Getting back into the swing of things...

Alright, I have been following tutorials left and right, trying to get the hang of MMF2. I've been around, but I haven't really done much designing due to previous commitments. Now that I"m up for the challenge, I would like to ask good places to start.

I have read and gone through at least 10 different tutorials, I have poked my head into various ideas, etc. Here are a few questions:

1) After you follow tutorial after tutorial, where do you go to learn to program actual games yourself?

2) A while ago I saw a tutorial for using a grid where an object can detect if another object is X spaces from it. Can I have a link to that please?

3) If I were to want to spawn monsters somehow, say I have 6 different monsters and I want to assign each monster an ID. How would I say: If Wave=4 Set spawn to 1,3,3,5,2,1,2?

4) I tried my best to understand about fastloops, but they confused the heck out of me. The one I read was a little...hard to follow. I may not quite be advanced enough for them. Is it possible to know what they are in english? I understood them to be something similar to custom physics. That would be EXTREMELY helpful so characters don't jump up walls in platforming, or don't get stuck in walls with different areas.

Thanks guys for any help you give.

3. Use an invisible list object to have the monster numbers, and the current wave number would be the list line number to get the numbers from. You might want to use string tokenizer for getting the numbers without the commas.

4. Did you watch the fastloop video tutorial? I think it's the most helpful.

I did not see that. Can I please have a link?

It used to be on the Tutorials page in the videos section a few weeks ago, but now it seems to be gone!

It was an excellent tutorial dispite a typo throught the entire thing.

I'm looking for it right now, so just be patient.

EDIT: I found it, it's still on the website. I don't know why the links to it were removed. :\
http://www.clickteam.info/mrman/fastlooptutorial.zip

Thanks a ton LB.

So if I use fastloops just as in this tutorial for falling, how would i use them for wall detection? With this programming, if you walked to the wall, you would be "teleported" to the top 100 times a second or 100 pixels a second.

I have a couple of fastloop movement examples on my website. They might help.

Marv

Alright, I'm using the string parser for my level. Now, I have loaded the list as you said into the parser. How do I set my "call" global value to set itself every second?

Basically, here is how I want it to work. The list item should have the following abbreviations.

5(1 0 0 2 1 1 2 1)

alright, the number outside the parenthesis is how many times I want to loop the spawn. The numbers in the parenthesis represent monsters to be spawned. So every second, one of those numbers should be set to call. When call is activated, a monster will walk onto the stage.

I have probally gotten way over my head, but how would I do this? I have almost all the graphics done for the game, just need to know how to bring out the monsters.

Just do 5,1,0,0,2,1,1,2,1 and know that the first element is the number of times, and then you can use the rest of the numbers as monster IDs. This makes things simpler because all you have to do it set the delimiter to ","

How do I tell it to do that? I have never used the parser before. :P

Well String Tokenizer should be easier than String Parser.