Posts by 300happy

For the record, I'm not even drawing these sprites myself. I've been using a bunch of paid for .png sprites/tiles from a collection I've built up over the years from sites like gamedevnet and itch.io. I own Spriter mainly cause I was fed up with getting .png files not recognized by the Fusion importer despite the files working just fine in everything else I've tossed them at. (the dreaded "not a valid .png" issue still happens with fresh downloaded resources in my personal experience.)

I disagree with the "just use other software" approach, for numerous reasons I don't feel like getting into at the moment. Suffice to say Fusion was advertised as being able to edit the animations in the tool, and that feature was working just fine in Games Factory and previous iterations of the engine/tool from the same company.

If Fusion 2.5 is going to have a picture editor feature (it's a listed feature placing it over "other software" in the selling material), it should at least work properly. This is especially frustrating as the previous iterations of this engine, including Fusion 2.0, didn't have this small but vitally crippling hole in the image editor toolbox.

All I'm asking for is a change to the select tool so that if I'm in color mode, the transparent pixels don't get copied, like Games Factory, Klik and Play, and MMF1/2 before Fusion.

Since the bug box is currently down for maintenance and my support email to support@clickteam.com just bounced, I'll post this here to get it over to Clickteam. Perhaps other steam 2.5+ users can confirm the bug too, as I don't know if it's just me or an actual problem. (I don't own any other 2.5+ enabled version of fusion or other PCs to test with.)

I'm running the latest version of Steam Clickteam Fusion, with 2.5+ extension.

I believe I have found a bug with object counts not resetting/updating at the end of an event processing. These events used to make a series of objects (like for a health display).

Start of Event Code (Pasted from fusion, maybe that can help with testing.)
* Always
Active : Destroy

* Always
Special : Start loop "ui_healthbg" Global Value B times

* On loop "ui_healthbg"
New Objects : Create Active at (0,0) layer 5

* On loop "ui_healthbg"
+ Active: Flag 0 is off
Active : Set X position to ( ( ( NObjects( "Active" ) ) * 20 ) - 20 ) + X Left Frame
Active : Set Y position to Y Top Frame
Active : Set Flag 0 on
Special : Send Str$(X( "Active" )) to output window
END OF CODE

In the attached application, the objects are positioned wrongly from the second frame onward. You can confirm this by pausing the application quickly after starting it in debugger, and scrolling the debug text log up to the first and second loop. (every loop the objects being positioned reports it's x axis on the debug log for the sake of tracking the bug.)

As you can see, the first time MMF correctly counts 0 of the object and sets the positions starting at 0 x axis. However, the next frame, despite the "Destroy object" command, fusion will position the objects as if the first set of objects is still there, resulting in the entire bar of objects being offset by the "phantom" extra width.

The actual end of frame Object Count in the debugger is reporting 4 active objects, as expected. However, the NObjects count is no longer updating correctly during event processing. In previous Fusion versions the above event code works fine, as it's how I did my health bars for games like Drake on Itch.io

Another aspect of this bug is that any code relying on "number of objects" comparisons will fail to work properly. For example, if something checks if the number of objects are greater then a value for destroying copies of the object, the "phantom objects" will cause the code to remove more then expected. (Fusion basically thinks there are already enough of the object due to counting the "deleted" objects, never actually stopping deleting the objects till all of the objects are removed. Sometimes it also ends up removing none of the objects and just continuing with the code, I assume this is the result of it selecting the "phantom objects" for removal. Either way, the physical number of objects in the frame will not be the expected result of the event code.)

Please login to see this attachment.

(The active object is simply a regular newly created active, in my game it's a 20x20 health icon, but I wanted to keep the bug example as straight forward as possible.)

Quote from 300happy

Is there a way to do one of the following:

1. Copy "What I see" instead of just color data. Basically like how the older editors work, where transparent pixels simply create a hole in the pasted image?
2. Set the transparent color across all frames the same (maybe to MMF standard color)? I'd even love a "global editor" setting for this, to prevent me from "creating" this situation in the future.

Some feedback: It's really illogical for copy and paste to not work "visually", even if that is how the graphics are stored "under the hood". The current editor behavior should be an "optional" behavior, with the default acting like the older software did where an invisible pixel simply doesn't come along when being copied.

Can we get an option that sets the editor to work "like the old one", where tools simply ignore "transparent" pixels when bringing data from one place to another?

The select tool is the main problem here, as I often try to mix sprites together in MMF (such as a hero and a sword image) and find that I cannot without major cleanup first due to transparent black/white pixels coming along in the transfer.

