Scratch

What's wrong with this? And if we get the right people this could be the best DDR game on Scratch!

archmage wrote:

One thing that would be a problem is that the lag from the music makes it almost impossible to sync the arrows to the music in the online player. Another issue is that it can only hold a max of about 5 songs because scratch's compression isn't that good. I made a DDR like game, its called x-mas beats but it runs very poorly online.

Well I had an idea where there would be "song packs" that you would download then import into the game, so there are more songs then just the ones that come with it.

RHY3756547 wrote:

archmage wrote:

One thing that would be a problem is that the lag from the music makes it almost impossible to sync the arrows to the music in the online player. Another issue is that it can only hold a max of about 5 songs because scratch's compression isn't that good. I made a DDR like game, its called x-mas beats but it runs very poorly online.

Lag shmag. Using timers destroys lag completely. You can also change variables with FPS multipliers to perform at full speed. Syncing, again, perfect with timers.

What exactly are timers?

Even with timers, there may still be a lag in the songs themselves, the scripts and the motions of the sprites. This mostly applies to the online player though.

Yeah, the x-mas beats game isn't synced to a timer because it was easier to make that way. To program the arrows I set up a script that would just record my key strokes as I listened to the song. The arrows in the game are just me mashing random things on the keyboard. But the alternative of setting each arrows individually seemed too time consuming.

So taking Rhy's suggestion into consideration to program the notes for each song you need to code a set of arrows to come out for every unit of time (say 1 second). To do this you would have to listen to the song with a media player (windows media/vlc are good) and type out the set of arrows for each unit of time. This will result in the best accuracy but it is a very time consuming process.

A good tool for recording arrows would be to use a tool made for that purpose like step mania.
http://www.scratch.mit.edu/ext/youtube/?v=Ozpv3dyBy7s&feature=related

Follow the instructions in that video to make arrows then record it on note pad or something and put it into scratch.

Last edited by archmage (2010-03-31 11:51:35)

So.......what do you need?

archmage wrote:

So heres a question for BWOG: how do you plan on recording the arrows and how will you make them come out? The way you do this can mean 10 minutes to make a song or a whole day to make a song.

I had an idea for this, if you ever get around to the part where you make the songs I can make a flash app that makes it as easy as possible to record songs according to time intervals if you need something like that. The reason you cannot make such a tool in scratch is because you cannot just jump to any point in a song making it too difficult to match the sound in a certain moment with a set of arrows.

I don't know how I'll do it yet. But if you can make a flash program that would make it easier that would be nice.

So.......what do you need?

BWOG wrote:

littletonkslover wrote:

So.......what do you need?

Try making some arrows for now.

What size? Big, or..........

BWOG wrote:

littletonkslover wrote:

BWOG wrote:

Try making some arrows for now.

What size? Big, or..........

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2 … aAnime.png

Small, preferably.

Also, archmage, your way seems a lot harder then the way I was thinking about doing it because you calculated the number of frames, and I have no way of doing that, so I can't copy the scripts from your project to mine.

No, I was suggesting you count every unit of time if you want it to be perfect, the x-mas beats scripts does not do that. The method with frames is the method that Rhy was suggesting and I just elaborated what that would mean. Mine uses lists to store the arrows and then calls out arrows when the list indicates some should come out which is the simplest possible way of doing things. How did you plan to make the arrows come out?

Last edited by archmage (2010-03-31 12:52:53)

Ok, so if I understand you plan to code it something like this

There is a list of 0s and 1s in 4 lists (1 per arrow) that indicate what arrows should come out at each point in the timer. A loop goes though each value in the lists every time the timer changes and checks to see if any arrows should be spawned.

If you decided to make it poorly you you make it like this for every arrow

if(timer=number){
spawn arrow
}

This would be extremely time consuming and make it impossible to edit the arrows.

Last edited by archmage (2010-03-31 13:16:27)

What, you mean are coding it like that? Thats no good...

Ok, if you want to make it like that you will need about 400 scripts like that for each song. You can replace all those scripts with just one and some lists. If you stack 400 of these scripts on top of each other it will slow the editor down and make it difficult to edit the script not to mention that you will have to look though so much code.

My choice of words was poor there, by impossible, I meant very unnecessarily difficult. Really, I very strongly suggest you use lists instead of if blocks in the way I described.

Last edited by archmage (2010-03-31 15:02:59)

When ever you store large amounts of data you should use lists. Also, I have not seen a difference in using lists and variables so there isn't a time difference.

You should make it like this

//for each arrow
if (item (time_point) of list right_arrow = 1){
broadcast (spawn right arrow) /replace with other spawning code if you want
}

forever{
change time point by 1
wait (0.1) seconds
}

Something like that would check every .1 seconds like you want it to (in theory).

Last edited by archmage (2010-03-31 16:16:37)