You probably might be working very hard on the upcoming update for flowlab @grazer, but I have some questions as well as some bugs or problems for you.
-About what time do you think this update will be ready, and what will be included with it?
-hows that SB3/2/NW shooting bug coming? Its spent a few months on the trello. It seems the problem lies in attachments. I plan on making a workaround, but theres another problem preventing me:
-Emits are probably one of the most important nodes in flowlab, but the angle input needs to be on top so it updates before the object gets spawned. Otherwise its far harder to use…
-The trello is very helpful! But one thing concerns me, how do we know which ones youve seen? Other users are putting things on the trello, but we need a tag or category letting us know which ones youve seen. That way we dont try to push for something being fixed when youre in the middle of fixing something more important!
-Could the expression node get a buff? Like us being able to add additional variables to them… Like a stepper.
-could custom splash screens become a possibility? Flowlabs free edition splash looks really cool, and I kinda wanna make my own based off of it…
-messages get de-cloned, so only one message comes through, even when theres a bunch of objects sending it. An example is you needing to shoot a certain amount of enemies before advancing to the next room, but if you somehow hit two enemies at the same time with a single bullet, they both disappear but you only get credit for 1… is there a workaround for this??
I hope these were worth your time looking at. Thanks
@CrimsonBlackGames
Yeah, i’ve noticed grazer hasn’t really been responding to ANYTHING recently! I’m kinda surprised he hasn’t said anything about The Crigence Critique! (It is getting so big that it’s almost rivaling some of the announcements!)
The next HTML update will be ready as soon as I can get it stable enough to be confident that people can start using it. Maybe 2 more weeks? It will start out as an HTML option, and once it is tested for a little while, then I’ll deprecate the Flash one completely and replace it with the HTML one. That entire process will probably take a couple of weeks as well, depending on how many HTML specific bugs show up. As for what’s going to be included, it will probably be a disappointment. Almost all the effort has gone into making the editor & engine work as smoothly in HTML as it does in Flash. There will be quite a bit of UI cleanup, and some relatively small bug fixes, but not much in the way of new features. My hope is to make it work properly on mobile devices, so I guess you could call that a new feature?
I honestly haven’t made much progress with the SB shooting bug. I have investigated it a couple of times, but there are two things that make it difficult. First, there is a lot of logic in SB, and that makes it hard to follow what is supposed to be going on. Also, I don’t exactly know how to trigger it reliably. Really what I need to do is to figure out exactly what steps to take to make the shooting stop working, and then make a simple test game that reproduces the problem. Once that’s done, then fixing the issue should be trivial. If you have any hints on how to trigger the problem, I;d love to hear them. My current theory is that it’s something to do with dying while the fire button is pressed, and it somehow doesn’t clean up correctly?
The Emit input switcharoo is a good idea, but it is a bigger task than it sounds like. Basically, inputs cannot be rearranged because the input links in all existing games will then be incorrect. The way I have to fix this is to create a new Emit block type, with the new arrangement, and then make the emitter behavior button create this new type, without changing the old ones. This is how I had to fix the Spawn, and it’s kind of a drag
Trello is where I track the bugs and feature requests, so if there is a card, I’ve almost certainly seen it. If there is any doubt, we could make a “New Issues” list, and add new tickets to that. If I’m working on an issue, or have it queued up in my task list, it’s in the “Working On” list.
I don’t understand the Expression request - what do you mean?
Custom splash / loading screens would be great, and that was a planned feature in the early days, but I never figured out a good way to make them easily editable.
Messages definitely get de-duplicated per frame. I think I should probably modify the way the messages work in general, but I’ve avoided it because I’m not sure how much of a negative impact it would have on existing games, and I don;t want to break a bunch of them. Basically, the way it works now is in two phases:
During a frame, behaviors for an object are run and they deliver any messages to other objects’ inboxes as needed. Then, that object’s mailboxes are checked and any logic connected to its mailboxes gets run. The advantage of this method is that it prevents infinite loops of message->mailbox->message between objects, which are easy to create unintentionally, and would crash the game. The disadvantage is that messages are not always delivered predictably in the same frame they are sent.
A better approach might be to just check messages instantly, so they always get triggers as soon as the message arrives. This would solve the problem you’re having, but the main downside is that it then becomes pretty easy to create loops
Go to the unused test level. There, you can spawn enemies manually. However due to recent ideas, you will need to delete the green eyeball object before anything. Its a project
You need to die once or twice while shooting with the arrow keys- so its pretty much what you said
Basically- being able to add letters to expressions, so like A, and B are already here, but what if you wanted C and D?
Another thing… what if we had some sort of loop detector? That can detect a loop before it happens? The links involved in the loop would flash red and yellow… viable???
Hey @CrimsonBlackGames - so yeah, a loop detector would work. The original version of messages actually had one, it was just kind of janky. Using mailboxes in two passes seemed like a better solution.
My main concern is just that switching to direct delivery of messages could break some games, since it would change the logic flow. It’s also possible that the mailbox delivery could be modified to fix the race condition without moving back to direct delivery, which would probably be safer.
I think found a small bug in sb3. I ended up clicking where the gamemode buttons would be if the menu was open (I was clicking an alert and it was bleeding through) and the gamemode indecator changed at the top!!! @grazer
@grazer go to the unused test level for testing SB3. Theres a spawning system that allows you to control what to spawn…
Click the lightning bolt up at the top.
@yanninanny, you don’t need to comment on different posts like this to get attention. Plus, there’s a lot of people on flowlab, but not a lot of posts. You will get your answer. Welcome to flowlab, by the way. I’m browngr, maker of HAKK3R, Call Me Kevin The Game, and Survival.
