Shoot-em-up Bullet Generator help

[FungalGrowth]

Hello everyone!

I'm developing a vertical scrolling shoot-em-up similiar to Raiden, Dodonpachi, Strikers, etc. I'm trying to develop an engine whereby I can set up complicated bullet patterns easily, then each enemy will load the relevant information and then shoot the bullets.

So basically my issue is with how to store this data, and how to input the data. I want to store the angle, speed and delay between bullets. I'm not sure what the best way to do this is in Multimedia Fusion. Creating these values as text would be the best option and then have my code interpreting the values.

For example, "10, 5, 20" would shoot a bullet at 20 degress, at a speed of 5 with a 20 millisecond delay till the next bullet.

Another example "10, 5, 20, 20, 5, 20, 30, 5, 20" would shoot 3 bullets at 10 degrees then 20, then 30 degrees with 20 second intervals between each and a speed of 5 for all.

So the best way I think I could do that is using strings. That way I could generate so many complicated bullet patterns as easily as typing in a bunch of text to be interpreted. I'd really like to avoid using arrays due to their fixed length, and because you can only enter data at runtime and have to store the arrays externally (I'd also like to have this game on the internet with Vitalise)

This is all delving into things I have no experience with in Multimedia Fusion. Hopefully I've explained myself clearly enough and someone can provide some advice as to what the best way to tackle this is!

Thanks everyone,

Sincerely,

FungalGrowth

[SEELE]

Use the String tokenizer and set the delimiter to ','.

[SEELE]

http://www.clickteam.com/epicenter/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=92120#Post92120

that should save some confusion.

[FungalGrowth]

Thanks Seele!

This is perfect! Just the solution I had in mind, and the example file is perfect. Thankyou so much you've allowed me to overcome the biggest hurdle in my game development so far!

I see you have a unique way of creating the timer using the mod function. Is this resource light way for doing a timer? At the moment I'm just using an alterable value that subtracts 1 every ms and shoots the bullet when it reaches 0.

Thanks again Seele!

FungalGrowth