Recent posts by AldenRogers on Kongregate

Topic: Tyrant / Building spam problem

put in a bridge of destiny and those gatlings don’t do damage anymore…

Topic: Tyrant / [Recruitment] [Level 12] Ich bin ein Berliner

It’s nice to see the faction I started so long ago with my short lived secondary account “SubtleMedia” is still going strong! heh. I hadn’t realized it was still around until you fought TC, which I’ve been in a while. Interesting.

Topic: Tyrant / Tyrants Club - lv 12 - Stable and mature faction 11 months old :D

Actually, none of us are bots. Sorry to disappoint you and your conspiracy theory.

Topic: Tyrant / Swipe should also swipe multiple walls

If you look at swipe from a realistic perspective…. a card with a swipe type attack would realistically have up to 3 enemies in front of it that it could hit with a slashing motion… However, a physical entity that can attack can only be in one ‘location’ at one time… structures would seem to count as locations, in my mind, and most likely wouldn’t be able to be damaged by a single slashing attack the same way.

I would, however, think that a card with payback should be able to counter-strike a structure that damages it.

Topic: Game Programming / [as2]How do i put something from library in game?

It sounds like you need to set the linkage in the library item… set it to export for actionscript and give it an identifier name.

If you are using flash 8 professional as I do, right click on the movieclip in the library list and select ‘linkage’ from the mousemenu… there you can set these proporties.

Topic: Game Programming / AS3 - Efficient Graphics Programming

I started a flame war? how about you reread the posts. I don’t like people assuming stuipid things, and I said so. That’s not starting a flame war.

Topic: Game Programming / AS3 - Efficient Graphics Programming

Originally posted by qwerber:

Originally posted by AldenRogers:

It seems that we might have future politicians in the making in here. Hehe. Not reading the content of messages or actually listening to other view points and blindly spouting opinions based in hype and popular belief instead of fact.

Dealmaster, From my experience with our engine, performance is increased without displaying the offscreen components. This may be heightened in our game as as2 is slower, as I have said before, but I would assume that

yes? that what? Did we blindly shout opinions or provide backup? Why did you attack us in the first place?

You keep mentioning your engine, and your game, assuming we will believe you are experienced and professional.

You think us (me and draco and dealmaster) as people who have little knowledge of programming, and only repeat what others say. You are wrong.

All my comments in here are based entirely off of the other comments in here. The blatantly ignorant assumption that I had to be using a super fast gaming machine to have an as2 project that runs well is the obvious example. I also don’t care if you believe if I am developing a game or not. I was trying to discuss some of my experience with someone who asked questions, and then a few obvious people hijacked the thread.

Topic: Game Programming / AS3 - Efficient Graphics Programming

It seems that we might have future politicians in the making in here. Hehe. Not reading the content of messages or actually listening to other view points and blindly spouting opinions based in hype and popular belief instead of fact.

Dealmaster, From my experience with our engine, performance is increased without displaying the offscreen components. This may be heightened in our game as as2 is slower, as I have said before, but I would assume that an as3 based engine would benefit as well from not displaying the offscreen tiles.

I don’t know what sorts of flags you are wanting to set in your game, but using tiles on screen instead of just the graphic information copied over, you can easily access a lot of different information… like in ours, one example would if the player is over a certain water tile, electric energy hurts more. Another is how it is simple to access if a player is nearby a certain object, as he is known to be x tiles away from the object. There are a great many helpful aspects, from what I’ve seen.

Topic: Game Programming / AS3 - Efficient Graphics Programming

I don’t need to defend my as2 game from your biased opinions, as it runs well with the organization I posted above. Get over yourselves. You guys missed the point entirely. please stop spamming your annoying comments on how you hate older languages, and allow the thread to go back to the original question.

Topic: Game Programming / AS3 - Efficient Graphics Programming

… please stop with the rediculous assumptions. We are not using any high end computers to work on our as2 project. This particular computer is an old stock dell laptop computer running windows xp, and it runs perfectly fine with our game’s setup.

We are also not ‘wasting’ resources. Nothing in our game is there ‘just because’. All of our game components are there for specific reasons.

The point is that if a developer designs and programs a game system well, they can create it in any language and make it work well. As I said before, if he uses a similar system to what we have in our as2 rpg engine, his AS3 version should surely be faster than ours, which has no issue. Perhaps there are better ways to do things than we have, but I have yet to hear of a full, cohesive way to do so.

