Kain

Happy Birthday. Enjoy your "who cares, I've been drinking for the past 5 years, anyway." There's no off switch on this guy!

Artist rendering of the Sonic Hedgehog Homoglog: ... I feel awful now.

An "engine" is basically all the physics and stuff that make up the game. Basically, there's the "engine" aspect of the game and the design aspect of the game. Usually people start with a pre-made engine as their base instead of coding one from scratch, and that's why "what engine are you using" was asked. You can find pre-made engines on the main website and scattered around the forums.. Anyway, no, you can't use this code directly with TGF 2, but it's not difficult at all to create an event/action which does the same thing. Of course, this code snippit is an extremely small part of the engine as a whole.

pauper $110,000 millionaire $66,000 bovine university student $47,000 psychopath $105,000 fetishist $103,000 toker $115,000 Money Tree $30,000 (seems reasonable) Martyr $79,000 (all in one day, of course) We all need one of these: Calling Technical Support Specialist $34,000 - High Confidence (more than 250 sources) A Kain pulls a respectable $79,000 (hopefully not all in one day) And we can finally say that the difference between Nerds and Geeks ::comedic pause:: is about $40,000 a year.

var i, number_of_pieces, t; number_of_pieces = 10; for( i = 0; i < number_of_pieces; i += 1) { t = instance_create( x, y, objPiece); t.hspeed = cos( (i / number_of_pieces) * 2*pi) * 4; t.depth = sin((i/number_of_pieces) * 2*pi) * 10; t.vspeed = -2 - sin( (i / number_of_pieces) * 2*pi); t.gravity = 0.2; } You should be able to tweak it easily enough if you understand the trigonometric functions, but hopefully this gets the idea across effectively. Edit: whoops, I of course mean 2 * pi, not 2 / pi.

GM7 is capable of loading .png's with alpha channel already in them (GM6 isn't). But you have to load them externally through this function: But I don't know about .tga's. Based on the help file, I'm guessing it can (though it's not listed explicitly):

What you do is you create two sprites. One will be a black and white sprite that'll be used as an alpha mask. For each pixel in it, the more black it is, the more transparent it is. (technically, it doesn't have to be greyscale, but it's easier to see this way). The other sprite will be the color component. You probably want this to be all one color or some form of gradient (like a gradient between yellow and orange). Create these two sprites: sGlowAlpha : sGlowColor : Set sGlowColor as the sprite index of the object you want it to appear on and in its create event, perform the following code: sprite_set_alpha_from_sprite( sGlowColor, sGlowAlpha); You can also set the object's alpha lower and it'll work the way you imagine, but it's probably not needed since it's already partially see-through.

Very well-done. I really need to play the MGS series. Wasn't there a topic on some compilation recently. At $30, I should probably invest my time and money in that.

Certainly not the first time I've seen the Garfield randomizer (in fact I've seen more randomized Garfield strips than I have real Garfield strips by many factors, which, incidentally, is many factors more than I need/wanted to), but not bad, not bad.

Define "Ink effect" (or give a sample image). GM supports alpha and additive blending (as well as many other blending modes) which is what I would use for that sparkle effect if I wasn't going for a "Genesis-possible" look. But I don't know if that's what you mean. Edit: Damn it, I had an engine pretty much entirely ready to replace it back in October, but I never implemented some of the basic stuff like Layers and Deactivating Objects and such and got bogged down in real life.

Let me say if at all possible DO NOT go with AT&T. Whenever Bellsouth was acquired by AT&T (me having a Bellsouth DSL), the shit went to hell. The speed and connectability was so bad that I tried for 5 hours to upload a 2MB school project file with no success. And whenever they sent a guy out he just kept saying "we keep getting this problem for people in this area." All they did was throw free modems at us and claim the problem was at our end despite everything the people they sent out here said. We spent over 5 hours on the phone finally to have them admit that they were oversold in our area with no immediate plans on making anything better. Edit: well, if you already have their phone service, it's kinda the most logical solution, but just be aware that their customer service is beyond intolerable.

No problem. Glad to help.

Simple solution: Widen your layer change object or space it a little further away from the loop. Otherwise if you're going as fast as its width or faster, there's a chance you will hit the wall before it deactivates. Of course, this just increases the speed you have to be going for it to happen, but you probably shouldn't be going more than 32 pixels/step so a 32-wide should be good. Alternatively, you can put the layer change event in between the horizontal movement action and the "stop when hitting a wall" action. Looking at your engine, moving the "Layering" code snippit to in between the "Movement" and "Action/Gameplay" sections should do the trick.

Disgustingly amazing. I mean really, now.

Oh, well I don't know if MMF has the smoothed curve interpolation that GM has which gets visually pretty close to sine waves without much work. Obviously sine waves are the ideal kind of path but problem is MMF/GM don't have such a system built-in.

There are times when pathed movements are appropriate. Corkscrews are that time. The boundaries of it are all over the place and in three dimensions. It'd be pointless to try and make an engine for that because ideally it would do the same thing every time. Of course, it'd be better if you had a form of linking path system so that all you have to do is place the pieces with their ends connected for them to work instead of having to create a whole new path for each corkscrew segment you want to place. But when it comes to release games, if it works perfectly, then that's just as well.

You forget your curly braces? //Spring if( OnGround == 0 && action == 0 ) { sprite_index = sprSonicSpring; image_speed = 1 image_index = -1; }

One day, I opened a ketchup bottle and noticed that ketchup smelled horrible. So for whatever reason I proceeded to mix in orange juice, mayonnaise, and god knows what else to a near-empty ketchup bottle. And from about half a foot above the bottle I took one sniff and immediately went into dry heaves. The worst I've actually eaten was various products (crackers, cereal) with sugar ants in/on them. Sugar ants really aren't that bad. Like a mix between metallic and cleaning products taste.

Also keep in mind that most 2D graphics systems gave y as going down with positive values, so you'll probably want to use the negative of the y distance for things to be coherent if that is the case. Of course, that depends on how you handle your other trigonometric functions. It wouldn't make a difference if it was consistent, but it's nice to think of 0 as being the right and 270 as being down instead of up.

The third is pretty good. The speed kills are a nice touch, but they kinda go overboard on the darkside thing. First one still is my favorite even though 2 had some really great battles.

I don't believe it's quite the smallest, but it gets the point across.

I didn't need to relive that.... again.

In my household, Easter means candy (Sweet Tarts, Butterfingers, Jelly Beans, Jolly Ranchers, etc) and Jesus Christ Superstar. So happy Easter, y'all.

Amazing, but crashes on my computer after about 2 minutes of playing. Maybe I need to upgrade my version of Flash or something. But I agree, it's a great game.

Over stimulation of the pituitary gland causing excess of growth hormones (see gigantism).