Bumping this, as I finally had time to get back to using fusion today, and lo and behold, the lack of a tool to fix the "copying the transparent color pixels" is still a problem.

Honestly, even just a mode on the selector to "skip" copying if the "color" of the pixel matches the current frames transparency would fix this issue for me. To be blunt, I don't understand why it even bothers copying the "data" of transparent pixels in the first place.

Slight ranting below, I'm short on time and trying to keep this as civil as possible.

As stated above NO OTHER GRAPHICS SOFTWARE I have ever owned even behaves this way. Either give us a proper "selection painting tool" beyond just drawing boxes/wand to cut frames/parts, or make it so the box selections can stop copying the transparent pixels.

Or hell, give us a tool to convert each frame's "transparency color" to the SAME THING so copying one frame or object image actually comes through properly into the other. MMF clearly knows what color "should" be transparent in each frame since it "preserves" it per frame instead of per animation/image, but the user currently has no access to this information. (For the record, I tried setting the editor's "transparency color" to the one from the imported frame. MMF will use the set color in a new frame, but the old frame insists on bringing in the imported color setting on the older pixels. The only way I found to apply this "fix" was to "paint" the transparency colors myself with the color erase tool, which of course defeats the purpose of having an image to import/using external tools in the first place since I essentially end up drawing the whole object again in fusion.)

I'm losing all my free time to splicing these images together in MMF. I have an external tool called Spriter that I can use to do the splicing, but having to export/import/test in fusion is not as easy a flow as if fusion's pixel editor just could avoid copying the "invisible pixels" in the first place. Especially as most of my sprites are coming from sprite sheets where the hotspot/action point needs to be setup again each new import. (center is wrong for a platform game character on import, as they have weapon emit points and the hotspot should be on the bottom "feet" of each frame of animation. So reimport in this case means about 10 min of resetting hotspots on frames and then testing for jitter in the animation previews.)

This is really bothering me, to the point where I've been doing a side by side development with another (less powerful/useful) engine that supports these sprite sheets out of the box. I prefer MMF's frame editor and "coding" to that other software, but because of constantly hitting the transparency issues I get frustrated at trying to create new characters/frames/tilesets in fusion.

On a more positive note, that onion skinning feature is pretty cool, nice work there! We really could use some more little hints about stuff like that.

Ah, that almost worked. Really close now!

Certainly faster then what I was doing before. Saves hours, so thanks for reminding me of that export function!

The tile set in question has some decorative or cornering tiles, these appear to have gotten cropped in the export process. Now they don't snap to grid properly since the image was reduced from the 16x16 size.

Normally this would be a good thing, as it means the images save memory. But it makes laying out such tiles rather annoying in practice.

In this particular case, most of the tiles for a suspension bridge and the bottoms of some floating island chunks got reset to small sizes such as 4x16 high due to being literally just the rope/bottom section. I can manually place these of course using the arrow key controls to nudge them after placement. It gets old fast though.

Is there a grid offset we can apply to a frame object when snap to grid is on?

If not, perhaps consider adding one for Fusion 3? Would be great to tell the frame editor "snap this object 3 extra pixels down below the real grid position" in this case. The data wouldn't even need to compile to the executable, just be for the Fusion editor to use for snap to grid offsets when building levels in this style.

I suppose another approach would be to simply redo the backdrops in question to resize them back "on grid". However, that would create a lot of empty pixel data, which I recall is something we should be avoiding for memory reasons.

I have a suggestion after pulling my hair out dealing with tile sheets from paid sources such as itch.io in Fusion 2.5. I've even tried to build myself a tool to slice sheets myself using the surface object, though the current state of my tool is too buggy to release or even use right now. (If I ever wrangle the tool into usable order, I'll probably share it to itch.io or some such, but it's still silly to need such a tool in the first place when other engines, including heavy competition for Fusion, support and understand tileset sheets out of the box.)

Can we have an option/tool in Fusion for importing a tile sheet as a set of backdrop objects?

Basically, I want to have something that combines the "dragging multiple png files to import the objects into fusion" feature, and the active object editors "import frames from a sprite sheet". So it would act like follows:

1. User selects to import a tile sheet. This could be asked on drag and drop import, or a special right click option, or even buried in the frame editor menus if you want.
2. Select the png file to bring in.
3. Interface for "frames" comes up like when importing an animation, input the width and height of the tiles and Fusion will slice the imported png into images for you.
4. Possibly a prompt for asking if the user wants actives, backdrops, or quick backdrops as the result. (The other options could be useful depending on what the user wants the tool for.)
5. Add an option to Spread out the "imported objects" into a grid, with width and height specified. Or with the original tile sheet calculated amount of tiles.
6. Fusion spits out all the new objects just like when importing a series of images in the current build. It will also arrange the objects as specified, instead of stacking them all at the same spot in the frame.

