Having trouble getting Snowboarding Tutorial to work

[Rambutaan]

Hi all,

I've been dabbling a little bit with MMF2's tutorials on and off over the past few months and I've started to take a look at them again. I had a look at the Snowboarding tutorial today but unfortunately no matter how similar I've made the game to the one shown in the tutorial, when I run the game I can't see any of the trees or rocks being created, although when I run the tutorial project that is provided it seems to work fine. I tried my best to see what differences, if any there were between my project and the one provided and came back with nothing. So I'm hoping that perhaps someone here could tell me what I've done wrong? Basically it seems everything is working (the score is even increasing on schedule) but the objects don't appear to be created (or they're not visible).

Script I'm referring to:

- Every 01"00
Create (pine) at (332,555) layer 1
(pine): Set X position to Random(640)
(pine): Bring to back
(Player 1): Add 50 to score

The tutorial I'm talking about is the Snowboarding one by Francois under Beginners at the Clickteam Tutorials page (I can't post the URL since I'm apparently not allowed to)

(I'd attach the MFA but apparently it's too large)

Thanks,

Mark G (Rambutaan)

[happygreenfrog]

First off, welcome to the forums!

First off, Francois is French. His tutorials were translated from French, and while his posts on the forums are very easily readable English, his tutorials almost feels like they were just run through Google Translate, making them kinda hard to follow, if not downright incomprehensible at times. It may be hard to follow along, so, if you have a hard time with it, I highly recommend finding another one to do instead.

Second off, I think the reason you can't share the link is because you aren't a registered product owner. I think it's to prevent spam bots from spamming links everywhere, while making it so that people with MMF2/CF2.5 can. You can register your copy of MMF2/CF2.5 on the forums here: http://community.clickteam.com/passport.php

Anyway, third off, I think the reason you can't see the pine trees is the "bring to back" action, since that moves them behind everything else that isn't a backdrop. Try deleting that, and seeing if it gets us anywhere. If that doesn't work, you may have forgotten to give the pine trees any form of movement, making them just stay off-screen. If they do have a movement, and that still doesn't work, then maybe you could put your MFA in a ZIP file and then uploading the ZIP file? If it is still too large, then maybe you could make a copy of the MFA file, and then remove any sound effects or musics (if there are any), and see if that helps? If there aren't any sound effects or music, or if removing them still doesn't make it small enough, then maybe you could, in a copy of the MFA file (the same one that you removed the sound effects in if you tried that step), try removing any unnecessary backdrops or animations, and then seeing if it's small enough when in a ZIP file at that point?

[Rambutaan]

Hi, happygreenfrog. Thank you for the warm welcome .

Second off, I think the reason you can't share the link is because you aren't a registered product owner. I think it's to prevent spam bots from spamming links everywhere, while making it so that people with MMF2/CF2.5 can. You can register your copy of MMF2/CF2.5 on the forums here: http://community.clickteam.com/passport.php

Yeah I bought MMF2 as part of the Humble Bundle sale and at first couldn't figure out where to get the serial key. I managed to find it now though so the serial is now linked with my forum account. This is the tutorial I'm talking about:

http://www.clickteam.com/creation_materials/tutorials/download/SnoWBoardinG.exe

Anyway, third off, I think the reason you can't see the pine trees is the "bring to back" action, since that moves them behind everything else that isn't a backdrop. Try deleting that, and seeing if it gets us anywhere. If that doesn't work, you may have forgotten to give the pine trees any form of movement, making them just stay off-screen.

Yeah I thought it was a bit odd about bringing the objects to the back so I tried bringing to them front and that didn't work. I tried your suggestion in removing them altogether and it still didn't work. Trees don't have any movement set but that's also the case in Francois's example. He uses the following code to move the tree I suspect:

* Always: (pine) set Y position to Y("pine") - value("speed")

I've managed to zip the MFA and it should be small enough now .

[happygreenfrog]

I don't even need to look at the example now that you've mentioned how the trees move. Have you followed the entire tutorial yet? Since you are going to need that event to get it working, since, otherwise, the trees will always be off-screen. I'll look at the file you uploaded and see if I might be able to get it working, though I don't know how it was done in the original tutorial since it is one of the few tutorials I haven't followed all the way through , because I haven't gone through Francois' beginners tutorials, since they weren't translated to English for a very long time, and, at this point, I've already followed basically every other tutorial there is, making it not exactly worth the time or effort for me for anything other than being able to help others with it, and, even then, I'm not sure it's worth it for that either, since they aren't exactly the best ever due to translation issues, though I'm sure they aren't completely useless for someone who is completely new to MMF2.

EDIT: Looking at the example, I can't seem to figure out what it is that makes it not work...

EDIT 2: I found the issue! Look at event 10 and 11. They're set to position the pine tree based on the stone object's coordinates, and set to destroy the trees based on the stone object's coordinates. Move those over to the rock object by clicking and dragging them, delete the actions in those events under the pine tree object, and it should be fixed!

[Rambutaan]

EDIT 2: I found the issue! Look at event 10 and 11. They're set to position the pine tree based on the stone object's coordinates, and set to destroy the trees based on the stone object's coordinates. Move those over to the rock object by clicking and dragging them, delete the actions in those events under the pine tree object, and it should be fixed!

