Help creating a break in acts.

[giglamesh]

Remember in sonic 3 / Sonic and knuckles, when the camera stayed on you and the boss and you could not progress forward or back till the boss was defeated?, basically i'm after some help with that.

Would i need maybe some "stoppers" so to speak to stop the character going back and forward, then when the boss is destroyed have an event that enables the character to move forward again?

Also with the camera, would i need to set that to certain boundaries so it will focus on the fight between character and boss?

This is the last time i ask for help for a while, some serious working is going on soon.

Thank You in Advance.

[OverbounD]

So I take you've creating your own engine using visual c++ right? It bewilder me how many people don't even bother to do something so simple as to tell what program they are using to make their game. How is anyone supposed to know otherwise? We really should have a rules thread with a template on how to right a question or something this is just getting ridiculous.

Essentially though its just a matter of limiting the x of the camera if camera x is greater than such camera x = camera x limit. I cannot be more specific than that without knowing the program.

[USC]

Umm, to get back on subject....

A way you could do this is make the limiter part of the camera movement conditions themselves. For instance, you could do something like...

int variable = 0;

while(variable) == 0{

//code for making the camera follow Sonic

}

[code]

...then, when you get near Robotnik, or a cutscene, or what have you, just set 'variable' equal to 1. In fact, you could create several different camera movement styles this way (IE: If variable equals 2, the camera constantly scrolls to the right, etc).

Hope that helps.

[giglamesh]

How about less criticizing me and more helping by you. I do my best to answer questions the answers aren't 100% correct all the time but I answer to the best of my ability each time with the exception of Delta one time where I was in the wrong. We worked that out via pm. Now a lot of the questions that come through are about MMF which I know nothing about so I can't do anything about that and a lot of the questions I could answer have missing information. I even went as far as to suggest a fix that might help people not forget information in their posts. Because as I said its getting a bit ridiculous. I don't see what's so wrong about that.

We need a thread with a template like so

Game Creation Tool:

Engine (if used because most of us use Dash or Worlds):

Problem clearly defined:

and maybe an example of a good question.

Here is the Posting Guidelines from the Game Maker Community.

Seems to me less people answers questions than they used to. Maybe that's because they are discouraged I know I am at times. Maybe something like this would help out.

oh F**k, i am terribly sorry.

I'm using MMF2, but i'm using my own engine (for a change).

just limit the camera?, ok i got it, thanks.

[hRook]

Overbound, in my 8 years on this forum, I have helped a good number of people. Hey, we're even at the same rep level!

[DimensionWarped]

ENOUGH. No bickering in the assistance forum.

[DimensionWarped]

I'm going to go ahead and weigh in on this one.

This is going to depend on what you want. To say the least, if your idea is to load the level without switching frames, that isn't going to happen. You can't unload non-actives from a frame and you can't load non-actives into a frame. And making a level entirely with actives will rape anything you have resembling performance. What you can do though is put the actives for a given level into some kind of event to be loaded when you switch levels and simply ditch the actives involved with the first act and load the actives involved with the second act once the level is finished and have the whole thing run in one large super-act. In fact, to some extent I think that's actually how it's done in Sonic 3 and Knuckles... since I seem to recall being able to slide past the level boundaries into a sort of dead version of act 2 devoid of enemies and working gimmicks.

[Asuma]

There's a way to fake it. It's kind of complicated but I might be able to write something up. It will work like the check point system. I asked LarkSS about this and he explained it to me once before. I'll just do a tutorial. It's better for me to explain it than to write it out.

[Scarletdark]

*grabs pen and note pad*

I am ALL ears azu.

[Aaron C-T]

Personally, unless I'm not understanding the question properly, I'd just go with USC's answer.

[DimensionWarped]

USC's answer is fine if you aren't worried about the performance of having both stages simultaneously active.

[Serephim]

There's a way to fake it. It's kind of complicated but I might be able to write something up. It will work like the check point system. I asked LarkSS about this and he explained it to me once before. I'll just do a tutorial. It's better for me to explain it than to write it out.

A way to fake it would be to simply make another frame and make the transition between the two as inconspicuous as possible.

Another way i guess would be to keep track of all the actives in the stage, and delete/load them once you get to a point where you could no longer travel backwards, or that they're no longer needed. An obvious point would be at the end of the Midboss of the level, but you could take it farther.

You could even take that a step farther, and just load/remove objects based on distance from them. Your pick. Stuff like this really needs to be implemented on completed levels only though, or it could get annoying.