raocow's talkhaus

FusionWarrior wrote:Ok, I got it... I'm going to keep a "current" version for my archive, but I'll "trim the trees" and see how it does in testing again... I really want to avoid messing with the machinery if possible... But I guess I can live without the massive amount of layer movement in my first section. Especially if it's gonna lag everything to come... But i'm keeping a legacy version for the day that nonsense is fixed.

When moving layers are just used for aesthetic purposes, I find myself wondering if a single some extra-large-size custom block having it's X/Y coordinates changed by LunaLua, would lag less than moving layers. The reason I think this might be the case is that I'm going to guess moving layers are normally laggy because it forces a bunch of extra collision checks, but I'm pretty sure moving a block with LunaLua doesn't get normally collision checks applied... and I say one extra-large-size blocks because that'll be faster than trying to move a bajillion little blocks.

EDIT: Actually, even without the LunaLua method, I wonder if using a single extra-large-size custom block in a moving layer would lag less maybe?

Rednaxela wrote:

FusionWarrior wrote:Ok, I got it... I'm going to keep a "current" version for my archive, but I'll "trim the trees" and see how it does in testing again... I really want to avoid messing with the machinery if possible... But I guess I can live without the massive amount of layer movement in my first section. Especially if it's gonna lag everything to come... But i'm keeping a legacy version for the day that nonsense is fixed.

When moving layers are just used for aesthetic purposes, I find myself wondering if a single some extra-large-size custom block having it's X/Y coordinates changed by LunaLua, would lag less than moving layers. The reason I think this might be the case is that I'm going to guess moving layers are normally laggy because it forces a bunch of extra collision checks, but I'm pretty sure moving a block with LunaLua doesn't get normally collision checks applied... and I say one extra-large-size blocks because that'll be faster than trying to move a bajillion little blocks.

EDIT: Actually, even without the LunaLua method, I wonder if using a single extra-large-size custom block in a moving layer would lag less maybe?

From a technical sense, it would, of course. But it wouldn't have gotten the effect I was going for... Heh, I had a pal with an ultra high end gaming system record a video of playthrough... Once raocow has posted his playthrough of my level then I'll have him post it in it's full glory... in fullest HD, so people can see what I was going for.

wow okay I finished my level just about! I want to devote this week to playtesting (a.k.a. asking other people to playtest my level) and making the finishing touches based on that, and next week I'll send it off to Horikawa

please PM me if you'd be up for playtesting it!

Rednaxela wrote:

FusionWarrior wrote:Ok, I got it... I'm going to keep a "current" version for my archive, but I'll "trim the trees" and see how it does in testing again... I really want to avoid messing with the machinery if possible... But I guess I can live without the massive amount of layer movement in my first section. Especially if it's gonna lag everything to come... But i'm keeping a legacy version for the day that nonsense is fixed.

When moving layers are just used for aesthetic purposes, I find myself wondering if a single some extra-large-size custom block having it's X/Y coordinates changed by LunaLua, would lag less than moving layers. The reason I think this might be the case is that I'm going to guess moving layers are normally laggy because it forces a bunch of extra collision checks, but I'm pretty sure moving a block with LunaLua doesn't get normally collision checks applied... and I say one extra-large-size blocks because that'll be faster than trying to move a bajillion little blocks.

EDIT: Actually, even without the LunaLua method, I wonder if using a single extra-large-size custom block in a moving layer would lag less maybe?

If you move layers with lunadll they will lose collision after moving out of their local cell, which im not sure the exact range of technically. A trick is to change their speed to some miniscule value so smbx remembers to update them to a new cell. This doesn't really solve the lag problem, because when the layer has speed smbx does all kinds of inefficient stuff to it. By the way smbx's concept of layers is just a string, so to work on a layer it goes through every block in the level and does a string comparison. It's bad. So when possible such as not moving very far or moving within a small radius, don't move layers with smbx events if you can avoid it.

Looks like I accidentally buried my request for help, so I thought I'd ask again.

Does anybody have any tips on how to ensure that a piece of music loops smoothly in SMBX? I had a piece of music that repeats once, then fades out about ten seconds after it repeats. So I cut the end up to where it repeated. SMBX looped it, but with a horrible clipping sound. I've tried inserting a tiny bit of silence near the end, but now SMBX has a huge noticeable gap between loops which admittedly doesn't sound as horrible as the clipping but is still unprofessional.

