Fangame Help

[trublu45458]

I'm sorry for being a burden, but theres just some things that my head doesnt know how to do. Sonic help is one of the main reasons I joined, and also a place to post my game.

I need help finding a simple solution to this hard issue:

How in the world am I going to make a Sonic Colors Boost gauge(its basically the same as Sonic Rush games) without 500 sprites involved?!?!?!?

The only solution I have is every time my boost value goes up/down, I set the image_index to go up/down the same ammount(making the boost gauge go up/down), then when it hits the top, to switch to a different set of sprites for the max boost animation, then set one for it to empty, then to go back to the original sprite.

How do I make a solution which doesn't require me to spend an hour building boost gauges?

[USC]

Can you show partial sprites in GameMaker? IE: Say you have a rectangle sprite that's 30 pixels long. Is there any way to make GameMaker only show 20 pixels of it?

If so, all you'd have to do is make a full gauge sprite, make a variable that determines how many pixels to show, then add or subtract from that variable as the gauge "grows" or "shrinks".

Does that help any?

You could also just dynamically re-size the bar; it'd look bad if the bar is complicated, but a simple single-color one would look fine.

[trublu45458]

Game maker has a feature like that, but it wouldn't work anyways.

The bar from Sonic Rush is extremely complex.

The bar consists of about 10 grey arrows, seperated by a 1 or 2 pixel line of grey.

As boost is gained, the bar gains blue arrows, then when it hits the top the blue are overlapped with yellow, then red.

Once the red is full, it goes into "overdrive" in which the bar flashes and gives you infinite boost for a short time, then draining depending the time you boosted while in overdrive.

due to those triangles, I was hoping somebody could help me by giving with a script or telling me how to make a script that adds the arrows, thus saving me time(and money by switching to geico) and the overall amount of sprites on screen.

[USC]

Hmm. Well, you could do something like this...

Have the gray bars always drawn. As the BOOST variable goes up, start showing more and more of the blue bar (if GM supports showing only part of an image). When that's at 100%, start drawing the yellow bar. When THAT'S at 100%, start drawing the red bar. When that's full, and you want the flashing effect, stop & start drawing the red bar every other second. IE:

Always -> Add 1 to COUNTER
IF COUNTER == 1 -> Draw Red.png
ELSE -> Draw Yellow.png
IF COUNTER > 1 -> COUNTER = 0

[justin123]

I'm not sure, but I think you could use a alpha mask.

[trublu45458]

The only idea I had is to draw the arrow in the right x,y coordinate, but I have no clue what the code is.

I might as well start the sprite solution...