Kain

The only real problem I've had so far are problems which seem to happen for every new thing I download and am starting to think I reinstalled my computer poorly. Namely, sound drivers randomly failing, explorer lagging up a storm, and Visual Studio "just in time debugger" throwing svchost.exe errors like crazy. Usually they iron themselves out after a while. But I've been using it as my main browser since Firefox is downright screwed up on initialization (it takes like 5 minutes and always acts like it and all the pluggins have JUST been installed) and Opera both doesn't work for certain things I frequently use. Oh, and it doesn't have a auto-spell checker (Chrome's still isn't as good as Firefox's, but at least it'll tell me when I'm wrong). Now if Chrome just had an ad block which was comparable to Firefox's.

If I ever get a good second act run, then I'll find out how to splice them together and do that.

With everyone using Chrome, now google can monitor users full-time.

I managed to cut off 2 seconds exactly. There are a couple of places you could cut time if you did it differently, but they look far too acrobatic for me. My time trial at 52.91 seconds (sorry for the various quality issues, it's my first time making and/or uploading a video):

I am by no means the best time trial doer, but I found a pretty nice path. I screwed up towards the end and kinda also to the middle and probably could have got 52 seconds or so if I didn't. So I don't doubt that someone made a 50 second run. Basically my path is to fall down the third hole and use your downward momentum to go fast. The rest is pretty obvious, just a few places where you need to slow down to roll into things.

Wha-!? That dude also did those higher-pitched The Simpsons Movie voice? Damnit, movie trailers just won't be the same without him. I liked movie trailers. And now they're gone.

I always thought it was the opening cutscene that was supposed to get people into it. That's what does it for me. For Sonic CD, S3&K, Sonic Heroes. That said, I did notice the the mellow feel to the music which might not be some people's idea of a first, grassland level, but (a) listening to the other songs on the website, it really fits the feel, ( the music's already made and that ain't something that's gonna change, and © it's god damn good music nonetheless.

Going on a third-hand mixture of previous discussions on this forum, articles and webpages written by industry professionals, some bit from a few C.S. teachers, and a little bit of partially-cynical "sense." It really depends on what position you wanted to get into and in what type of company. If you were looking for a designing position, then it wouldn't matter WHAT very very extremely super high-level language you used to implement your concepts as long as you were making good games. But development positions are probably few and far between and most companies would probably look for someone with writing and/or business experience. Not to mention (and I might be a little skeptical about this), for a top-level design position (instead of a more specific kind of design position) it's hard to imagine that designs based on other people's copyrighted designs are going to be all that appealing. If you're looking for a programming position, you probably simply aren't getting in without a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or such. They're surely willing to train competent programmers (and being a competent programmer is fairly language-independent, though that's partially because of the vast amount of similarities between similar-level languages) in OpenGL/DirectX/whatever, but experience in the engine they will be working on would doubtlessly look mighty good on your resume. Other positions like graphics design require some degree of programming knowledge, but experience like this would probably look fairly good in a portfolio. That's the extent of my knowledge on this. More to the point regarding the question, fangame experience probably won't be a stand-alone stepping stone into the game industry, but you're still making games, encountering logical, graphical, and design problems and solution, and it's all relevant experience. Edit: also, meeting a schedule and/or getting something done, especially in multi-person projects, is good experience for just about any job.

It does. It's just not nearly as vigorous as Firefox's. Fore example, type paralel, it'll give you parallel, but type parilel and it won't give you a thing. Whereas firefox's will give you parietal, parimutuel, parallel, and particle... yea, I'm not sure which is better. But it kinda surprises me, because google's "did you mean" is almost always right. Probably because it's weighted by search popularity.

You mean like how Opera does it? I found it pretty silly how they presented it as if it were a new idea in their little web-comic. And I agree that "computer-determined most visited website!" will never trump user-selection and it just gets in the way when it tries, but hey, it's google after all.

There are a few minor holes in the layer. But other than that, the only thing I encountered that could even begin to be called a bug was extremely inconsequential. Also, when jumping up an incline, I hit a spike at just the right angle and speed where I guess my bottom sensor was touching it despite the fact that I was moving upwards and I got hit. It seems to me this happened before in an earlier official Sonic game (Sonic 1 or 2) and it's a bit of a fluke, but I still call it a (minor) glitch. Anyway, now that the nitpicking is done, implementation is dazzling. Not just for the engine, but the gimmicks as well. The parabolic zip-line maintaining momentum made it an absolute ace of a gimmick, even if it's the slightest bit of an eyesore. I'm surprised you got so many gimmicks in in between the last time I saw this mid-SAGE and now. Obviously y'all have been putting a very good amount of work into it. There's a nice big array of badniks who all have nice design and implementation (though the rolling one did look weird as it went up/down steep slopes and went straight through spikes). There were places that the badniks cluttered up the space, but it was by no means haphazard (they weren't plopped right in the middle of a nice-speed section, for example) and fitting for the Sonic CD grassy level design. The design is likewise wonderful. A quick obligatory example of the first thing I noticed is how every time on the first drop (the three-hole one), the most naturally thing for some who's pressing right to win (and what happened to me all the time) was to successfully jump over the first one, not have enough height to make it over the slightly-higher second platform and fall onto an incline which, with your downward speed, will send you flying backwards into a badnik who'll get you if you don't jump/roll quick. Just extremely well-thought-out consequences and rewards for speed and platforming with not a bottomless pit to be found. The paths will intelligently and seamlessly transition in between sections of speed and sections of platforming whenever you're met with a strategic spring or gimmick. Even with the GHZ first-level limitations, direction, transition, flow, and gimmicks are all put together to make this not only technically impressive, but enjoyable as well. Presentation gets all stars as well. Graphics are fitting and hit a great mark in between familiar and original. Opening cutscene is a wonderful bonus. And music is simply orgasmic. Anyway, love where this project is going. I'll go ahead and put the layer holes I found in spoilers so you can find them:

