In my Zark game, (download the demo if you haven’t already: http://www.terragna.com/~plantperson/zarkdemo.zip) I’m having a problem which I’ve mostly been ignoring, but when my brother was testing the game a few minutes ago, he insisted that it absolutely must be fixed at all costs. Or something like that.
Fool around with the demo to see it. The problem is, sometimes the zark isn’t facing the same direction he’s walking. For example, if you move northeast, and then begin to move north, he will continue to point northeast, though his direction will be north. (Assuming you never take your finger off the UP key.) This is especially true when switching from an angle to a straight direction (ie, southeast to east,) but it can happen in straight directions too. I’ve tried to find a workaround without success. Does anyone see how to fix this?
You still have lots of work to do. Your facing problem is in the controllers. Use expressions instead of and. Figuring this out and connecting everthing is very complicated. What you need to do is figure out how to make the controllers only pass to the actuators when only the correct sensors are active, and not when wrong sensors are active.
TIP: you can use the names of sensors as variables in your expressions.
What’s going on in your game is multiple conditions are true, but the behaviors do not always matchup. EXAMPLE: you are holding ‘down’, but the last direction you pressed was ‘up’ – now he faces up and walks down.
EDIT: I edited this post for clarity.
EDIT AGAIN: I didn’t mention before. I really like the scene, but the characters look a bit too much like capsules – too geometric. The character design is spot on, but the meshes and textures could be much improved if you have the time. At first I didn’t even notice they have a mouth on the front.
Thanks mark. Do you know where I could read up on expressions? I don’t know anything about them.
Thanks for your crit of the Zarks too. Unfortunately, I can’t change them very drastically as they’re based on comics that I’ve been drawing for years. But I will look into rounding their limbs and making the mouth more obvious.
Expressions…I think they have something to do with combining sensors in arbitrary ways.
For example, you could have an expression saying “sensor1 AND sensor2 OR sensor3”, using names of sensors, and then the whole expression is evaluated to be true (activate linked actuators) or false (don’t).
Sorry I don’t know where there is a good reference, but maybe this will help.
Expressions controllers can take properties and sensors (anything else?). You can use expressions to do some math (but I almost never do math… ever.). When using an expression controller remember to connect the controller to all the sensors used in the expression.
Syntax for expressions is similar to (same as?) Python.
Some possible expressions might be:
sensor1 and sensor2 and not sensor3
sensor1 and x > 0
x = “put strings in quotes”
x != “you could do this to say not equal this string”