A Greeting and Some Event Questions

[AnunC8]

Firstly, I'd like to say hello. I'm new to Clickteam Fusion and am looking forward to speaking with everyone. Having a brain that was clearly designed for art and not at all for programming, this seems like a good place to be!

With that, I've been tinkering with the program, watching tutorials and making simple games in in an effort to understand it better, and have come up with some questions. I'm hoping with time, I'll understand the event editor better, as I'm still fairly obtuse with it.

First question is, what's the best way to make a player character do a dash motion? My game is 8-axis movement (think of something along the lines of Streets of Rage or Double Dragon) and I'm having trouble figuring out how to work this out. My first instinct is to increase the active's speed with an animation change (perhaps with a button hold or a double-tap of an arrow if that's possible) but I'm not sure how to make the speed back down again after a certain amount of time. I looked into using the Platform Movement Object extension, but it seems to be made for left and right motions only, and I got some issue with falling through the ground when trying to use it. Not sure if it's useful for me or not.

My second question is about projectiles. I've figured out how to use them and get them to destroy enemies, but I have another issue. Like I said above, my game has a sort of beat-em-up style, so I only want projectiles to be fires left and right, despite the 8 direction movement. I thought I could use the "launch in selected directions" event under "launch an object," but then I have a the issue that whenever the active has moved perfectly straight up or down before launching, I don't know how to orient the firing direction based off of which way the active is facing, since it technically isn't facing left or right. I'm also not sure how to best orient the active's sprite during up and down motion, as the sprite only has a left facing and a right facing graphic -- no up and down (again, think Streets of Rage).

Again, nice to meet you all, and any help would be greatly appreciated!

[schrodinger]

Hello and welcome!
Some guys here are making awesome old style beat-em-ups so maybe they'll be able to give further insights,
but as a general greeting info:

1) you likely need an 8-directional movement, if using the builtin one(s) or making your own is up to you, each choiche has its pros and cons (ask more on this if you need)
PMO won't probably help much as it's designed for strictly 2D sidescrolling.
You could use an object's alt. value for the "dash",
i.e.

on double-tap
>>> set "dash" to 10

dash > 0
>>> set X position to X + dash
>>> subtract 1 from dash value

(of course you'll need to fine-tune starting value amount and "subtract" amount, or find more suitable functions)


2) seem to remember players kept facing left or right in most of those games, even when you moved up or down.
You could use a little trick: copy left and right animations to up-left, down-left and to up-right and down-right, this should keep the player oriented to last direction he was facing before you moved up/down (using builtin 8-dir)

shooting direction: using the "launch" action is generally a bad idea, as you won't have much control over the projectile
an in-between solution before using a completely custom code can be using a "bouncing ball movement" for the projectile
the when you "fire" a projectile, you "create" a bouncing-ball projectile at 0,0 from player
and then you can plug in this expression
(set direction --> click the 1+1 button)

( ( 1 - ( ( Cos(Dir( "Player" ) * 11.25) ) ) / Abs(Cos(Dir( "Player" ) * 11.25)) ) * 8 ) + 32

to set the "projectile" direction at player dir

[AnunC8]

Thanks for your response.

For the dash, I am using the built in one, yes. Is there an actual way to quickly set a double-tap? From my searches it seems really complicated to get that to work. Also, I'm having a little trouble following you. Am I typing all that in somewhere? Sorry, definite noob and I get really get this program yet.

As for the player direction, that sounds like a good idea, but I don't really know how to do it. I have the movement on the active set to 8 directions, but when I bring up the sprite, it still only shows up, down, left and right. Is there a way to add more in there?

Create a bouncing ball? How does one do that. I don't see an option for it.

Thanks again for your patience. I really don't have the brain for this formal logic stuff so it's taking me a while to get comfortable.