Aligning lick areas to object images: best practices?

  • #1, z nmvhWednesday, 22. June 2022, 13:59 hodinky 2 years ago
    Hello! Here's a question that probably comes across like whining, but here goes:

    In the MYST-style game I'm doing, there is a heavy focus on puzzles involving rotating bricks. The game will probably include between 10 and 100 puzzles (depending on ability and perseverance on my part), which means several hundreds of bricks in the game total.

    It just occured to me that just placing the bricks on-screen is a challenge, albeit one I managed to solve by directly entering the coordinates of the brick images.

    But then comes the laborious part: aligning the "object area" (which is "clickable") to the area where the image is placed. I only know how to do this by hand, which is 1) kind of tedious and 2) not wholly accurate coordinate-wise.

    Is there some commonly agreed-upon practice that minimizes the labour involved? That is, is there a way to make the object area align with the image placement area of that object?    

    Bažant

    38 Posts


  • #2, z afrlmeWednesday, 22. June 2022, 14:44 hodinky 2 years ago
    I see you are already rotating the brick objects. The object area should also automatically rotate with the object - or at least I think it's supposed to.

    Imperátor

    7285 Posts

  • #3, z nmvhWednesday, 22. June 2022, 15:58 hodinky 2 years ago
    Sorry for not being more clear. I'm not having any problem rotating the bricks. They are all quadratic and always turning by 90 degrees.

    Rather, the laborious part I'm talking about is when creating every brick object. The process goes like:

    1) I specify an image file for the brick.
    2) I specify the position of this image on screen.
    3) I drag the four corners of the "object area" so that the approximately align with the image on screen.

    It's step 3 that bugs me!

    Bažant

    38 Posts

  • #4, z afrlmeWednesday, 22. June 2022, 18:12 hodinky 2 years ago
    You could have created a single brick with the object polygon & then just duplicated it a bunch of times & just moved it to the new position & edit the action parts as needed if you already created them.

    All I can say to you is that you better get used to doing tedious repetitive things as that's just an unfortunate part of game development in general - even triple A studios will have their staff doing repetitive things all the time too.

    Imperátor

    7285 Posts

  • #5, z nmvhWednesday, 22. June 2022, 19:25 hodinky 2 years ago
    I don't have a problem with repetition per se, as long as I know there's no other way.

    You write "duplicated it [the object polygon] a bunch of times & just moved it to the new position".

    Actually, this seemingly simple procedure I have a problem executing. 

    Ctrl-C doesn't quite work, so it must be something else? When hovering over the object polygon, the words "STRG TO MOVE" shows up in miniscule letters. What does that mean? smile

    Sorry for challenging your patience.

    Bažant

    38 Posts

  • #6, z afrlmeThursday, 23. June 2022, 03:12 hodinky 2 years ago
    No, I meant the scene object itself. When creating a bunch of the same thing that just need editing slightly, you create one & do whatever you need to set it all up then you right click on the scene object & select "duplicate" from the right click context menu & do that for as many as you need, then you rename them, reposition them, & edit the action parts in them as needed.

    Imperátor

    7285 Posts