Use a very short fade in and fade out for the edges. Also cut froma good point, where the song is already quieter, after a beat for example. Please do not use 10 minute songs unless necessary.

Willhart wrote:Use a very short fade in and fade out for the edges. Also cut froma good point, where the song is already quieter, after a beat for example. Please do not use 10 minute songs unless necessary.

You can get nice loops with SDL, but to avoid popping you need to do some Audacity magic. Zoom really far in at the end of the track, until you can see the individual waves. Then, cut the end if the track such that the final sample is as close to 0 as possible, and look at which direction the wave is going (is it above or below the centre line just before the end?) You need to make sure that start of the track has a wave in the other direction, otherwise it will pop when the transition happens.

PM me if you'd be up for playtesting a level! I will send you the mediafire link to it when I get home

I removed all of the movement in the first section ( a LOT of blocks, really) but kept it everywhere else and honestly it no longer seems to lag at all on my weaker computer.

Ah, made a good chunk of progress today! :)

-decided how many sections there'll be (though it's very short, so y'all might have a problem with that... will choosing easy make it more acceptable compared to if I chose medium? if so, then I'll choose easy)
-decided and found 3 out of 3 songs (I had to do some editing in Audacity due to one of the songs looping bad and one being ripped from a concert show)
-partly did 3 rooms (1 and 3 halves done so far)
-made my own Star Exit (which was kinda hard, also note it's a secret exit)

Now! I want to do some more advanced stuff. I need help though, there aren't many specific SMBX tutorials, especially ones for Wohl's engine. What if I were to, say, want my character to be disabled to move left for a section? (and only a section, not the whole level) How would I go around doing it? I'm thinking of assigning a little puzzle with it.

so, uh
I've been making progress, but suddenly I am also making anti-progress?
graphics that were working fine earlier are suddenly not being made transparent correctly
I haven't touched the files since then, they're all still named correctly and exactly the same as earlier, so is it just that there's a limit to how many graphics you can use without things breaking? because that's the only guess I have right now with my limited knowledge of how smbx works

it's just two background pieces, but it's somewhat important and I don't know why the transparency randomly broke

EDIT: something worth noting is that it shows up fine in Wohl's editor but not in the actual gameplay in the default smbx
the files in the smbx folder are the same, though

Kerkec wrote:so, uh
I've been making progress, but suddenly I am also making anti-progress?
graphics that were working fine earlier are suddenly not being made transparent correctly
I haven't touched the files since then, they're all still named correctly and exactly the same as earlier, so is it just that there's a limit to how many graphics you can use without things breaking? because that's the only guess I have right now with my limited knowledge of how smbx works

it's just two background pieces, but it's somewhat important and I don't know why the transparency randomly broke

EDIT: something worth noting is that it shows up fine in Wohl's editor but not in the actual gameplay in the default smbx
the files in the smbx folder are the same, though

When you say transparency, are you talking about semi-transparency? That isn't really handled by SMBX, and will cause problems.

This may be a dumb question, but I'm rather new to this editor and I couldn't find this information in the readme tutorial.

How do I make an npc give more than one window of dialogue when you speak to it?

Kapus wrote:This may be a dumb question, but I'm rather new to this editor and I couldn't find this information in the readme tutorial.

How do I make an npc give more than one window of dialogue when you speak to it?

I don't know the "correct" answer, but I think you can have the following text be an event that is triggered upon "talk" that triggers an event after a .1 delay containing the second speech block, and if needed, have that event trigger a thrid after another .1 delay, etc etc etc? Haven't tried it myself but it is a sound theory.

I know one way, that is to do that with events.

You will need a lot of events though, so it could quite stuffed.

Step 1: Create as many events as you need, that means: Amount of dialogue boxes - 1 = number of events

Step 2: Place the NPC with the first event enabled for "Talk" in the events tab for NPCs (can be found in the NPC tab)

Step 3: Write the rest of the dialogue in the events. (See that long space below layer settings in the Events tab? Write the dialogue down here.)

Step 4: Make Event 1 trigger Event 2 below in the "Trigger event" tab (Delay should be Instant) Repeat that for every event until you reach the last one.

