it's never too late to learn another language.

One with power, debugging tools, nice IDE options ,commandline possibilities and powerhouse coolness you could use....
But still , debugging is like 78% of the work (atleast in my case)


Why did you ever start using Gamemaker ?

in my experience there is a 95% change the slowdown comes from the amount of your flip/blit/draw commands

that's a great unicode font ,thanks  alot

i want to use webdings, block elements and other unicode characters.

But im not really able of finding a ttf font thas has all of them..
Would you advice to use a "font to bitmap (sheet) way" of using them, and does anybody know a font that has many many unicode characters?

And now I'm wishing I was making something that could use it.

that sounds like an healthy fetisj 

[(OGL, dx 7, dx 9)]

Here is a rough list of the major components we need:
1. Fast 2D graphics (OGL, dx 7, dx 9)
2. 2D physics engine (box2d & chipmunk bindings available)
3. Win API (yes)
4. Basic multithreading (yes)
5. Advanced sound engine (yes native binding OpenAL)

and the scripting could be done in LUA (Also binding implemented natively)

I'd say go blitzmax , it's not free though (80$) but you can try it for free...



About speed and GML; isn't the speed in GML capped, and the language interpreted ? (Instead of compiled and f$%#ing fast ?)

maybe this can help you further

or you could use cairo for vector graphics
there is some extra info on Cairo + OpenGL + SDL here (some sexy OGG movies there too! how about this for "making vector graphics with fancy effects" ?)

write to an interface instead of an implementation !!

Is something smart i heard once, considering the connecting of data.

@skyy : that seems like a very good solution, however i have my mind set on building my own this time. I could steal some ideas from that library though..

Now I am moving my "interaction decision-tree maker" into my world-editor.
The decision tree has 2 nodes (action with 1 childnode, to run when the action is finished) and decision nodes( with 2 child nodes, 1 for false, 1 for true)

The actual decisions are either Boolean, integer in range, integer in set, float in range, float in set.

The actions are functions with possibly more then 0 parameters.

Since the logic is object logic to be used by actors. The files are saved in the object..
The object also keeps reference to the actor that its interacting with and the world that its in.

So decisions and actions can acces member-values of the actor and the world.


I don't know why i am writing this, i guess its to say it out loud!

[blitzbasic]

blitzbasic and blitzmax are two different products (by the same company) blitzbasic doesn't have proper OOP behaviour.
I don't know anything about freebasic, well i guess it's free (it could be good i don't know..)

The thing i really like about the Blitz products is that theyve been building programming languages since the Amiga days (!!), they have a helpfull and professional community, and is not one of these products that suddenly stops updating (PTK anyone?) And most important its especially geared toward 2d graphical game programming.

maybe

• round the floating 3d position to integer
• posterize colors
• work in a small scale with not to many polygons
• apply 'pseudo hand pixeled' gradients
• disable rude anti-aliasing

 

Cool!, I bought i too!.

A new more specific question:

I've been creating a program to build decision trees, now I want to save them.
I figured breadth-first search would be the proper solution to get all nodes in the proper order.

Code:

start
decision
decision
action
action
action
decision
end
end
action
action
end
end

Now i need to get my head around a way of saving the nodes to the harddisk .
only the action nodes (1 child), and decision nodes (2 children) actually matter.
I am guessing i need a temporary ID for the nodes, so at loading i am able to put them where they have to go.

Anybody can tell me the way to properly do it?
(ps when i search for node saving graph etc i keep on finding JAVA libraries that are pretty high-logic)

so you're drawing the same amount of pixels...

well yes, Your drawing the same amount of pixels, but your doing that with 4 times the  overhead (looking up picture in memory, plotting it , etc.) .

If you'd draw your 1024x768 image by plotting individual pixels your going to be using alot more time then if you'd draw an png file of that size that resides in the memory

Its a good technique

I don't understand where the 20 tiles come from, I only see these:

• inward corner  4x
• outward corner 4x
• horizontal 2x
• vertical 2x

total: 12

The thing that worries me though:
Isn't drawing 4x the amount of tiles alot heavier (those dreadfully slow draw commands)  then just checking more neighbours (simple lookups) ?

I am happy because the implementing of a graphical decision-tree (thats user-moddable) to my world objects goes alot quicker and smoother then i thought!

[Blitzmax]

Hello , what a well put question!

If we are recommending other languages/libraries too, i'd recommend Blitzmax
It's geared towards 2d games, cross platform (linux mac win) runs very fast, and is a clean and simple language to write in. (as opposed to c++ & OGL/DX Terror)

The problem i have with some of the game-making programs is that they use crazy programming under the hood and force you to learn to work just as crazy, you end up learning stuff that's bad practice, in my opinion your better off NOT learning such methods.To make matters worse you don't learn stuff that's essential to learn (like collision, tile based stuff, graphic programming, handling of data) So I opt to learn to code the more traditional way (in a IDE, with code and as little external libraries as possible)

However if you only want to worry about the game-design (instead of the actual learning to code) you are better of with the options you and other posters here have given you (mmf,gm,construct,flixel,flashpunk, etc) . I'd say try em all out see wich one feels good to you and don't look back for the next year!

And since your belgian and i am brabants I say "Houdoe!"

i don't know about mac, but i guess there must be some kind of zip/rar module for you to use, you could stream from a zipped/password secured/ renamed to *.DAT file.

Not only is it nice for orgqanization, it also makes the loading of your data a bit quicker!

thanks for all the advices!
i went to the bookstore today and had a long look at this book

To the original question, I'd say you're already on the right track by referring to it as a decision tree. You don't necessarily have to get into script compilation. It sounds like you want a visual interface and you've made the assumption that the elements in the visual interface needs to be transformed into a script before they can be "executed" by your program. I disagree. If you're already explicitly building a tree of operators and variables, then converting into script is actually taking a step backwards, adding a layer of abstraction to the logic.

i think your completely right about that assumption i made,
The decision tree will be my friend! , i wrote a lititle test prgram that builds a tree with decisions and possible actions, all decisions are extended classes so all the logic i need integer/float( ==, <, >, <> ) is actually a specific extended class that take some parameters, translating that to script and then that script back into the same code is not necessary

thanks for all  the tips and links peopel, some reading to do!

I am trying to get my head around user-definable actions.
I think i need a way of using scripts to make if statements, but i just don't understand the principles.
I am not asking for very specific implemetations, more the abstract way of looking at it.

imagine:

there is  an actor and a sandwich.

the sandwich has the action [eat sandwich] , and if the actor does that it will change its motive [hunger].
Now imagine a script language in wich you set this specific action, and make it a little bit more complex. (lets add an extra if , lets say the sandwich is only eatable during the afternoon)

Quickly the code will grow into nested if's , decision tree like.
But how to write such a thing in a sript? (and the real question; how to generate such a script from a few user-inputs (connecting boxes, filling in variables)?)


I believe the question  has to do with tokenizing, parsing and other stuff i don't grasp   ,
Could someone shed his/hers light on this?