Forums

I know you guys are busy fixing bugs and finishing major advertised features to get ready for public beta, and that's great! but so far while beta testing I've come across several smaller limitations of the engine that I think could be fixed without too much of a workload, and would add a lot of value to the program as a whole. Basically, small fixes/additions that could have a big impact on the possibilities the engine is capable of. Please consider them :) and if I'm dead wrong about the amount of work involved for any of these let me know haha.

Also, if anyone else has any smaller suggestions that they're afraid to make a whole new thread about, go ahead and post them here too.


Change the highlight color for selected conditional branches.
Right now when you select anything within a conditional branch, it highlights the branch in red so you can easily see it; but variable and switch changes are also highlighted in red. This can get VERY confusing when there's a lot of branches, variables, and switches in one event.

Allow timers to use 10ths of a second.
More accuracy is always a good thing for game design. For example: What if a designer wants a skill to have a 1.5 or 2.5 second cooldown? Or a timer that determines how long after the first jump until the player can use a double jump?

Add an ignore gravity (on/off) toggle in Program Dynamics, or the option to adjust gravity for each event individually.
Some games certainly will need to turn off gravity for events mid-game, or have gravity affect some events differently. Right now the only way to do that is to make the event(s) static, or change gravity for everything.

Add a change movement directions option to Program Dynamics.
Unless I'm missing something, once you set the movement directions for an event they can't be changed in-game.

2. When I last checked, the timer system had an input for hours, minutes, and seconds. I tried to put in 0.5 seconds and it rounded up to one. There's a wait for X number of frames option, but that halts the event processing for that # of frames rather than being a timer.

4. "Or did you mean the Player's Movement Directions that limits the directions the player can take via keyboard or controller?" This is what I meant.

Those glitches shouldn't happen in the first place. EGM is built to take the worry out of game making as much as possible so if you run in to glitches such as that, always let us know and don't let a work-around be your only and final solution. We will fix those glitches right away.

I will still add number 4 because it maybe useful in other scenarios such as mini-games.

As for the timer, if you want to use a frame based timer, it might be more accurate to use a variable. Create a variable called "Timer" and add a new Global Event. Make it "Background Process" and add a new program, Data > Variables > select "Timer" and "+ Add", "1".

Using this method, you can have more than one timer for any purpose. I use it for "Shield" in the shooter template but the timer takes place in the Player, rather than a global event.

I might have been mistaken about the Wait X frames not working. It looks like I needed to 1) add the Wait X frames command and then 2) check the "Wait Completion" box at the bottom of the program dynamics window in order to get it to work. I'm still pretty sure though that the lock player command doesn't work at all.

I believe I tried Lock Player from both within the player editor and another event, although I didn't know it wouldn't disable any custom controls in the player editor, so I guess it is working as intended. I've been able to achieve what I was trying to do with the wait command.

Good suggestions, thanks :).

"Actually, you can use "Turn" and than "Apply Force" or "Move" in the direction "Forward". "

I'll give that a try.

"Also, your computer isn't being overused because of high FPS. the FPS just calculates the number of times your hardware is able to call Draw per second. Basically, it just means you have a badass computer.
Can you check if the high FPS messes up testing the Animations?"

Alright, just making sure haha. When EGM is minimized my cpu usage is 0%, if it's open then my cpu usage sits at about 30% even if I'm just leaving the window open not doing anything. This doesn't happen with software such as say photoshop so I was curious. Also that 2000fps comes from the fraps fps display, the editor fps display says it's running at 900-1000fps.

From what I've seen there haven't been any problems with animation playback in the editor.