Having jumped from tool to tool, it's very annoying how behind Fusion is when it comes to using tile sheets. If the editor could do this, a lot more tile sheets could be used without needing to code our own entire tile display engines. After all, coding our own tile scrolling engine and storing all the levels out in external files really defeats the whole purpose of having a frame editor in the first place.

If money is the problem, I'd even pay a few bucks for DLC that does this in editor. It's really become a problem for me as time goes on, and is often the main reason I drop Fusion in favor of other engines. Please consider it!

Thanks for the explanation on how the editor works!

I think what happened is that the imported image has black as transparent, but the MMF created image has white set transparent instead. Even in Transparency Mode the two frames are still remembering their old colors it seems, as bringing one into the other results in phantom pixel data from the transparent part of the images.

Is there a way to do one of the following:

1. Copy "What I see" instead of just color data. Basically like how the older editors work, where transparent pixels simply create a hole in the pasted image?
2. Set the transparent color across all frames the same (maybe to MMF standard color)? I'd even love a "global editor" setting for this, to prevent me from "creating" this situation in the future.

Some feedback: It's really illogical for copy and paste to not work "visually", even if that is how the graphics are stored "under the hood". The current editor behavior should be an "optional" behavior, with the default acting like the older software did where an invisible pixel simply doesn't come along when being copied.

Can we get an option that sets the editor to work "like the old one", where tools simply ignore "transparent" pixels when bringing data from one place to another?

The select tool is the main problem here, as I often try to mix sprites together in MMF (such as a hero and a sword image) and find that I cannot without major cleanup first due to transparent black/white pixels coming along in the transfer.

It's neat to have the control over the alpha for effects and such, but in practical use I have found 9 times out of 10 that the phantom pixels this creates end up costing me a lot of time/confusion to clean up.

PS: I noticed this is posted in the old MMF2 area. It's actually about 2.5+, so it should probably be moved there. Sorry.

I am copying and pasting straight from MMF editor into MMF editor, from frame 2 to 1 in fact.

I've tried various settings of the little fish icon to no avail. I think whatever broke, MMF doesn't appear to have the controls for it(or I don't understand where the copy and paste setting is).

When I copy the second frame's pixels and paste it into the first frame, I get white pixels filling in all the transparency of the pasted pixels.

This is with the Steam version of MMF2.5+, so I assume the latest version. I can attach a screenshot of the process here if needed.

My settings on both frames for the fish was to set them to "transparency", though I have tried various alternative settings to no better result.

The image in the first frame was imported, I can attach the imported image as well. It was from a resource bundle I purchased, but supposedly is normal png file(everything else like Unity opens and reads it fine, even gimp or other graphical editors. MMF just starts doing strange things to itself in the sprite editor.)

Please login to see this attachment.Please login to see this attachment.

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As you can clearly see, it's just a png meant for a background that I've edited in MMF to make it shorter.

For the record, the second frame is just the result of making a string in MMF itself, then right click and getting an active object off using the "Make active object" function. I then copied the frame from the new active into the one with the panel to edit them together into a single object.

So I guess to recreate:

1. Import the png
2. Create a string object, set it's font to whatever, and create an "active object" to get a sprite frame out of it.
3. Copy that sprite frame into the png object as frame 2.
4. Now copying frame 2's data with the box selection will result in pasting white instead of transparent pixels into frame 1, which makes adding the text and background together much more difficult then it should be.

Quote from Volnaiskra

I just opened up the file in Photoshop and switched it from Indexed Color mode to RGB color mode (Image>Mode>RGB Color) and resaved it. Once I did that, Fusion could load it successfully. I have no idea why this is, or what was wrong with the file before (if anything was 'wrong' at all), but anyhow it worked.

Do you have Photoshop? You could easily set up a batch job to do this conversion on multiple files at once.

Thanks for that, it seems removing that indexing did the trick. The whole character comes in clean now. I'm cropping as I go as well, to keep frames smaller in size once in MMF.

The amount of sprites is in the realm of "preposterous" (It's an entire tileset and kit with characters each with about 8-30 frames of animations), but thank you for the offer.

I have a photoshop equivilent called Affinity Photo, it has a batch process so this won't be too painful. Still a bit curious why the original file doesn't work right. I'll leave the frame up here in case CT wants to have a look at it. Maybe they can convert to the RGB mode automatically if there is a way to detect this issue.

