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The only fault I find with these tutorials (so far) is that there is no reminder to comment your code. I always thought that was essential when I was learning programming.
If you are making a large game, then comments indeed can help out. Personally, I always found commenting annoying (I minored in computer programming in college) since I used names that allowed me to simply remember what each behavior did. It IS essential though for collaboration projects (so that your partner quickly knows what each part does).
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let me follow the tutorial again and see if i can correct it I'll start from the beginning, i fixed it somewhat it still crashes but it waits till all the enemies are loaded i can get to about 2500 points then it crashes i'll start from tutorial one and try again
That's strange... it's still working fine for me. Do other tutorials of mine crash too or just this one? If you can send the error message, it would be very helpful.
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Okay after the second wave comes out it seems to me they come out very very thick. and after a few seconds before the third spot has enemies, flash seems to crash it tells me An ActionScript error has occurred but it doesn't say what line and i don't understand the error, it doesn't seem to be very straight forward like java is. Any ideas?
Is this in your own game or in the in-tutorial game? If it is your game, it would greatly help to see your scene behavior that creates the enemies as well as a screenshot of the error message (I have had to become good at decoding them due to the number of errors I get in my own games).
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Abigayl, you mentioned sticking with Photoshop to Chad. I think that's a great idea as I've had much more expierence with Photoshop and it seems a little more user friendly than Pencyl. I don't know if importing of .psd simply doesn't work or if I'm too impatient to wait it out. At any rate, you can maintain the "free space" around circular objects by saving them as GIFs and then simply opening directly with Stencyl instead of trying (waiting?) to import them as a .psd. I've noticed the "click on the image to choose its transparent color" is useless in Stencyl so Jpegs simply won't work. Might be something worth sticking in a tutorial if you plan on covering inserting images. :) My apologies if you've already covered this in a tutorial4+, 3 is as far as I've gotten so far and these are great. Three "5"s so far, keep it up!
You have some good points there... might be worthwhile for me to make a tutorial about images in the future (haven't done it yet). Thanks for the 5s! :)
Mine actually do when colliding (you will see it in tutorial 4). Make sure the enemies can't collide with each other in the collision groups in the game center (unless you want them to hit each other). To stop rotating on collisions though, in the enemy actor tab (the actor itself, not the behavior), in physics, turn off the rotating freely option.
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i literally shouted "YES!!!" when you went into 8-way movement. Again, this stuff should come in handy regarding me doing an RPG (or at least a top-down game). My only problem was the x/y coords. But that was because i had a different resolution setting for my game. A little tinkering and adjusting later i got what i wanted.
So far i think the greater challenge once im done with all this is making all the sprites in Pencyl..unless i stick with photoshop/fireworks and import from there. Though, that's something to worry about later...
Agreed, 8-way is so much better than 4-way. The X/Y coordinates indeed can take some finesse to get correct since actors are different sizes. If you have Photoshop, I'd advise sticking with that over Pencyl, but I will admit that I haven't fully explored Pencyl myself.
Can you screenshot the code and send it to me? From the error message, I am guessing you don't have the "if/otherwise if" chain properly placed. They have to go right after each other with nothing in between (and not inside of each other).
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Behavior: Design_0_0_Motion at line 80
Syntax error: else is unexpected.
else
Behavior: Design_0_0_Motion at line 87
Syntax error: else is unexpected.
else if((isKeyDown("left") || isKeyDown("A")))
Behavior: Design_0_0_Motion at line 94
Syntax error: else is unexpected.
else if((isKeyDown("up") || isKeyDown("W")))
That keeps appearing whenever I try to test what I have so far and I just reached the end of this tutorial... the error thing will probably get messed up when I post comment though and you probably wouldn't be able to tell me what the problem is and I can't find it.
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Please Note: Due to an update in Stencyl, the comparisons are now found in the Flow -> Conditional tab. Since my version is one that has been updated over time, it works differently with mine, so I cannot show this updated scene... :(
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This has been a really fantastic series. I've been wanting to dig into Stencyl, and this has been a really great introduction. I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for more from you.
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LOL I was supposed to say "change the smiley into something else" last tutorial. I guess it happened already. xD Could your next tutorial be about adding an HP bar and actions? Thanks. :D
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I am getting reports of a bug where the tutorial jumps back to the beginning. If this is happening to you, please send me a detailed message as to what/where/etc. it is happening. I have tried it both on Chrome and IE and I cannot recreate this error.
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One of the most common problems I see on the Stencyl forums is misuse of the time blocks, particularly when using them in the "always" wrapper or when referring to an actor after it has been killed (both game-breaking issues). I think that could use a good tutorial.
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LIke always a great job. I liked this tutorial more than the others though, since it went deeper into programming concepts. I think that you should move away from the avoider game, but perhaps try a patformer, since up until now, none of your games have had any physics. Something I'd like is how to have moused based shooting. Also, perhaps you should make a separate tutorial just for how stencyl is like programming - how the or is like the ||, and is like the &&, show some code-mode of stencyl and explain it. If I get any more ideas, I will share them with you. I liked the improvements you made from the other version as well. But who's the drawing on the bottom left of? It kind of reminds me of RPG Shooter Starwish.
Wow... let me take these one at a time... Platformer is tutorial 6; Mouse-Based shooting is tutorial 4 (next tutorial); Stencyl as programming/sitelock/music/other random tidbits is tutorial 5; thus, you have actually hit on all of the next tutorials :P. The drawing is a unique character that Ilolamai is making just for me :)
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Please rate this comment up so that I can see if you want to see even more tutorials, going more in depth or into other concepts. (Also, please let me know what other concepts you would like to see covered.) Thanks!