Minor Victory

netdzynrnetdzynr Member Posts: 296
edited November -1 in Working with GS (Mac)
As I continue to work on my GS game, I'm growing more and more annoyed at the lack of basic editing tools/control in Game Creator. It takes hours just to lay out things that would normally take 5 minutes in almost any other modern app. In particular, I have a scene that is supposed to display over 400 actors -- I wasn't even sure if GS could handle displaying this many actors once. And who wants to place that many objects by hand?

So rather than fight with Creator, I started writing a tool that goes into the code of a game file, finds all the images, actors, positions, etc, and created a script that auto-generates the grid of 400 actors I wanted. I cut and pasted the code into the GS scene file, and what do you know, it worked. :-)

image

Comments

  • eaguirreeaguirre Member Posts: 89
    What is the game all about? I'm puzzled
  • netdzynrnetdzynr Member Posts: 296
    It's right to be puzzled. It's a color puzzle. :-)

    The game is a collection of visual puzzles. There is a backstory behind the game, but there are no written instructions for each level -- only visual cues. So part of the challenge is figuring out how to interact with the puzzles, as well as how to solve them.
  • CrazybreadmanCrazybreadman Member Posts: 674
    hmm... no idea what to make of it, but it def looks trippy :)
  • rebumprebump Member Posts: 1,058
    You can place actors in a scene "programmatically"...although with 400, there could be a delay that you would need to disguise with a pop-up message or something.
  • giacomopoppigiacomopoppi Member, PRO Posts: 914
    how did u implement the code in GS?
  • A3MGA3MG Member Posts: 152
    Yeah, I would be interested in this as well.
  • netdzynrnetdzynr Member Posts: 296
    Virtually everything in a gameproj file is XML. With a bit of poking around ("a bit" meaning several hours), it's possible to figure out where actor code is, where scene code is, what most of the code is used for, where rules appear, etc. It's not easy to do at this point, and if the pasted code is not inserted at the right location, GS won't understand your XML and the scene will not load. Object IDs are key, and while I don't claim to be an expert, almost every ID appears to be randomly assigned within a scene (except for those of actors, of course). But it's working for me, which is what matters. Just thought it would be worth mentioning that it's possible to do.

    [ Long winded explanation ] My main reason for doing this is pure frustration. I'm losing countless hours having to double-click into the editor to make simple changes and even just read actor attributes. When rule blocks get longer than a few behaviors, the editor take longer and longer to open (not to mention the infernal slow down that requires restarting GS every 10 minutes). The current level of the game I mention above has 400+ actors, 4 stages, and more than 130 conditions to check. I would rather shoot myself in the head than enter the behaviors by hand. Longer term, I'm hoping to make a display of sorts that will list actors' attributes in a palette window alongside GS -- something that should be there already IMO.

    If I get a chance I'll try to assemble some kind of explanation, or maybe even a tool. But I'm a bit loathe to invest time in this if the GS guys are planning an update that solves these issues (hint).
  • ORBZORBZ Member Posts: 1,304
    Brilliant netdzynr! Why didn't I think of that :) I've known of the XML for a while but for some reason I didn't think of writing a tool to edit it.

    I don't suppose you'd be interested in sharing your XML editing code?
  • netdzynrnetdzynr Member Posts: 296
    I would be happy to share but it wouldn't be of any use to you as I'm editing the XML in Revolution (the app that Apple refused to allow to build iPhone apps -- how's that for irony).

    It's not so much *what* is used to edit the code, but *where* to find it in the gameproj file. if you (or anyone else) knows of a decent XML editing tool out there, please chime in. I had a quick look around yesterday but couldn't find any tools that were priced affordably or that would handle GS's code the way I need to (and I'm no XML guru, I just poke around).

    I think it would be a *ton* of work to create a full blown GS file editor. I'm sure the GS guys have their own. The XML structure seems to get deep in some cases -- it would probably be more trouble than it's worth.
  • reddotincreddotinc Member Posts: 653
    The XML structure seems to get deep in some cases -- it would probably be more trouble than it's worth.

    You're telling me!.. Just tried to open my main game scene in oXygen and it showed an alert saying:

    "The longest line contains 22328 characters. This warning is displayed for lines which contain more than 5000 characters"
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