Step 5: Test.

Step 6: (Maybe?) Success.

FusionWarrior wrote:

Kapus wrote:This may be a dumb question, but I'm rather new to this editor and I couldn't find this information in the readme tutorial.

How do I make an npc give more than one window of dialogue when you speak to it?

I don't know the "correct" answer, but I think you can have the following text be an event that is triggered upon "talk" that triggers an event after a .1 delay containing the second speech block, and if needed, have that event trigger a thrid after another .1 delay, etc etc etc? Haven't tried it myself but it is a sound theory.

It works fine for me on Instant rather than .1 seconds, and this is how I've had dialogue chained, myself.

Does anyone know if the exclamation symbol that appears over talking NPCs, and if the HUD elements, have graphics in the graphics folders that can be changed? The HUD isn't a huge concern to me, but the exclamation is, and I can't currently find it if it's in Effects or something.

Hoeloe wrote:When you say transparency, are you talking about semi-transparency? That isn't really handled by SMBX, and will cause problems.

no, I mean how you need to make mask files (like block-50m.gif, etc)
I've made and named them correctly as far as I can tell, and I swear they were working earlier, but since I've customized more graphics, they seem to have stopped using the mask files properly

though I went and looked at it more now, and I'm wondering if maybe they didn't actually work to begin with and I was just overlooking it, as maybe the problem is that you can only use masks on blocks that originally had masks? because I definitely added mask files to blocks that didn't originally even have them, and while they show up fine in Wohl's, they don't show up in the actual smbx

so maybe that's it? though I need to double check this

It's a hard-coded graphic that can't be changed except with methods that are way too hard to be worth it.

Kerkec wrote:the problem is that you can only use masks on blocks that originally had masks?

That is the problem. You cannot add masks to blocks that did not originally have them. It's a nuisance.

Hoeloe wrote:That is the problem. You cannot add masks to blocks that did not originally have them. It's a nuisance.

yes it is, but thankfully it was easy enough to just reassign all the blocks
problem solved, back to progress

thanks for help

If they're just background tiles, can't you substitute with other tiles that do have masks and resize them?

I sometimes used background tiles that have edited sprites so that they look just like some other tiles.

I'd like to run arbitrary lua code any time an axe NPC is grabbed.
I do have it working already, by using findnpcs(178,player.section) and table.getn to get how many there are and checking when the number goes down, but that feels super gross and doesn't seem to work with the last one. Is there any 'cleaner' way of doing it that I'm not aware of?

Zyglrox Odyssey wrote:I'd like to run arbitrary lua code any time an axe NPC is grabbed.
I do have it working already, by using findnpcs(178,player.section) and table.getn to get how many there are and checking when the number goes down, but that feels super gross and doesn't seem to work with the last one. Is there any 'cleaner' way of doing it that I'm not aware of?

I think there's a memory offset in the player structure you can look at that tells you the currently grabbed ID.

Horikawa Otane wrote:I'd recommend editing the audio with audacity and just... Extending the track super-far. Way further than what is required to complete the level. That's what I do, but if other people have better suggestions, they should recommend them.

Hoeloe wrote:You can get nice loops with SDL, but to avoid popping you need to do some Audacity magic. Zoom really far in at the end of the track, until you can see the individual waves. Then, cut the end if the track such that the final sample is as close to 0 as possible, and look at which direction the wave is going (is it above or below the centre line just before the end?) You need to make sure that start of the track has a wave in
the other direction, otherwise it will pop when the transition happens.

Willhart wrote:Use a very short fade in and fade out for the edges. Also cut froma good point, where the song is already quieter, after a beat for example. Please do not use 10 minute songs unless necessary.

Thanks, guys. Extending the track was kind of unfeasible as it's impossible to tell how long it would take for a player to complete the level. However, the other suggestions worked fine.

Hoeloe wrote:

Kerkec wrote:the problem is that you can only use masks on blocks that originally had masks?

That is the problem. You cannot add masks to blocks that did not originally have them. It's a nuisance.

I will add to this that the Wohl Editor WILL use the mask file you create even if it is for a non-maskable object. Of course, it still won't have the new mask in SMBX, so it really just serves to confuse you.