Camera movement and extended scenes.

I've been trying to work out if it's possible to emulate the extended movement of something like color switch – which appears to just keep on scrolling up indefinitely. As far as I understand it, camera movement requires an extended scene. What if you want the game to be infinite and have the camera controlled by the actor?

Comments

  • tatiangtatiang Member, Sous Chef, PRO, Senior Sous-Chef Posts: 11,949

    I don't think they are controlling the camera. It's just a matter of spawning actors from the top of the screen to make it look that way. There are Doodle Jump templates and tutorials around here that would probably be helpful since it's the same style of game.

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  • pHghostpHghost London, UKMember Posts: 2,342

    There two options you have is to either

    a) loop the scene

    b) make the scene really large

    The fact is, that infinite games aren't ever played for an infinite amount of time. If you extend the scene to be long enough to last a, say, 45-minute game, it's pretty much guaranteed nobody will actually ever reach the end.

  • Village IdiotVillage Idiot Member, PRO Posts: 486

    thanks @tatiang – I'll look for a doodle jump template and check it out. I have a color switch template by Sparky and it uses an extended scene. Which makes me wonder just how large can you make a scene? As @pHghost said, it's one of two options. Regarding looping – I haven't looked into that as yet – but wouldn't that mean spawning the same actors over and over?

  • tatiangtatiang Member, Sous Chef, PRO, Senior Sous-Chef Posts: 11,949

    Yes, for a looping scene you'd spawn the same actors again and again.

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  • pHghostpHghost London, UKMember Posts: 2,342

    The spawner can also move with the camera, if necessary.

  • Village IdiotVillage Idiot Member, PRO Posts: 486

    thanks @pHghost – the doodle jump template I've been looking at is not enormous (referring to your previous post). It's 960 high using iPhone legacy with a camera size of 480. If the scene size is the actual screen resolution of the the old iPhone (960) – and the camera size is half of that.. how does that work? I understand that the platforms keep on spawning down.. but why the camera size halving?

  • pHghostpHghost London, UKMember Posts: 2,342

    I think that's just the GameSalad size. I usually refer to it as GS Points. With retina displays, one GS Point equals 4 resolution pixels (2x2), double the size for each dimension (width and height). So basically, for a 960 pixel display you have 480 GS Points.

  • Village IdiotVillage Idiot Member, PRO Posts: 486
    edited October 2017

    @pHghost – Sorry, but I'm confused – again. I thought that when you nominate the the device you're outputting to – in this case they've nominated iPhone legacy (960x640), that was what you got. I don't understand how they've halved the screen size (480x320) for the camera size. I've attached the template .. can you please take a look and let me know what I'm not getting? I thought that you had to have the camera size be the same as the screen size.

  • pHghostpHghost London, UKMember Posts: 2,342

    Nope. It's always half the size. Open a new project for iPad, it's 1024x768 GS Points. Check the scene size and camera size. iPhone 5 legacy: 568x320 GS Points. iPhone 4 legacy (don't use that anymore): 480x320 GS Points.

    This is why you always need to use textures that are 2x the size of your actors. If you want, you can make the scene and camera double the size and use graphics the same size as your actors, but the scene will be huge and you'll need to scroll around a lot. This of course becomes less of an issue if you can zoom in and out. You can also go the other way and make the scene and camera half the size and use graphics 4x the size of your actors. A NOTE HERE: your graphics are actually staying the same size this whole time, just the size of the actors is changing.

    The presets in GameSalad are really just that -- presets. You can customise them as you wish. You can start with the iPad preset and build a iPhone only game, it doesn't matter.

    So you can make the camera size pretty much anything you want, the main important thing you need to keep the same is the ratio of the camera.

  • pHghostpHghost London, UKMember Posts: 2,342

    I looked at the template and what is happening there is that the platforms are actually looping, the camera stays the same if you are jumping up. It only moves if you fall down.

  • Village IdiotVillage Idiot Member, PRO Posts: 486

    Thanks @pHghost .. I took a look at the scene size and camera size and they're the same. So I'm still confused here. But.. I think I get what you're saying about making the camera size whatever I want (ratio the same). I'm guessing that the final publishing through GS ensures that it ends up being that you wanted.. yes? I just took another look at that template. So the've kept the original screen height but halved it's width. They've halved the height and the width for the camera size. Is this so that the camera can slide down to the bottom half at the end of a game with the score showing?

  • pHghostpHghost London, UKMember Posts: 2,342

    @monkeyboy simian said:
    They've halved the height and the width for the camera size.

    They haven't. This is the default camera size for an iPhone 4 size template. They made the scene 2x taller so the camera can slide down.

  • Village IdiotVillage Idiot Member, PRO Posts: 486

    @pHghost – but when I look at the scene size it says 320 X 960 and the camera size is 320 X 480. iPhone 4 screen size is 480 x 960. I've also tried looking up GS points and have come up with nothing. This is weirding me out.

  • BBEnkBBEnk Member Posts: 1,764
    edited October 2017

    iPhone4 point size is 320x480 the rendered size is 640x960, the template Camera size is 320x480, the scene size is 320x960. scene size has nothing to do with the camera or device display size.

  • pHghostpHghost London, UKMember Posts: 2,342

    @monkeyboy simian said:
    iPhone 4 screen size is 640 x 960

    But the iPhone 4 project size is 320 x 480 (GS) Points. Open a brand new, empty, iPhone 4 project and check the scene size.

    @monkeyboy simian said:
    I've also tried looking up GS points

    GS Points is my own name for it, as I mentioned in the post where I was explaining the matter.

    @pHghost said:
    that's just the GameSalad size. I usually refer to it as GS Points.

    I'd be very flattered if you found anything. :smiley:

    As @BBEnk is saying, the scene size actually doesn't mean anything at all. It can be 1321 x 2337 in size or 363 x 519. What you will see on the phone screen is what the camera sis capturing.

  • AlchimiaStudiosAlchimiaStudios Member Posts: 1,069
    edited October 2017

    It's a kind of confusing topic for sure.

    What you see on launching GS and choosing device is just the target device. This doesn't mean you can't make any one of those devices work for other screen sizes or devices. It just means GS creator will default to that for the camera size and workspace. This is generally 1/2 of the target devices actual resolution, this is so things don't appear too large to work on in GS itself.

    When you import an art asset, that is the asset size, or texture resolution. Maximum for GS is 2048x2048 regardless of device type. The higher the resolution asset, the better it looks on any device.

    Scene size is independent of any of those things. It's just literally the size of the scene. It will be half of what the assets themselves should be. So if you want a level to be 1024x1024 because that what it is in Photoshop or something, it should be (in general) 512x512 in GS. This doesn't mean the assets will be lowered in quality, just halved for work space convenience.

    The actors image, or "textures" load the highest quality texture by default, regardless of actor size, unless it's an old device and you are using resolution independence. (In that case GS server attempts to make images at different texture scales 1x,2x,3x etc. upon publishing)

    Camera size is literally just the "viewport" for showing a section of a scene, you can change it dynamically or adjust to higher or lower resolution or even aspect ratios with some math trickery. It can be anything for any device, although it's going to look weird if it doesn't follow some sort of aspect ratio guidelines.

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