Violet CLM

http://www.sonicfangameshq.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=509&stc=1&d=1192150913

One thing I'd like to see would be non-discrete, continuous time travel, i.e. not broken down into separate periods. Any given part of the level would be programmed to change at a certain point in the timeline (trees grow taller, platforms fall, machines are built, routes change, whatever), and there'd be some way to move backward or forward in time until certain changes had happened (or had been undone), but not necessarily too far.

See, doing the work yourself sometimes just isn't all that hard.

Someone telling you which engine is the best isn't going to help you know that either. If you want to use somebody else's engine, you're going to have to figure out how it works before you can use it. But, again, nobody can know better than you which engine you'll like the best, and the only way you can find that out is by downloading them. First, this isn't the fangaming assistance board, this is General Fangame Discussion. Second, you're conflating some things. There are two kinds of requests for help being discussed here: "how do I"-type questions, where a user has a specific problem with one or more objectively correct answers (for instance, code that creates the desired behavior), and "what's the best"-type questions, which are going to vary to some extent for every person. The main use of this and other places to ask for help is for questions of the first type. Often, the user can be helped by people explaining the important concepts but not giving the actual code (just like tutoring for a class involves more than giving you a list of the correct answers and sending you on your way), because that way the user actually learns something from the experience that can be applied in future situations. It makes some sense to ask questions of the "what's the best" type if trying each possible option has some severe costs, e.g. they literally cost money, it would take a long time to try even one, etc. Here, though, each option is freely available and by your own admission you haven't tried downloading any of them, so you -- and by extension we -- have no idea if you'd be able to figure it out yourself without asking anyone else. On a related note, it's always important, when asking for help, to show your work. That is, explain that you've already tried on your own to solve the problem, then list exactly what you've tried and exactly what went wrong. This is basic respect, it shows that you recognize that other people's time is valuable and you've made every effort you can to make helping you as easy as possible. This could work even for your question of what engine is the best, but as it stands, if you haven't downloaded anything you're offering no starting point for people to help you.

The thing is, the information you're asking for is not in any way restricted. It's right there in the links that FGR has already provided to you. In fact, since you know more about your ideas for your game in your head than you could ever possibly explain to us, you are much better suited than we are to download those engines and decide which one is the best match for your ideas. You may even be inspired by something you see that you would never have seen if you simply took someone else's word for it. This is something all programmers have to do: try multiple things until the right answer is found. There's no way around it, and you learn things in the process anyway. Besides, if you're worried about slowing your computer down by downloading all those engines, keep in mind you can always delete from your hard-drive anything you decide you don't want.

Two SAGE downloaders! Huzzah! To answer the question of what was changed, the level design is completely original, the level graphics are edited from various Jazz 1 sets (obviously JJ1 never had a grassland with checkered ground), and the enemies are all customized. The music is from JJ1 because it's really difficult to convert songs to a format it'll read, and any sense of "slippery-feeling movement" is indeed unchanged -- the only editable variables in the basic movement are default jump height and whether it's an ice level, in which case all the floors would be slippery. But hey, it's better than Sonic's extreme heaviness. The name of the mod does come from an old derogatory term used to describe Jazz, and part of the idea here is to show just how nonsensical it is -- modifying as much as I could to get it as close to Sonic-like as possible, it's still a long distance away, and the two are quite different games in most every respect. I have been receiving feedback about enemy placement, and will work on toning it down a little. The enemies in typical Sonic games is one of my least favorite aspects of the series -- most of them are so useless and they're rarely placed where they could conceivably cause you harm -- but I agree I may have overcompensated a bit. The only available code for collapsing platforms in JJ1 results in platforms that will fall if you stand either above or underneath them, which can be a problem... I may well end up removing that ability altogether, since it's not like their falling is ever a major gameplay element. And the website explicitly says to run SWAG.bat if you download the all-in-one package, so... I can't help you there.

Interestingly, if you click on the links you should be able to download the engines and, in turn, find out what each does.

Thank you for being the first person at SAGE to acknowledge having played my demo. Your criticism that new content must overwrite original game levels is a little odd since that's exactly what one does in most ROM hacks of, say, Sonic games, which were likewise not shipped with any modding tools. I'll look into enemy placement, however.