Finally got it working one way or another. The change in UI is pretty disorienting, but right now, I'm only concerned with that annoying fickle little url bar at the bottom-left which comes and goes as I hover over a link. Any word on getting rid of that thing? Minimalism is all fine and dandy, but give me an option to turn off potentially-intrusive features, at least. Other than lack of options and/or documentation, it out-right doesn't work with the apps that Opera was having trouble with, so it certainly isn't making it to my default browser just yet. But I like the idea and it seems to be running both fast and smooth, so I'll be keeping my eye on this as it gets out of Beta. Edit: Actually it seems that the apps were probably working, but it screwed up my sound card. It says it lacks "mixers" all of a sudden when I went to play a game. Fun times. But a quick restart fixed that and now I'm loving it even more.

So I'm gonna assume by all these posts that I'm the only one having download issues. It's crashing my browsers left and right and never gets past the "Downloading Chrome" section. Why can't they just do it the normal way; why do they have to Microsoft up the download?

So I download a 475 KB download in my preferred and familiar download environment and then run an .exe which proceeds to tell me "downloading Google Chrome" for 10 minutes giving nothing but an imaginary load bar that gives me no indication of how long it will take and whether or not it's working. Not very good design, google. Let's hope the actual browser goes better.

I'm with PG. Looks like Google is being backed by some serious Chozo technology for this one. Anyway, I'm obviously going to be checking it out. Firefox 3 screwed my computer over and Opera doesn't play well with certain aps.

Are you using the instance_change function (or equivilant D&D action)? If so, then you should be sure to set the "Perform events" option as off/0. If you're not doing the instance_change function, you probably should be.

It's actually a much more complicated problem than I thought before. And I see why others suggested a 3D model. Because to do this real-time you'd need an entire depth buffer to do it accurately. But if you have a finite number of animations, you can always cut out the parts that would normally overlap.

They're probably mostly the same with minimum overhead differences. Using the room array ones will probably be the fastest, but the difference will be negligible.

There are numerous solutions, but the most un-intrusive would probably be this one: http://gmlscripts.com/script/draw_sprite_hud

There's an attribute for background which makes them tiled vertically or not. You can change it in the room properties (there's a checkbox next to where it says "Tile Vert."). Alternately, you could do it in code, by saying "background_vtiled[whatever] = 0;" The problem is there's no corresponding draw_background_*** function for this, so if you run out of backgrounds or get tired of the jumpiness then you're gonna have to code your own (or use someone else's script; I can find some if you need).

You're using GM? Well, in that case, I could show you what I did. If you find a way to compensate for the overlap (I was considering a sort of weaving method where each sprite is a higher depth than the one before, but a lower depth than the one after, going in a circle; I tried using blend modes to get this effect, with no success), then it's easily usable real-time. This basically only accounts for the rotation and proper positioning of offsets (which is, itself, a bit of a hassle). Anyway, I never have any luck spriting objects and such, so if anyone else wants to sprite a spike, notice the guide lines I made on my template and following the general makeup of the curves. stargate.gm6

Here's a little 32-frame template. It draws only one half of the blades so that the improper overlap is not made apparent. With minimal (though still tedious) cut-and-paste, you can easily-enough make a full template out of it. And from there you could sprite it frame by frame if you were crazy enough. But the way I did this was extremely simple (I just rotated a single spike twice: once about the corener it's attatched to the blade and once about the center), so if you would rather sprite a single blade and have me do what I did here, that's possible to. Though really GM's rendering will never be smooth so you're gonna need to touch it up either way. Also, sorry fot the .bmp format which makes this 12.4MB decompressed. That's easy and tedious to change since I don't have any inline .bmp-.png converter. a32.zip

What do you mean "doesn't seem to work"? Do you mind being more specific on what you tried and whether the nothing happened whatsoever or whether it was, in some way, off? -- As for your method, the only way to fix the fact that it moves based on Neon's speed and not on the view's speed would be to make it based on the change in view (note view_hspeed means something else; namely how fast a view is capable of following an object). And that encounters the same problems as I mentioned before (namely that you can't update the background values in between the time the view variables update and the time the background is drawn). Another problem with your method is that it will be off if Neon is moving on anything but a flat surface (angle = 0). That can easily be solved by saying, instead: background_hspeed[0] = lengthdir_x( hsp*39/40, angle); But you will still have the problems encountered before. -- An alternative would be to disable the automatic view following and to update the view values yourself (note, this code will not have any in-between area; though it wouldn't be too hard to code some). This code should go in the End Step event, after Sonic/Neon has done all his moving but before he is drawn. view_xview[0] = min( room_width, max( 0, x - view_wview[0]/2)); view_yview[0] = min( room_height, max( 0, y - view_hview[0]/2)); background_x[0] = view_xview[0]*0.975;

Well, in general, you can simply set the position of a background object using something like: background_x[ whatever] = view_xview[ 0] * 0.95; background_y[ whatever] = view_yview[ 0] * 0.99; However, the problem is that the view system gets changed just before it is used (which is just before backgrounds are drawn). And so there's no way you'll be able to change this value in time for an updated view. What you get is a jumpy background because it lags behind by one step. The usual way to avoid this is to draw the background yourself in a high-depth object. But to do that with layered paralax, you're going to need some function to draw the background tiled only horizontally.

Naturally. Actually, use this one: it has layers and a couple of other things implemented: http://kainsirusque.googlepages.com/sonic_cgm_080719b.gm6 It's still pretty dirty around the edges, though.