Posts by astrospoon

I'm not-- everything is working swimmingly now You just got me nervous.

Just so you know, I thought XLua was great before... MMFI puts it over the top-- This is really, really awesome.

I got started on an impressively complex prototype in only a few hours of work, and I think like... 5 event lines in MMF. This is the best mix of powerful and fun game making software I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Bravo!

Could you tell us what the other WIP stuff is so we don't just get confused?

I'm loving MMFI big-time, as I can practically code an entire game in Lua now, but I lost a little more than an hour searching docs and monkeying around with the keyboard/mouse stuff...

It is much easier to work around this kind of thing if you tell us about it before we find it

Seriously though, I'll owe you the cookie

Is there some trick to activating the keyboard and mouse input?

I'm using similar code to the documentation:

while (mmf.keyboard.keyDown(mmf.VK_RIGHT)) do
Camera.x = Camera.x + 1
end

or

local leftDown = mmf.mouse.buttonDown(mmf.MOUSE_LEFT)
if (leftDown) then
Camera.x = Camera.x + 1
end

Neither of these ever trigger, regardless of what I do with the mouse and keyboard. Am I skipping a step?

Hey.. just downloaded MMFI for XLua, and saw that you just get mmfi.dll in the zip.

What directory do I dump the .dll into? How do I tell XLua about it so I can begin using it? Basically, how in the heck do I set it up to start using it?! The docs don't seem to mention it.

I'm going to play around with it some again today. I am sure though that I am linked up with MMF correctly though. Why? Because over 2000 lines of LUA code already run the rest of my game correctly. In the line right above where I try and grab action points, I am grabbing other information from the same object that is working properly.

Hey-

As far as I can tell, all of the functions:

mmf.Object.GetActionX (objid) -> ax
mmf.Object.GetActionY (objid) -> ay
mmf.Object.GetActionPoint (objid) -> ax, ay

seem to not be working. If I do something like this:

local xaction = mmf.Object.GetActionX(self.id)

It won't stop the program, but if I try to access the xaction, I get always get a nil value. (By the way, action point relative to sprite origin is much better in most cases, at least in my program.)

looks like it is time for me to update my build. I have to go back and change a bunch of functions when I install this to avoid a ton of off by 1 errors from when you changed teh indexing on some of the functions. I'll tackle it in the morning.

Thanks for the addition though.. should come in really helpful. Relative position is just fine though... (probably better to be honest) It would be pretty cake to code a skeletal animation system using this too. (although rotations probably break nice and good with this)

I know you can grab the ho tspot, but it would be great to make functions getting the current frame's action point as well. (For say, creating a bullet at the tip of a gun, when the hot spot is at the trigger.)

Is this available and I missed it?

If not, consider this a request

thanks,
Andy

This is pretty rad. Will work awesomely on static things, but it would be a huge pain to generate normal maps for all the frames of anything animated. I may try implementing this in my new project.

I implemented a zoom in my game, and after messing around with zoom shaders applied to both objects and to the frame, I settled on what I think is a better method.

Make your game at the closest zoom level you want. (So frame size, sprite size, etc, should be pretty large.) Then in your MMF event code, actually scale and reposition all of the objects to simulate the zoom. Do this as the last events in your frame.

Then the starting events of the frame should reverse the process, returning all objects and scales back to full zoomed in size. This way, all of your events occur at the closest zoom level, and the zoom is only applied to objects in the very last events each frame.

HWA is plenty fast enough to use this method, and you don't have to worry about all the glitches that occur when using a zoom shader. Not to mention, you can have hi-def art when zoomed all the way in this way. (You don't end up just blowing up the lower res sprites.)

I have an animation of a 3D object spinning (32 frames) that is saved as separate sequentially numbered images. Is there any way to automate importing them into the 32 directions of an object? It takes forever to manually import a picture for each of the 32 different directions. (especially with around 100 objects to do this for...) Something similar to how animations made of numbered images can be loaded into MMF2?

Also- are there shortcut keys in the animation editor to change frames and/or to change directions? It is even slower importing things because I have to mouse over to the bottom and manually click the "next frame" button, or to click on the next direction on the "wheel"

Awesome stuff... is this going to be coming out at some point?

I am using the layer object to sort my objects by alterable value L. Value L is set to 0 for one kind of object, 1 for another, and 2 for a third. Everything is ordered correctly 90% of the time, (2s on top of 1s on top of 0s) but as more objects are created and some are deleted, they start getting messed up. 2s will suddenly appear behind 1s. If I scroll off the screen and come back on, it will usually correct itself.

This is in HWA mode.... My program won't run at all in non-HWA mode. (I am scaling all the objects (200-500) in real time) Has anyone ever had trouble with the Layer object mis-ordering objects before? Is there a limit to the number of objects it can handle properly? Is this a HWA specific issue?

Quote from xyzzy

from what i've tried you just need to bind to the same state, but it looks like you have to wait a few frames after binding before trying to do anything

A few frames as in MMF frames, or frames per second? I assume you mean there is just a slight delay from when you bind to when you can access the info.

Can someone explain how to properly use a Lua state between different frames? Does the new frame's XLua object need to bind the state again, or is it already set from the previous frame? What calls are required to sync everything up? I keep having crashes and errors when I try to access Lua values stored in a previous frame.

Thanks!

That reminds me AndyH. I was messing around with the "zoom" shader, and I came across something cool. I wanted to zoom out on my frame which was at 1280x1024. Obviously, this leaves the "streaky" edges. (Since there is no more data to display)

So I had an idea! I created a 1024x768 application, and placed a centered sub-app of the original 1280x1024. At normal zoom, you only saw the center portion of the entire 1280x1024 display, but when you zoomed out, you saw the entire larger window squished into the 1024x768 window. I tweaking the settings so the "streak" on the edges never displayed! It worked GREAT except for one tiny issue:

It did not work when you switched to "Change Resolution" mode. I guess setting the resolution to 1024x768 means that the 1280x1024 sub app won't render correctly. Which is a bummer. I was hoping MMF would still render the sub-app to a 1280x1024 buffer surface, and ignore the actual current resolution.

I got told in click chat that checking the "Display as Sprite" option should let you overlap other objects on top of it. <shrug>

Bug report: Active objects will not display on top of sub application windows for me, even with "Display as Sprite" checked. This holds true even if the active objects are on a layer above the sub-app window.

Also, there is no way to adjust the order of the sub-app window, even with "Display as Sprite" checked. The options in the pop up menu to do so remain grayed out when in the frame editor.

Im on Windows XP SP3 with a Geforce 8800 GT.

I noticed that when you apply any pixel shaders that you sometimes get a thin gray outline around the sprite if it has an alpha channel.

Is there a way to prevent these from showing up by tweaking the shaders somehow (by not blending in the neighboring pixels)? Or by tweaking my pngs? The same outlines appear in the small frame preview windows in the animation editor as well... They seem to be blending some of the invisible alpha pixels in as black around the edges.

Looking online, it seems you can stop shaders from grabbing neighboring pixels by using TextureFilter.Point. Is this something that can be set somehow?

Hey, I noticed on things like the Sin Wave and Underwater effect shaders, that if you apply them to a layer, and you scroll the window, the effect doesn't scroll along with it. I understand why this is probably the case, but is there an easy way to synchronize the scrolling with the frequency so that this does not occur?

I have it applied to a "water" layer that is under the "ground" layer (top down view) so that the water looks like it is moving. It works great, but the water speeds up/slows down when the character walks around, which looks really strange.