Just because you can’t program well enough to optimize a good game engine, Darkim, doesn’t make your pessimistic views legitimate. Please stop wasting everyone’s time with your poisonous attitude.

Topic: Game Programming / AS3 - Efficient Graphics Programming

we’re working in as2, and have a setup with 45×45 sized tiles where 2 tiles off each side of the screen are still ’visible due to possible overlapping graphics, and those next to them off screen are removed.

All these tiles are placed into a master movieclip, not directly on the stage.

with our setup, we have no problem with any lag issues in our as2 rpg engine. If it works for AS2, it should work fine for your as3 project.

Topic: Game Programming / Animation in Flash

for my rpg project, we have various animations set to different frames in a ‘character’ movieclip.

so, the walk facing downward is on frame 1… the walk facing down&right is on frame 2, the walk animation facing right is on the next frame, etc. when we need to switch, we just tell it to change to the correct frame and play the corrisponding animation on that frame.

When you want to attack instead of walk, just set it to the correct ‘attackAnimation1’ frame. If you label each frame, it should be easy to tell it which frame to go to instead of just referencing frame numbers.

Topic: Game Design / UG and I were arguing about AI (UG beat up qwerber and won, I mean!)

… what about tron ai do you want to discuss? I really only played tron once, and didn’t like it at the time, so I’m not all that familar with the various parts of the game except for the motorbikes leaving the non-crossable trails.

Topic: Game Design / UG and I were arguing about AI (UG beat up qwerber and won, I mean!)

I saw the contest when you posted it, it belonged in the programming forum. Discussion of the topic of AI, however, is perfectly within the scope of this forum.

Seconded.

I am mainly a developer, but have some background in programming. I feel that AI is most definitely a discussion needing to be in game design. The basic types of AI and which to choose for one’s project is a must, especially for new indy developers.

Without base knowledge of the general implementation and how AI works in it’s various forms, a new person will never be able to properly code something that works well.

So, Who has the first questions on AI?

Topic: Game Programming / Probability / Chance [AS2]

heres a function to create a random whole number up to a given number of your choosing. (this can work with my previous comment’s theory for relational occurances)

// this button Returns a random number up to the given max
on(release) {
	function roll(max:Number):Number {
		var rand:Number = Math.floor(Math.random() * (max+1));
		return rand;
	}
   trace(roll(169));
}

Topic: Game Programming / Probability / Chance [AS2]

His question stating: “Eg. 43% chance of Event 1 , 56% chance of Event 2, and 70% chance of Event 3” is rather vague.

We really do need to know what the effect is supposed to be… if he’s trying to have different events all possibly happen, then each event needs its own check vs the random result… That would give Event1 a true 43% chance to happen, Event2 a true 56% chance, etc…

otherwise, if you are wanting to have only one of those events occur depending on the random call, we are assuming a scale of 1-100 and asigning 1-43 = to Event1, 44-56 = Event2, 57-69 = Event3, and 70-100 = Event4. With this setup, however, there is Not a 43% chance for Event2 to occur, as it only has a 13/100’ths chance to happen instead of the other possible events.

So… are you trying to give ratio% chances to each of those events compared to eachother, are you wanting various events to take place upon the same random call, or are you trying to do something else?

If it’s supposed to be relational for those events, it would be simple enough to use the total of the values you want each event to be in relation… eg: 43+56+70 = 169… you’d call for a random integer between 1-169, then compare the results. if the result <=43, then Event1. Else, if result > 43 && <=99 then Event2, Else, if result > 99 then Event3. you could do this for more options as well, giving precise relational control over how likely it is for each event to occur instead of the others… and you can obviously check the exact percentage of how likely each event is to occur by dividing the number range for each event by the total number.

Topic: Collaborations / Programmer Needed

Perhaps you can put together your “vamped up” versions of a few of the main components… that way, programmers can see at least one or two parts that are real examples of the final product, and then can decide if they want to help based on that.

Using only placeholder graphics as examples of the look you want to go for is not a good idea, as you can see by averagejoedev’s, and gameBuilder15’s responses.

Topic: Game Design / Horror Games

I still find the first ‘alone in the dark’ to be the best survival horror game that combines ‘horror’, puzzles, story and play control all together into a great cohesive whole. though, my second favorite was parasite eve 2. It lacks the scariness, but made up for it in fun action and precision gameplay. Check those out if you havn’t already.

