Small Update (Unsure where to post it.)

[BrandonC]

I was working on a game of mine with a very large open frame (it's an open ended world, no frame jumping) and I've noticed one of my biggest 'issues' is finding locations, especially in the very start of designing the world.

Would it be possible, even in the next build or so, to add in "Bookmarks" for the frame editor (and even the event editor) and have a little drop down list like you do for all the levels.
This would be a very nice feature for very large levels in general, and perhaps other things, and I can't imagen it being to hard to add in. Thanks. <img src="/center/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

[Sarah]

So - instead of centring the display at the centre of the frame, it would put the bookmark location at the centre of the display instead?

[Joshtek]

Seems like an interesting idea.

Workaround: Navigate to your "bookmark" location in the frame editor and use notepad to record the X/Y that appears on the statusbar. Then whenever you need to access the "bookmark", you can use those coords to find the right place.

[DavidN]

I'm quite interested in the "huge frame" idea - how large is it, exactly? I was going to make an adventure game based entirely in one frame, but was worried that it would just break and die entirely after a while.

[Joshtek]

I think the frame limit before any problems is, generally speaking, 32767 by 32767 as MMF2 uses 16-bit signed ints.

Note: Using the upper end of this scale may cause a few quirks if you wish to scroll right to the very edge, because it may go over 2^16 to show outside the play area. There are also other associated problems with huge frames (e.g. you have to be very careful not to take up too much memory).

[BrandonC]

My online game uses a frame size of:
10000x10000
It runs perfectly fine. Hasn't given me any problems in the past. The only problem is, I get lost in it, if I'm working on a particular area. Basicly I'd need to fallow the paths I made, so I can find where I was again. That or zoom really far out, then back in.

I use, for the most part, backdrops though. Active objects for the land, would cause large slow downs, if not crashes.

PS: I also used that same frame size on MMF 1.5, and didn't have any problems at all. :-)

[Joshtek]

It isn't as good as bookmarks, but if you hold space you can then click and hold down your left mouse button and scroll around more easily.

[DavidN]

That's another interesting feature that I didn't know about.

[BrandonC]

Now see, I've been using MMF for how long, and I've never known about that feature. They should have large webpage with all the hidden features in MMF2, because to be honest, I'm sure there's plenty more that I don't know about.

[00J]

In regards to your large frame idea.
This is probably the approach lots of users take.

It's easy to build a game like this and not get lost "everything is in the same frame". So you don't really need any logic to track frames or to save information.

Another reason is that MMF1.5 had always seemed to have a problem jumping from one frame to another one without problems developing, unless the frames were extremely simple, i.e. little or no event editor coding.

MMF 1.5 had very poor Memory management features, and you really were blind when trying to develop things in it, because you never had an idea how much memory you were using. "in MMF 1xx".

With MMF 2, it should be easier to do this because of the debugging tool which takes the blindfold off. The only problems I see with 1 huge frame would be the fact that you'd have to limit the overall detail of the entire game to keep it stable.