Tips for making developing more convenient?

[Outcast]

I wonder if you guys have any tips for making the development of a game more convinient and easy? I am talking about how to structure things for example.

Like for my game now for example. I have around 15 levels and I mostly do changes that I try out on level 1. But then I have to go over every level to implement these changes and that takes very much time and is tideous.. Maybe there is a better, smarter, faster way to do this?

I was thinking about making every item global? And trying to make as much events as possible global events? Is that a good idea, or could it cause problems?

I read here about some guy who always create a empty frame as the first frame when developing where he put all the items he made as global objects, and then if he needed to change or get a object he could just go into this frame and change or copy a object to use. That sounds like a good trick instead of using the sometimes very messy build in window for picking objects maybe..

[Corlen]

The latest build of MMF2 has a new option called "editor synchronization" under where you check global object and just pick "same name and type" instead of "identical objects" and that should make your global objects synced with much more reliability than before.

[Phi]

Stone Goose?

[Outcast]

Stone Goose is an extension so I dont know if it works so well for exporting.. to example Flash.

I read a bit of this editor synchronization in the new build news, but is there some more indepth explanation?

Any more tips and trix? :p

[Corlen]

It just does as the name implies and forces the editor to sync objects that are the same name and type instead of exactly identical objects; the latter falls out of sync quite easily as I'm sure many of us are aware. I can't remember if it was Francois or Yves, but one of them said this problem particularly happens with objects that have behaviors.

[Fanotherpg]

Work on proper resolution and window setup:

Http://tm2fk.pl/gwerdy It improved my performance a lot.

[Dines]

I find planning a project on paper in advance helps hugely. I have an extension I've been developing for a while, and this has enabled me to work through likely problems in my mind before discovering them when I start to program (causing the inevitable process of unpicking the events back to the point where the problem arose).

I tend to favour alterable values and strings over flags, as you can name them. This takes a very slight performance hit, but it's negligible unless you're doing huge, intense object loops. The advantage is I have code I can actually read. This is especially important because I tend to drop projects for a few months then come back to them later - if I didn't do this, I'd never be able to brush up on what all the events did. It also makes expressions more readable, so less comments needed.

Use the Event List Editor most of the time, but don't forget to use the Event Grid Editor when you want to copy events across like objects, it's just drag and drop.

Learn to make extensions. There are small but useful little objects I've wished someone would make for years, and now finally I can. It's liberating - if you're making a game and thinking 'I wish there was some way to do <thus and so>', you can simply load up rSDK or EDIF and do it yourself. I find it feels better making tiny little objects to do something directly than trying to force generalised objects to do things that they weren't necessarily designed to do. Might just be how my mind works though...

[King_Cool]

I think i have asked this before, but how do you make extencions?
What programming language do i need to use?
Is there kind of a torurial for this?

[Dines]

If you're making Windows extensions, you need to do it in C++, and compile it in MS Visual C++.

C++ can look a little complicated at first, but it's actually fairly straightforward. The article here discusses it in greater detail, but in essence:

An MMF object is a DLL file which is basically just a library of functions that MMF can talk to. MMF plugs into it and it has a series of default functions that it tries to call. So if you create functions in your DLL that match the names that MMF will call, then you can communicate with it and an object is born.

To make things a lot easier, there are different Software Development Kits (SDKs) available, with different advantages and disadvantages between them. Clickteam have their own official SDK, which is well-documented but a little time-consuming to use. rSDK is another option, but it doesn't gel well with some features of Visual C++. EDIF is the newest SDK on the block, and it comes with lots of useful features like an Object Selection API, but it abstracts you ever more from the inner workings of the extensions.

[Outcast]

Work on proper resolution and window setup:

Http://tm2fk.pl/gwerdy It improved my performance a lot.

So what is the proper resolution and setup exactly?