Topic: Game Design / RPG level design

Originally posted by draganviper:

Originally posted by truefire:

If you have secret areas/treasures/dungeons/bosses, make some more obvious ones a bit earlier in the game. The player needs to know that these exist early on. It will make them interested to find them (possibly even combing every dungeon they come across if they’re a completionist). It’s probably not a good idea to say “Hey, there’s secret areas,” because that kind of kills the secrecy. The player won’t feel like they found a hidden bonus, they’ll feel like it was something they were supposed to find because they were told about it.

That’s true, you need to ease them into secret area awareness just like any other opening tutorial should ease them into other aspects of the game.

Having easily found ‘secret areas’ early is a great way to introduce the fact that there could be more throughout the game…

Hinting at a location is another way to clue people in… perhaps through character dialogue, or by having an item you need to find all the parts for… if a player is missing the trigger for his super blaster ultimate weapon, he’ll know he’s missed something so far.

The more blatant way is something that some of the early 3d shooters like wolfenstein did… after a level has been ‘completed’, display a figure like 5/8 secrets found. To me, this way did detract some for the feeling of finding the secret, as truefire said. However, without this, I wouldn’t even have known I missed some, since they didn’t seem to have another way of subtly hinting of their existence… and so, the completionists might think they have gotten everything, and thus, no longer play your game.

Topic: Game Design / RPG level design

Regarding the action rpg classic: “legend of zelda, link to the past”, it used a dungeon system with multiple floors for their main puzzle areas. they used that level design to allow the player to fall through holes in the floor to gain access to locked areas below. This added a good depth, literally, to their level design, allowing essentially for 3d maze puzzles.

They also allowed the player to ‘wander’ around the main world map freely between dungeon encounters, which allowed the player to explore even more, and gave the player the ability to ‘discover’ new hidden places.

They also included themed areas on the world map, giving a sense of a larger world than it really was. from plains areas, to river areas, to forests, each their own themed puzzles that fit into those areas well.

Now, with the non Action style of rpg, such as most of the first final fantasy games, their level design was much more straight forward without much interactivity in the levels themselves. They relied much more on themed areas that tied in very closely with their storylines. The focus of those games was more on the story as well, and much less on the discovery and manipulation/exploitation of the environment.

Topic: Game Design / RPG level design

First you need to know your character’s motivation… what is he striving for, and what has hindered his progress so far? What are the forces in the game that are working against him? A government? and evil arch enemy? Nature itself? You want to have new and unique types of things, so it’s not just the same… gather x monster skins over and over and over and over and over and…

Next you need to consider the characters current skills available in that section of the game, and work with what is possible to overcome, and still be a challenge.

Afterward, figure out what sort of obstacles would be a good fit for the style of the area for the ‘map area’ in question.

When you figure these out, you should have what you need.

Topic: Game Design / Microtransactions

Originally posted by UnknownGuardian:

… And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone using paypal directly in a flash game… Other systems like GamerSafe I’ve heard of and have lots of options for developers to implement.

From the Flash Game Summit in San Fransisco a while back, I learned from the player.IO discussion that he, with “everybody edits”, and ‘shellshock live’ both use paypal for micro transactions.

It seems, though, that doing so, they would need to deal directly with any fraud, item discrepencies, etc… which the already established micro transaction services say they take care of.

Topic: Game Programming / using flash 8 movieclips in an as3 compiler?

Thanks for the info.

Topic: Game Programming / using flash 8 movieclips in an as3 compiler?

is there an easy way to use a movieclip character library that contains different frames for different animations created in flash8 in a different compiler for as3

Topic: Game Design / Which is the best design method?

In traditional animation and in film making, people essentially make prototypes along the way. The storyboards used show the key points in each scene before they shoot/fully animate… this helps to focus on what is important that the stories need. After this, animatics are often made… where those key points are positioned in time, looking at the timing of a scene to see if it works the way the director wants, or if they need to find different shots to add a different ‘flavor’ to the scene. While a film shoots, they put together rough cuts, which serve a similar purpose, and they replace the animatic placeholder (prototype) with the fuller version.

Because of all the work and different people working collaboratively, these ‘prototypes’ along the way help to avoid working on things that don’t quite fit, or that just don’t work, saving lots of time and money in production.

The same can be done using the prototypes for games.