I'm having problems creating some special effects

Hi there, forum-goers. I'm currently working on a shoot-em-up/rpg about wizards battling in a tournament, and I'm learning MMF as i go. I grew up making games i Klik & Play, so I already knew the very basics of the program. But with the huge amount of new features (as well as exciting fan-made extensions), naturally I'm running into quite a few problems when making such an ambitious game for my first project.

As the theme of the game is wizards in combat, I'm trying to design several magical effects for the game's various spells, and this is where I'm having a bit of difficulty. There are several problems, and as far as i can tell they're not related, but I'm including all of them in the same post as to not clog up the forum with posts. If any of you have a solution to one or more of these problems I would be very grateful if you would share it with me. I'd also like to hear any general suggestions about how to make good-looking "magical" effects for MMF in general. Any tips/tricks or extensions you can recommend will be helpful. So without further ado, here are the issues:

1) Magic Missile: This is the basic attack in the game. The wizard fires a missile when clicking the left mouse button, or one every second for which it is pressed. I'm using vector movement for the missiles, since this is the only way I can find where I can utilize all 350 degrees, and not just the 32 directions for shooting. I do this by creating a magic missile on the action-point of the caster when the user clicks, and setting the direction towards the current position of the mouse, using the Click team Movement Controller.

Originally this went smoothly, but then I added an effect where a small particle is created on the position of the magic missiles every four milliseconds to create a sparkling trail behind the missiles. After I added this effect, a problem started occurring. When playing the game, initially the missiles work as they should, but at a seemingly random point (Usually after about 30 seconds) missiles which are already fired sometimes change direction midway, and heads towards the cursor again.

My theory for why this is happening is that when the missiles didn't have any other events tied to them (e.g. the sparkling trail) MMF assigned a direction only to the newly created missile each time, but adding the trail somehow forced MMF to change its focus to the missiles which are already moving, changing their directions instead. If anyone knows a way to stop the missiles from changing direction after the initial direction-change, this would probably solve the problem.

2) Fire-bombs: I've been using the Particle Effects object to create explosions for thrown fire-bombs. I followed the steps in the "Sparkly Effects" tutorial included with the extension, and changed it a bit, so the particle sprayer is created at the location of the bomb when it goes off. The effect worked as expected, and looked okay, if not spectacular (I tried to make it look better using the flame-object, but ran into more issues. See problem 4. However, when I tried making a similar but smaller effect, every time a magic missile hits a target, a problem occurred. Instead of appearing on the position of the magic missile, the particle sprayer always appeared in the upper left corner of the frame. I used almost identical events to the fire-bomb. I created a new Particle-Spray object, gave it a separate number (1), and changed the events to affect particle spray (1). I have no clue why this happens. If anyone has an example-file that utilizes more than 1 Particle Spray effect (none of the included examples do), this would probably be enough for me to work out a solution.

3) Particles stuck in frame: My game uses a bit of scrolling and a few layers to create an illusion of depth in the game. However, this seems to cause an issue for the particle spray. When particles from the fire bomb explosions reach the visible edge of the frame they sometimes get stuck, and create a line of particles on the same edge. The particles are normally set to be destroyed when their fade-out animation ends, but these stay visible, and on the same spot until the player moves so that they are no longer in the visible frame, at which point they are destroyed. Perhaps this is caused by my event, which only destroys the particles when their animations are finished. I hope someone here can find a work-around to this problem.

4) Flame object: To make the fire bomb explosion more spectacular, I used the flame object extension (which I believe is 3rd party) to put each particle in the particle effect on fire on particle creation. The effect is great, but at the moment I cannot use it due to a couple of problems.

Firstly, the frame of the game is quite large (800x600 visible, and 1200x900 virtual), and making the flame-object this size slowed the game down immensely. I think I may be able to create a work-around with moving a flame object the size of the explosion to the fire bomb the moment it explodes, but this has proven to be a bit difficult so far.

Secondly, the flame-effect doesn't seem to work that well with a scrolling game. When the game scrolls, the flames do not properly scroll with it, creating a trail of fire after the particles between the particles previous position and their new position after the scrolling. I had the same problem when creating a waterfall-effect in the background. I don't see a solution to this problem at the moment, and any help would be appreciated.

I usually manage to find a way around problems I've run into after much trial and error, but I might not find the most efficient solution and it may take quite some time, so if you know a solution to one or more of my problems, it would save me a lot of time.

And again, any other thoughts on creating special effects in general will be greatly appreciated.

I'll give it a whirl ;)

1. sounds like you need to have a unique identifier for each missile or each missile target. I thought I saw something about a fixed value recently, which may work for you. I usually just create an id with one of the alterable variables.

EX: Upon clicking on a monster create new missile from the hero
if missile variable "target" = 0 set "target" to "monster id #"
If "target"= "monster id#" look in the direction of monster

2. Have you checked your hotspots and action spots? Sometimes when you shrink an object, they do not automatically adjust to the size changes.

3. Have you done the old tried and trues? 1 make invisible, 2 restore animation sequence before trying to destroy

4. I haven't played w/ that object at all. But if you like the affects, you could always record them and just turn it into a regular animation??? not sure one that one

Monokkel..

Did you know good Particle Effects?

I want to buy Particle Effects SE.. But i want somme feedback on this product..

Other, did you use an Physics Engine for realize your effects?
Did you know Box2D Extension (available on http://www.phizix.tk/)?
It will solve some of your problems if you use physics into your game.