Okay, granted, sometimes it can happen that a company sends a "cease and desist" letter to take down a fan game (I've never once heard about anyone going directly for a lawsuit), but this is very rare for free games because it's a waste of time and resources that only upsets people and doesn't help themselves in any way. Free fan games are very common on the internet and they are rarely taken down! If everybody strictly followed every copyright law, amazing things like Please login to see this link. wouldn't exist. On top of that, I highly doubt that "Hasslevania" infringes the "Castlevania" trademark anyway, as swapping letters is a common way to do satire without using the trademarks directly. I spotted a synthesizer called Morg in Simpsons, and there's a hamburger resturant in Please login to see this link. called McBonald's. Those are way less distinct than this particular case. So relax.

Besides, you can always become the victim of patent and trademark trolls. Look at Tim Langdell's attack on everything that used the word "Edge" or Lodsys' attempt to sue both large and small developers over an in-app purchase patent. If you want to protect yourself against everything that can possibly go wrong, stop making software.

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Parodies are allowed? By whose standards?

Please login to see this link..

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and sexuality from gay or straight (I'm parodying a friend who says that its incredibly important to give customizable options in any game, even my impossibly simple one.)

Your idea is very likely to be inappropriate, even if you don't have any bad intentions. People can't read your mind, so they'll probably think that your parody implies that sexuality is an insignificant choice or topic in games. To offer the choice of sexual preference as part of customizing a character can be interesting if it is serious and has a meaning in the game (though the choice should usually not be a bit flip since it's gradual in real life) and I would love to see more of this in games. However, if your reason to add this is to parody insignificant choices, trust me, you don't want to make that choice about something as important as sexual orientation. To parody insignificant choices, pick something that is actually insignificant. Maybe the character's favorite food or color.

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I'm hoping MMF3 makes it so that the level frames aren't tied to the events so making a level editor isn't even necessary anymore. At that point, the only reason to make a level editor then would be so players can make their own levels.

An additional good reason right now for having a level editor is control over scale/angle/transparency/values of instances rather than just objects. Then, of course, I hope they'll improve that in MMF3 as well

My shader of choice for an underwater effect would be Looki's offset shader. It distorts everything behind the object horizontally based on the red channel, and vertically based on the green channel. A red of 0 distorts to the left, 128 not at all, and 255 distorts to the right. Green works the same way, but with up and down. Please login to see this link. uses it.

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I looked up footage of Knytt Underground and noticed it was all static rooms. Where exactly do all the different rooms get stored in a single frame game like this?

Also, what if a game has scrolling and all the levels are radically different sizes?

It's in a custom level format using the Ini++ and Binary Array extensions together. I made an editor in MMF2. Making it scroll is definitely doable too, I did this in FiNCK. I would have divided the levels into different scrolling "sections", and when you exit one area, you enter the next and the game loads all its content. It should be no problem, not even with rather large scrolling areas. The hardest thing is to make the whole world a huge and continuously scrolling, because that will force you to dynamically load/unload data and objects (very fast to avoid freezes or a slow fps), but with skillful use of events, even that is possible.

I'd put it like this: working in a single frame and a custom level format+editor is always a more powerful option, but it takes lots of skill and time. Working with multiple frames is easier, and probably the best way to go for a beginner, but it has drawbacks due to MMF2 not being very global-oriented. Hopefully, MMF3 will be designed much more around that you'll want to share most events and objects over most frames.

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Yeah thats what I'm doing, but a level editor seems too restricted for what I'm making. I have lots of unique stuff in each frame, both in terms of graphics and code, and putting everything into one frame would just be way too cluttered I think. Its not a simple game with a whole bunch of similar looking levels with the same objective, pretty much every frame has something different going on in terms of conversations, going through doors to enter different areas, cinematics etc, stuff that seems would be really tricky to do in the confines of a single frame level editor engine.

It's quite the opposite. Knytt Underground uses one frame and a custom level editor and format. It features 1800+ rooms (2000+ after the coming update, the world size will be 47616x25920 pixels) 1000 unique scenery objects (probably a hundred thousand instances), and tons of NPC's, enemies and creatures. It worked best within a single frame since I decide when to load/unload rooms/images/music and not having to deal with global events where values are unnamed, or having to avoid qualifiers... it all makes life so much easier.

Maybe in MMF3 it'll be different, but for MMF2 at least the advanced user will normally want to build as much as possible into one frame.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are saying. What does it mean to position a button? What does it mean to delete a joystick and leave a button? If you post an .mfa file that demonstrates what the problem is, it'll be easier to help.

I suppose X)