Objec t Selection / Spread Value Question

[Golds]

I'm surpremely frustrated trying to get my simple enemy behaviors working.

I have an enemy that walks towards the player and shoots at him, and avoids stepping off the edge of platforms. All well and good.

And for multiple incarnations, I do a Spread Value, and a fast loop to handle each instances events. But if I added more than say 3 or 4, spread out through a big scrolling frame, the first enemies I see will behave properly, but when i come to another one later on in the frame, big chunks of his events just won't execute. He won't move to you or shoot.

I think the crux is I have it set to only walk/fire at you if you're close to it Abs(Player(x)-Enemy(x) + Player(y) - Enemy(y)) < 250 or somesuch. I can't seem to get this to work, and it's really frustrating.

I've even tried using the Object Selection Extension to spread 1 on Enemies that meet that criteria and fast loop for that, but it's also buggy.

Can anyone give me some tips on how to have multiple instances of an active object only perform events when close to the player?

[Sarah]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/maths/shapeih/pythagorastheoremrev2.shtml

[haora]

Just in case Sarah's answer was a little "short"... your problem is probably the way you're calculating the distance between the player and the enemy...

Check out that link, and use the proper equation for it...
And tell us if that solved the problem!!

[DT]

Pythagoras Theorem is "a^2 + b^2 = c^2"

In MMF2 this can be calculated using the Specials Object / Compare Two General Values. Something like this:

Sqr( Abs(X( "Active 1" )-X( "Active 1" )) )+Sqr( Abs(X( "Active 2" )-X( "Active 2" )) )

:for the first value and 250 (from the example above) for the second value. I would use the =< comparison just in case the object is moving faster than the event loops speed.