I also have gif files in this same package that MMF chokes on, it imports the right amount of frames, but each new frame has a ghost of the older frames inside it after import. It might be a similar issue. I lack software to test the gif version of the animations to make sure they are setup right, though dragging them into a web browser displays the animation properly.

Thanks!

Exactly as title says. I just bought some resources, and MMF 2.5's active editor won't open the png files.

I will attach a single file of the frames I am trying to import, note that this cannot be used by anyone who doesn't own them as it's a paid product.

Opening the png using the active object animation editor just spits out an error. The png seems to display fine in everywhere else I tried it.

I'm eventually trying to open a whole bunch of animations in this format(it's from a character pack), so hopefully any workaround is sane?

Using the latest MMF2.5 steam version, pro license.

I've got a quick test to see if sub applications worked. I was hoping they would work out of the box so I could start building a more complex game with many sub apps used as "pop up" control panels for a simulation.

The displayed sub app shows up just fine if the application is run in windows.

But on android it is very broken, not sure how else to describe it. The android apk is showing the sub application as a very small little grey square on my device, with no counter or active visible (the text saying "this is a sub application" is an active object, as you can see in the mfa file). The button (of all things) is showing up just fine, in the proper resized place on the device. Of course without the rest of the interface the usefulness of using just system styled button objects to display stuff is questionable at best.

Here's a link for both the MFA application and the APK file so you can see what I mean (I hope).

Please login to see this link.

Is there a known "fix" or step I missed along the way? Does it show up fine for everyone else and I'm just going mad? Is there another recommended way to display and create mobile interfaces in CT Fusion?

My device is running Android 5.0.1, in case you need to know. I am installing the apks by emailing myself the compiled files as I lack a working cable for the push to device building.

Ok, I get the behavior where running the test run crashes edrt.exe right from the start of the game opening.

It's worth noting that the game will be in this "crash at start" state till I make a major editor change and resave the file. Also, once in this crash state, the app will keep crashing on tests, even if MMF 2 is closed and reopened.

EDIT UPDATE 2, removed most irrelevant information from this posting:

Ok, I've narrowed the problem to these coin objects and the score object. The coins are the only thing in the game that has qualifiers used on them. I strongly suspect something might not be getting cleared or reloaded right when the game starts test runnning again.

If you open the attached app, and then test run the game, edrt.exe crashes. Sometimes I have to run it twice to get the crash.

Once the crash happens, the only way to get the game running again is to edit something(deactivate and reactivate an event, move an active, any one of those will "fix" the issue) and resave the file. Any attempts to reload the file or restart MMF2 will just result in the same crash happening a few runs later(often the very next test run). Naturally, later the app will start crashing on test run again anyway.

Removing any reference to the object group and any copies of the coin objects will fix the issue, at least as far as my limited time let me test. I'd like to keep my coin collectibles in the real game though.

Hope this file helps narrow the bug down. If you need further info, just ask.

Here's a basic/advanced example of some enemy AI for a space ship type of game. Beginners will probably be able to learn something from this, even if they don't understand all of it right away.

All the AI does in the example is attempt to dodge oncoming bullets, but I've done the whole enemy with a simple static active object, and a variable that controls which "behavior"(not MMF terms, but think of it as "settings" or "tasks" the AI does) the enemy attempts to do each frame.

The idea behind this example isn't to give you a drag and drop enemy, but to give you an example to look at so that new users can grasp the basics of making an AI in MMF2. Hopefully if you carefully read my comments and watch what I've done here, you can gain a better understanding of how you could code your own AI or "reaction/action" using events and alterable values.

The idea here can be expanded or adapted to just about any different kind of game, though the actual event code will probably require rewrites. That's kind of the point, there is no "one AI fits all", and the example is provided for you to learn techniques on how to make the example(and other AI) yourself.

I hope it proves helpful to study, in any case.

Problem solved, thanks all! Especally thanks to Yves's post here for helping me remember about the JAVA_HOME setting: Please login to see this link.

The installer for Java, or something related to installing it, likes to set the JAVA_HOME variable to the exact path of the version you install(in my case, 1.6).

Going into Control Panel > System > Advanced Settings > Environment Variables(button at the bottom of the advanced tab in System Properties) and setting the JAVA_HOME variable to

C:\PROGRA~1\Java\

Seems to have fixed the problem. MMF2 can find java and compiles correctly again.

To anyone else with this problem, just check your JAVA_HOME variable in the above settings. Make sure it points to the base Java directory and not any specific version folder.

My best guess is one of the games I bought off steam in the recent sale probably installed a specific version of java, and the java install tried to act "smart" and set itself to only see that one exact version.

