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Couple suggestions/requests

PostPosted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 5:23 pm
by BlenderFreak
Multiple Actor Selection: It gets really aggravating having to click, drag, click, drag, click, drag over and over when I realize I cloned something so far. It's even more annoying when I want to delete an entire row of actors and have to enter their actor control, click remove, confirm, and do it again... My suggestion? In Blender 3D there's this thing called box select with which you click and drag a box across the screen, similar to selecting in games like Age of Empires. When you confirm the box, everything in the box is selected! You can then deselect individual objects that were selected that you don't want to be selected. So perhaps a hotkey that enables/disables box select, and then the ability to drag the box AND the entire selection across the screen.
If this feature is already available, someone please tell me! It would reduce the amount of tedious work I have to do by a TON. :P

Highlight Selected Actor: Sometimes - especially if the box select feature were created - it would be really helpful if the selected object(s) were highlighted around their edges in order to tell exactly which objects are selected (as opposed to having to go through and read their names, as when objects are cloned it simply adds a decimal integer).

Import/Export Actors (AND VARIABLES) From Other Files: This is a feature I've searched for but have not found. The ability to pull an actor from another file! This feature would be so useful when making large games. I'm actually not sure if it's really available yet, but it would be great if it is! More than just pulling actors, though - the ability to link an actor from another file and all of his variables would be incredible helpful when making big games. This would give the ability to load, say, the coins count from one file of the game to another file while only using one variable. It would greatly reduce the script necessary for making something like that happen (unless it's already in existence). But like I said - not only being able to link actors and variables while playing a game, but also while making one. Pulling out individual actors and variables instead of having to copy and paste, remake all of the actions and reload all of the animations would be far easier! (Not sure if that last sentence made total sense grammatically, but I think you catch my meaning).

Script Editor Action: It would increase simplicity if there were a script editor action, rather than having to say "key down" or "draw actor". This way, we could define our own actions! Such as saying that if the left key is down, the character moves left. This would allow practically everything in a game to be script, rather than relying on just the premade options (the pre-made options are really good, but the ability to design our own actions with the script editor would be extremely helpful as well). The script editor actions would always be active, and would always require an "if" in the script, but this way we could create just one script for movement (if left=down, blablablah, if right=down, blablabla) and not have to go through separate key down events later on. If there's a way to do this already (without using draw actor or create actor), that would be pretty useful to know.

That's all I can think of at the moment. I really don't know if any of this would be simple or not, or if anyone else would find it useful, but I believe that I would! XD Thanks for the time you took to read this!

Re: Couple suggestions/requests

PostPosted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 5:52 pm
by TSO
maybe good for more advanced users... but GE is really aimed at newbies more...

Multiple Actor Selection,Highlight Selected Actor

Would be handy in places but good luck to GE makers to getting it to work as there are some already present bugs that would probably be amplified by this while working to adding it in.

Import actor

is a nice idea.


Script Editor Action:
It would increase simplicity if there were a script editor action, rather than having to say "key down" or "draw actor". This way, we could define our own actions! Such as saying that if the left key is down, the character moves left.


Umm... I think there is a key down function in the script editor already that you could simply pull up and place in a if statement under draw actor.
And under global code tab you got quick access to every action and it's script especially recently used scripts..

As for not using draw actor. If you figure out the advanced code.
You can simply drop your commonly used codes in global codes and load them into w/e actors in a single function.

Re: Couple suggestions/requests

PostPosted: Sat Oct 23, 2010 10:51 pm
by SirAz
Changes to the interface (especially with finding actors you accidently made invisible :oops: :roll: ) would be nice for conveniance's sake but I prefer the makers spending more time on compatibility and debugging, as they are already. Even Photoshop and Office have annoying little quirks to them that no one seems to do anything about, but as long as they run with the newest machines, who cares?

Keeping up to date with the latest hardware and software should always take priority, and the Game Editor is much better for it.

Re: Couple suggestions/requests

PostPosted: Sun Oct 24, 2010 4:09 am
by TSO
SirAz wrote:Changes to the interface (especially with finding actors you accidently made invisible :oops: :roll: ) would be nice for conveniance's sake but I prefer the makers spending more time on compatibility and debugging, as they are already. Even Photoshop and Office have annoying little quirks to them that no one seems to do anything about, but as long as they run with the newest machines, who cares?

Keeping up to date with the latest hardware and software should always take priority, and the Game Editor is much better for it.


Umm for invisable actors... they should always be visable unless you gave them a very small animation of like 1 pixel. You could lose that...
In that case in any actor window click it's name in drop down menu and your actor should be listed. Click it and should have access to change it's animation to something more visable while you work with it. =)
some bugs would be handy to have fixed by now... namely changing/updating animations in my experience...


Another possible feature. Quick clearing/reseting of saved variables/savegroups for use while testing a game perhaps...

Re: Couple suggestions/requests

PostPosted: Sun Oct 24, 2010 1:03 pm
by BlenderFreak
ha yeah I "lost" an actor once, but TSO's right. If it turns "invisible", you can just clock on any actor, click on the drop down menu that has its name and then choose the name of the actor you "lost". You can then edit the transparency so that it won't be "invisible" anymore, because the actor will be centered on and selected.

Another thing I thought of that I just think would be a nice idea, but not exactly important, is an "After Editor". This would allow you to, once you've finished the main game, create multiple splash screens, menus, etc. for the start of your game. I know it's possible to do this already using code and all that, but I think that the ability to edit start-up of the game using an interface as opposed to coding and creating loads of actors would be a lot simpler... not sure if all that makes sense. But you could create splash screens that would occur after the Game Editor splash screen (if you haven't purchased it), make different sizes of the game (as opposed to having to run through, change all the picture sizes manually, change the game size, move the actors around, etc) available from start-up, and make a main menu real easily, with sound adjustment codes and such already in place to make it all really simple... just thought that would be cool. I know it can all be done already (except for the multiple-size thing... I've been manually going through and resizing all of my animations and images in order to make a PC version of the game I'm working on... not fun), but I think that a prompt which would take you to a simple interface that allowed for more complex (and eye-appealing) start-up and load screens would be pretty awesome. However, this wouldn't be as important as some of the other bugs and fixes that need to be done...

Re: Couple suggestions/requests

PostPosted: Sun Oct 24, 2010 10:42 pm
by SirAz
Cool. I made a small controller actor for dialogue scripts, turned him invisible to save memory and he hid behind the sofa. Not really a problem at the moment but now I've found the little bugger I can keep him organised with the others.

Thanks to both of you. :D

Re: Couple suggestions/requests

PostPosted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 12:56 pm
by lcl
Your request of script editor action running all the time is same as draw actor event. :D