Absolute legend! Thank you so much happygreenfrog . Looks like I made a rookie mistake (and not the first time) - got to make sure I have those events in the right columns!

Also, just wondering if you had some general advice, would you recommend getting my hands on as many tutorials as possible first before delving into my own project or better to jump into my own project and then learn as I go?

[happygreenfrog]

Definitely learn before making your first project. If you don't, then you'll "learn as you go" the fact that you probably will just give up on your first projects if they aren't absolutely tiny, and most people seem to immediately jump to huge RPGs or other such huge projects instead of making smaller ones.

Tutorials aren't exactly the only way to learn, however. Looking at examples (if you can't find any tutorials that teach you how to do what you want) and making really small projects (if you want to learn as you go) are both great ways of learning as well. However, I do recommend you do the tutorials. Start with a few beginner tutorials, then, once you feel you've gotten the hang of MMF2's interface, then move on to the intermediate tutorials.

I have a few recommended beginners tutorials, though the intermediate ones are where things start getting really interesting...

Build a Canabalt style - infinite runner game: http://gamedev.tutsplus.com/tutorial...-from-scratch/

This one is, simply put, perhaps the most useful beginners tutorial. It teaches some concepts that can be very difficult to grasp and makes them really easy to understand, and multiple of them are ones you'll find yourself needing for even the largest of projects. If you only want to do a few beginners tutorials, this is the way to go. It may be the only one you need, actually. It's a video tutorial, by the way. And it's made by someone who has a pretty good sense of humor, so you can expect to find yourself chuckling at a few of the things said. The same person who made it also made a video tutorial series on Lacewing, which is, without his Lacewing video tutorial series, one of the most complicated to understand extensions ever. He manages to make it only a little bit harder than this beginner tutorial, BTW, so I'll put the link up for the Lacewing video tutorial series made by the same person here: http://community.clickteam.com/threads/58247-Lacewing-Video-Tutorials

I would put a link to the Catch the Fruit tutorial here, but I think it's actually easier than the tutorial that comes with MMF2, and, all things considered, you've probably already done the one that comes with MMF2, and I do believe that almost everything you'd learn there is in the snowboarding tutorial as well, even with the translation errors and such.

Here I'd put a link to some of the intermediate tutorials, but why do that when I can just recommend all the tutorials from one person?:

Under intermediate tutorials, you'll find that a lot of the tutorials were wrote by a guy who's username here is "Koobare". His tutorials are the ones you should focus on the most. Most of his tutorials have these apply to them: Easy for intermediate tutorials (particularly "Smelly Claw" and "Glob Wars", which are also some of the best MMF2 tutorials out there), wrote by a guy with a sense of humor about as good as the one who made the video tutorials I gave you links to, and, to top it all off, they are also fun to play once you've finished making them.

I can't forget one of the longest MMF2 tutorials in existence, though, can I?

Bermuda Triangle

http://www.clickteam.com/creation_materials/tutorials/bermuda_triangle_1/bermuda_triangle_1.html

Okay, so this one's almost an advanced tutorial if you ask me, but it's under the intermediate segment, so it counts. Do it last, though. It's nearly as hard as the easiest advanced tutorials.

Speaking of which...

Some of the advanced tutorials were also made by Koobare, but even a few of his are really hard. I recommend making a few smaller projects and going through almost all the tutorials I listed and looking at a bunch of examples before you do most of them, since they are kinda hard to understand, except for Space Corsair and M4OS and maybe a few others (I recommend you just stick with those two at first, though). You should probably do Space Corsair right after the intermediate tutorials I listed. It's a pretty good transitional point, I do believe.

I hope this helps!

[Rambutaan]

I would put a link to the Catch the Fruit tutorial here, but I think it's actually easier than the tutorial that comes with MMF2, and, all things considered, you've probably already done the one that comes with MMF2, and I do believe that almost everything you'd learn there is in the snowboarding tutorial as well, even with the translation errors and such.

Here I'd put a link to some of the intermediate tutorials, but why do that when I can just recommend all the tutorials from one person?:

Under intermediate tutorials, you'll find that a lot of the tutorials were wrote by a guy who's username here is "Koobare". His tutorials are the ones you should focus on the most. Most of his tutorials have these apply to them: Easy for intermediate tutorials (particularly "Smelly Claw" and "Glob Wars", which are also some of the best MMF2 tutorials out there), wrote by a guy with a sense of humor about as good as the one who made the video tutorials I gave you links to, and, to top it all off, they are also fun to play once you've finished making them.

Again, thanks for the helpful post! I've actually already tried the Catch the Fruit tutorial and the Chocoblock one (as you probably guessed). I have also come across a couple of Koobare's tutorials and agree that they're pretty good.

I've now got a clearer picture on how to proceed, so thanks again .

[Riverswift]

Having trouble with some coding dealing with the speed lines 8 and 12 and 15 thru 21 can't set a count in order for those to work and software is reg. to tiger wood learning center i am a instructor with them so don't know how to reg the product.