I've done an install of the Java 32 bit sdk off their site, and it still won't be recognized or found by MMF2. Same error, no luck.

One thing I noticed was that Java seems to be on version 1.7.x. I'm not sure what version MMF2 is expecting of java, but the recommended version on the Java site is 1.7.0_02.

I'll next try completely removing all java and reinstalling. Nothing has changed with my MMF2 aside from updating to the latest version through the auto updater.

I had the Android beta installed at the time of updating, but have since run the uninstall for that and rechecked for updates in MMF2. MMF2 says it's fully up to date, so I'd assume that fixed anything that was wrong with the beta install.

If the java reinstall doesn't work, I'll try a fresh install of MMF2 and the flash plugin from scratch. I'll let you know how this goes for others who might find this thread.

Edit: There is both Java 6 or 7(depending on developer kits or end user installs) and this "JavaFX" thing. Anyone know the exact thing I need for MMF2?

I can't build any flash apps at all, clicking export results in an immediate java error.

Here is the error output:

Error loading: C:\PROGRA~1\Java\JDK16~1.0_2\jre\bin\server\jvm.dll

I've installed both the flash exporter from scratch, and the Java SDK(made sure to get the SDK version not the runtime version, though I have tried installing that one too.)

Also tried updating MMF 2, it says it's up to date. I'm on build 253, after the auto update did it's thing.

The directory for jdk itself on my PC is in "C:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_26"

It's the 64 bit SDK, and I'm running Windows 7 64 bit, if that helps.

I think the thing messing this up may be the fact MMF isn't looking at the right folder, since the folder names don't match. Might be a java version error caused by MMF looking in the wrong folder.

It's hard to tell what MMF is looking for when it's error message puts the ~ symbols, but maybe if I knew what MMF was looking for, I could rename a copy of the existing jdk folders?

I'd appreciate any help fixing this issue or further figuring out how to fix it.

Just a quick note here, as I'm a bit short on time overall.

I recently got a part time job doing some physical work, and it's really taking it out on me(first few weeks of doing physical labor in a long time and I'm really out of shape). I haven't had as much free time as when I started beta testing when I was just looking for work instead of doing said work. On top of that, some contract work came up too this week(which I intend to do as I get paid really well for the time put into it), so beta 6 launched at the worst possible time for me.

I still intend to beta test this when I get into the rhythm of work and this contact work is filled and done with. But I won't have much time to do so this week, and possibly next week(I don't know this until friday, thanks to schedule postings).

The time I have you can rest assured I will be pounding Beta 6 into the ground and back again as hard as I can.

Just thought you fellow testers might want to know so you don't wonder where I went.

Quote from Pharanygitis

yes, the maximum height from this site is 480... is the game too big, the "wall" scaled the game automatic

the max size from the flashgame is : 640 x 480

It would be fine if it scaled it automatically like you said, but it doesn't. It just cuts off the bottom of the game entirely.

You can compare the original on Mochi with the window on your site to see...the ad skip, volume controls, copyright credits, pause button, and combo counter are all cut off on your site. So if it's supposed to be scaling things something is going wrong as elements are missing/cut off.

Original game: Please login to see this link.

Maybe it's something to do with the game being made in MMF instead of flash?

Just a quick note: my game "Smiley Gems" has the wrong height settings. (tested on google chrome, win 7) It's a 600 width by 500 height game. Currently it's cut off a bit on the bottom, which hides the ad skip buttons, and some of the gameplay display.

It's probably my fault for submitting it while I was tired and half drugged out(taking some meds, not the unhealthy kind). If you could fix it, I'd appreciate it, as would a lot of players who would then be able to actually hit the skip ads button. Sorry about that. :o

Thanks for the update Jamie!

Yeah, after much fiddling and trying to get stuff working, I think I'll join you all in taking a break till 6 is out. This thing has...a lot of broken stuff...to put in mildly. O_o

But that's the fun of beta testing, right?

Instead, I think this time will be spent brainstorming some new game concepts based on the shiney new tech like the tilting motion sensors and such. So many new shiney toys to play with! (Well, after they actually work properly, lol.)

Which joypad are you referring to?

If it's the onscreen ones MMF uses, they only show up when testing on the phone or in the phone emulator, not when quickly running your level in the MMF exe format. They work fine on my setup. Just remember to use Build and Run with your phone plugged in set to developer USB mode, or have the emulator running(I recommend the physical phone because the emulator is slow and often broken in that it emulates stuff wrong).

I don't have a controller attachment for my phone so I can't speak for those.