Scoring with dynamic strings

[wiggy]

Ahhh, I see.

Yeah, I took out the always, as its starting to click now that all these events are "always' tested once per frame. Its hard to wrap my mind in that direction that its per frame, not just anytime in the game.

<sigh> I'm not sure if I'm learning more or not, lol. Every time I post a question, the answers give me more questions (even after going through all the tutorials)
It's mostly just familiarity with Fusion and the properties it seems. I'd like to have (in the future) questions that are more geared towards the game rather than "how do I do this in Fusion", lol.

Anyway, so you're answer is no different schrodinger.

You said

or still better a counter with type=animation (see properties-settings for counter object)
and forcing animation frame/counter value to ufo-destroy-count

I did take a look at that today. I cloned one of the counters, and when I changed it to animation, it changed its icon to a default looking active object. So I made the one frame into a red line for 1, and the second frame a two, thinking, lets just see what happens. But incrementing and decrementing it does nothing. It stays on frame 1 (which is the single red line for a number 1 that I made). So I'm not really understanding how to use the animation property on a counter.

I'm assuming that an animation counter is a counter that using objects to represent counts in a single / multi frame (animation). If that's true, does this mean I can animate numbers 1 - 9 (lets say 2-3 frames for each number)? I'm kinda envisioning it for something like the UFO or even missile count. Kinda like the ole school Missile Command. You would have missile icons/objects on the bottom of the screen that represented your "count" of missiles. So if you had 10 missiles you would not have a 10 at the bottom of the screen, but 10 missile objects (active I guess, I dunno).

Is that what the animation for the counter does, or is that easier to do? Now that I'm thinking about it, its more classic and ole school style to do it that way. Whattya think?

[schrodinger]

Hello wiggy,

here's how you should setup your counter:
ufo_counter.mfa

the most important thing (after drawing its animations)
is correctly setting starting, maximum and minimum value
(see properties of ufo counter above)
because animation will be set taking into account these parameters,

so that if your min value is 0, max value is 10 and you have 5 animations
value 10 will be animation 5 and 8 would be 4

in our situation we simply prepare one animation for each value the counter can take

Don't worry about questions, there are and always will be plenty!

I think two of the key not-so-intuitive-things a new user has to learn asap are:

1- all of the events in your editor are read top-to-bottom and executed in event-list order
2- all of the events in your editor are executed FrameRate times per second in above succession

and from what I see you are facing (and tackling) both

[wiggy]

Bah, I gave up and looked at your solution after a day of fiddling, lol.

It was two factors. One, I didn't have a min and max value. Second, I did not have the event to set the:
counter = value("<animated_counter>")

And yeah, definitely tackling both. Its so easy once you see how its done... Its like "oh yeah"...duh. I'm just not quite familiar with Fusion yet. I know what I want to do, just not how to do it in Fusion yet, haha.

Maybe in a year I'll be able to answer someone else's questions after banging my head against all these issues. I see why now they say to "start small" and "finish" the project. You learn SOOOOOOOO much invaluable information just doing a small project. I figured I'd do 2-3 of these (not counting chocoblock, haha) and maybe I'd hit most of the speed bumps and will have more advanced questions that are like "how come it won't do this..." instead of "anyone know how to do this?" when I do my first real game

[schrodinger]

Maybe in a year I'll be able to answer someone else's questions after banging my head against all these issues. I see why now they say to "start small" and "finish" the project. You learn SOOOOOOOO much invaluable information just doing a small project. I figured I'd do 2-3 of these (not counting chocoblock, haha) and maybe I'd hit most of the speed bumps and will have more advanced questions that are like "how come it won't do this..." instead of "anyone know how to do this?" when I do my first real game

Surely enough! You'll be surprised how much you'll learn in how small time,
this is probably the most appealing feature of Fusion, its smooth learning curve.

I'd say you're going for the correct approach