Except "He" wouldn't be capitalized since it's a weak pronoun.

Surely you could have found another computer to play Rose of Longevity on or else found somebody else who could play it and asked them to write a guest review? I feel either would have been more helpful both to readers and to the game's creators than to say only "this game may not work on your computer."

It works fine for me, even with all the files packaged together. Did you try any other sound settings? Does Jazz 1 run on your computer normally?

The thread for the SAGE demo of my game, Sonic With A Gun, an in-progress mod of Jazz Jackrabbit 1. The main download links are best suited for people who already have the game installed, but there's also a link to a complete package (containing the minimum files to run the game, the modded files, DOSBox for use on fast computers, and a .bat file to keep things organized). Let me know if you're having technical difficulties. Enjoy!

Presumably you have some code roughly equivalent to this: if key(right): Xvel += 3; if key(left): Xvel += -3; if (Xvel > 0 && !(key(right))): XVel += -1; if (Xvel < 0 && !(key(left))): XVel += 1; [/CODE] Those being rightward acceleration, leftward acceleration, rightward deceleration, and leftward deceleration, respectively. What if you just changed the speed that gets decelerated to, so it's something higher than 0? That way you can stop or move left if you want to, but left alone, your horizontal speed will default to something positive.

It's hard to say without knowing what your actual code looks like, but it sounds like maybe you're achieving the autoscroll by constantly adding to the x position of the "mask" (do you mean the player mask?) instead of adding some constant rightward momentum to your existing static movement engine which presumably already has collision detection.

I've found Windows 7 can run most programs without difficulty, and compatibility mode usually helps with the rest. Compiling code is messy because you may accidentally end up building something 64-bit that you'd like to be able to distribute, but that's avoidable. MMF 1.5 seems to have issues related to all the Windows control objects, but 2 is supposed to be fine. Windows 7 never really seems to crash.

I used the sprites because it's a custom episode ("mod" in perhaps more familiar parlance), not a separately programmed fangame. There's no real story beyond "lol Jazz is in Sonic zones," though. And of course the community's going strong! We'll be doing fine for years yet, even if we give JJ2 much more attention.

People around here tend to be very specialized in what is immediately obviously related to Sonic engines, and have comparatively little experience in any other aspect of the same programs. Considering all you're looking for is basic use of an extension, you'd probably get better results on the Clickteam forums.

http://www.sonicfangameshq.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6482

Oh god I love Knuckles in a hat. Can he hang out with Archimedes the fire ant? Please?

They remind me of the Olympics mascots.

Pretty cool and fun overall, and the level design is suitable if underwhelming. Two details I noticed, which may or may not be intentional: - If you start charging a spindash on a collapsible bridge and it falls away from beneath you, you continue charging and can release it while falling, sending you forward. - If you jump while rolling, you will still be rolling when you land.

It's also possible for objects to turn bad if they don't actually appear in the frame editor and exist only in the events. This is particularly nasty with subapps. When that happens, your only real recourse is to go through all the events and reassign them to the proper objects, which is really frustrating when practically every object in the file is bad and you have to remember what does what.

Basically, either through a long series of events (one for each key/button) or through an input object, each key and gamepad button is associated with a specific value. The key/button-pressed events start a function (using Power Function 2.0 or some other function object) and pass that specific value as a number (that is, not a string) argument to the function. As for the list object, it's not bad, but that's not what it's for. The list object is a user interface tool, but it comes with too much overhead just for storing data invisibly. The binary object is the most lightweight data storer because it involves exactly as many bytes of memory as you ask for and no more. You don't have any overlarge values, so all you should really need is 52 bytes, most of them null. So when you press "A," this runs a function "foo" through the Power Function object (or whichever) with 17 as the argument. Another event states that on function "foo," turn control byte(foo-argument) on. Usually that'll be 0, sometimes it won't be.

It seems to me that a lot of that could be simplified by using one of the various input objects. Either way, I think the binary object would probably be slightly faster than the list object, and I'd be tempted to replace the whole fastloop bit with some function object and an argument, so that you're not running through all 52 loop steps all the time: I press the "A" key on my keyboard. This runs function "foo" with an argument of 17. The function then activates the virtual button numbered at byte(argument) in the binary object.