walls wall and more walls

rustbucket

Apologies if this has been covered: I have a game in which you guide a ball through a maze (original, I know!) and when the player touches any of the walls they lose some energy. At the moment I have the mazes drawn out in photoshop and placed in a background layer and an invisible actor call "wall" that makes the player bounce and tracks collisions. Given the size of each level is there a convenient/effective way to make the above happen *without* having to place a zillion wall actors in each level to track when the player has hit a wall? Having to do this for the 20+ levels I want to create seems pretty time consuming...

ORBZ

nope, place them by hand. Or, if you can code then code a script outside of GameSalad to translate your png into gamesalad scene xml. NOT trivial.

Place them by hand.

rustbucket

Bummer, I figured that would be the answer but wanted to make sure before I went and did all that work for possibly nothing. I do wish GS did per pixel/alpha collision detection but that's a bit like complaining about winning a million dollars because it was given to you in singles.

tenrdrmer

Yes, thats not what you wanted to hear. But just remember. It will still take less time than if you had to do it completely with code. and even longer if you had to learn the code first. Just looking at it from a different perspective.

JackBQuick

A few months ago, I toyed with the idea of having 14 actors that represented all the different locations of walls. Each of these actors would then, by using collision rules and global attributes, constrain the movement of the player. This is what I came up with:

A-Mazing! (Experiment)

(I also tried it with four actors using rotation.)

However, I abandoned this idea when I realized that it would be easier to simply place the walls manually

rustbucket

I'm a programmer by trade so when I see something that takes a lot of "hand coding" I get suspicious that maybe I'm not doing it correctly. Thanks for the responses folks, I don't mind placing each wall by hand but I did want to get a reality check.

On the subject, I'm assuming all these walls aren't going to slow down my FPS by that much as GS is just creating instances of the one object?

firemaplegames

I'm pretty sure each one you add will affect the FPS, since they are all performing physics collision calculations.

Make sure to turn 'visible' off in their attributes so the graphics processor doesn't needlessly draw them.