Image Previews

Thanks to a good idea by Phantasm (btw, the cube panning and cellphone hotkey in my comment above was an idea by someone from /x/), now game editors can optionally add an image to represent their game, and if they do, that image shows up everywhere in the site where their game does. Just an aesthetical thing, but its nice :)

Keep the feedback comin'!

Save games, a bug fix, and random keys

Three things in today's update:

• It is now possible as a player to save your progress. Its a little primitive: the game just gives you an encrypted string and you're supposed to copy paste that, but the alternative was to force all players to make an account. That might have been savvy from a marketing standpoint, but as a gamer, it would just feel .. I dont know what's the word... scummy? Whatever icky I felt when I realized GTAIV forced me to register with fucking windows Live to save my game. I dont want to go that road. The only ones who need to register here are game authors, players, I say, should not be forced to.
• A bug fix: before, if you clicked on any action like mad (for instance when trying to catch Todd's orbs in "The Warehouse Ghost" game) sometimes you'd initiate an action before the game had had a chance to process the previous one, and the whole thing would freeze. Now, the game ignores repeated clicks until it itself decides it's done and ready to handle more. It fixed the Todd issue!
• Random keys. Or "dice". If you make a key and name it dice_3, then the player has a 1 in 3 chance to have that key. I'll write better documentation soon, but basically with this element of randomness, the game becomes potentially way more open to variation and game-play. Less linear. 

Fixes to Progress Percent, Scene Intro Text

Two very small updates today:

• The Progress Percent in the savegames was shrinking whenever you switched to a new scene. I've fixed that, but old savegames may have to be re-saved this time.
• The text for Scene Intros now will only play once, the first time you enter a scene, and never again. Now you can walk in and out of a room as many times as you wish without getting the text intro every time.

Animation control

Well, the Gun Test works.

That's the good news I guess.

The .. concerned news, is that its incredibly hard with multi-stage animation (such as the ghost) to get things in-synch in the editor. I need to add a "play" button for animations and sounds in the items table.

I also made it so that whenever an animation item is brought up on screen because its an Action to click on, it stays looped in frame 1, but if its brought up because it was on the output (or intro) of an action, then it does play beyond frame 1. Why? To give game authors control on when to trigger an animation.

For example, for the Gun Test, I needed to bring up the ghost even before the player has drawn out the gun. And then, when the player does draw out the gun, I needed to bring up the ghost again, this time to kill him. If animations played whenever they become available to click on, then the first time the ghost shows up it would be fine, but when you draw out the gun the animation would have "played" to the next stage, which happens to be death. 

Instead, this way, with play happening only when an animation is invoked from Actions Output or Intro, I can make it so the ghost "dies" simply by calling its item from the Output of the "Fire!" action.

Wow, it's late, I don't know how much sense I'm making. I'll confess that finely controlling imported animations was something not precisely planned-for, but I want to do it because the potential is limitless. 

Anyway, I'll update the Assets page soon.

Oh, and one more thing: I made it so that the only way to execute actions is when the editor is turned off, cuz it was annoying to try to place an item elsewhere in the location and keep executing it instead.

Man, I need sleep :)

Wiiiiiidescreen!

Major thanks to biogenesis for pushing me to do something I thought was impossible, and turned out to be possible!

This:

Another important change that comes with it, is that now we're no longer restricted to images 999 wide by 666 tall; now we can use images of any damn size we want :) 

I'm happy about it :)

On other news, I noticed the goddamn progress percent still is buggy in most games, I'll fix it, but the savegames should work fine nonetheless.

If anyone finds anything broken (or anything that even seems broken) please post about it in the bugs thread, I'll jump on it like flies on shit.

Cursor and Complex Embedded SWF Control

Well, feedback from Lucid X convinced me to make it so that all interactive elements in a location now turn the mouse pointer into a "hand" when hovered. 

Realizing that this would kill the challenge of any game related with finding a hidden area to click in the screen, there is now a fourth kind of items: those that begin with the word "hidden_". So, if your item is named "hidden_whatever", it will still click when clicked upon, but the mouse pointer will no longer give you a clue about it :)

Another breakthrough that is simple, but has huuuge implications: now you can finely tune exactly how does an embedded swf item interact with the engine.

For instance, lets say that you want a keypad in your game. You want the players to click a sequence of 4 numbers, and if they get it right, that will unlock the safe or something. Before, you would have to make each number an item with its associated action, and deal with a LOT of keys. 

Now, you can just make the whole thing in flash. Kinda like a minigame, if you will. All you have to do to make it interact with Scavenger, is add "hijack=1" in the first frame (that will make the engine cede control to your embedded item over all things mouse over and mouse click) and then in the end, when you're done going through whatever motions (in our example, when the player has finally entered the right key) you simply call "executeAction()", and that's it, Scavenger takes over again, gives out whatever Keys, runs whatever Output, etc. 

Of course, this is optional. Vanilla items can continue being simply clicked on to active.

Note: hijacking all mouse functions disables the drag and drop functionality in the editor, as well as the tooltip text (thats onRollOver). I figured its an acceptable trade of, since you can always use the "place" button, and you can code your own rollovers. But if there's a better solution to find in the future, I'll find it :)

I'll try to make an example video tonight :)