Unlock Actor in Creator 2.0

UltraLionBlu

Double clicking on the actors in the scene displays the Edit prototype button, but not one to unlock it

Anyone have any idea how to do it?

UltraLionBlu

Sorry, I have been looking for a quarter of an hour and I found it only 2 seconds after writing the post .. -__- '

adent42

Heh, yah. One of the things we found was that unlocking actors was the cause of many bugs, so we sort of hid it on purpose.

Glad you found it.

pHghost

Honestly, working on other people's projects, unlocked actors are easily the cause of 50% of issues, so best to have it more hidden. Unlocked actors can still be very helpful in certain situations, but generally you're better off if you learn how to construct your logic without needing to unlock.

There's a lot of flexibility and power in locked actors if you use actor variables, as you don't need to unlock an actor to make its variables unique!

UltraLionBlu

Thanks for the advice, I don't make massive use of unlocked actors, but mostly I often find it convenient to be able to coerce the actors to other actors via scene attributes, instead of creating 2 game attributes for the coordinates.

I also noticed that if you use touch and bind the actors via the game attributes, when the main actor moves the actor bound to it will tend to have a "flicker" effect, mini unwanted movements.

I don't know if this is wrong for some reason.

It would be very helpful to understand what kind of bugs you can encounter

pHghost

I think that might have to do with code execution and sometimes performance.

Depending where things are in the scene layers, there can be a one-frame delay in this, which can become worse if it's a busy scene on a lower performance device. Say that the following actor has his logic processed first, then it is aligned to the target actor. Then the target actor's logic is processed and it is moved, thus the actors are out of alignment again. Only then at the end of the frame, the screen is rendered, and so the actors will always be a bit wonky in relation to each other.

Yeah, if you have a lot of position constraints happening, then unlocked actors can become a must. One big quality of life improvement in GameSalad would be if you could make certain actor attributes public -- accessible by other actors in the scene.

UltraLionBlu

I agree it would be very useful, good idea!

Armelline

http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/615432#Comment_615432

This can normally (though not always) be avoided by rearraging the actors in the layer list.