Hopeful and some general questions please
Monkey Forums/Monkey Programming/Hopeful and some general questions please
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| Hi All, I used to use blitz basic years ago and so that encouraged me to try this. I have some questions please: 1) Some other cross platform solutions seem to sit on Monotouch which adds quite a bit of cost. I assume we don't need to buy anything else for all cross platform, other than the hardware (i.e. an apple mac etc) 2) One of my games has thousands of large images and in the framework I used for that there is an asset manager that allows freeing up images from the previous level before going to the next, hence being able to have any number of images available to the game. Can monkey do that now, if so how? 3) So I paid for and downloaded the pro monkey and there is a bunch of folders and I see an exe. Is that the windows version, if so where is the version to run on the mac or do I have the wrong end of the stick. I guessed IOS dev would need to be run on the Mac. I have PC and Mac BTW, although my Mac experience is a bit limited so far. 4) Is there an example of incorporating IOS Game center into a monkey game for IOS? 5) In Monkey is it easy to zoom the camera in and out from the play area, sort of adjusting the viewport? I mean is pinch to zoom or zoom in and out buttons perfectly feasible. I assume it is. 6) Is it efficient enough to say handle around 200 images (32 by 32 pixel gifs) moving about the screen at once smoothly on say a duel core Android device? The answer to these questions will determine if I look into Monkey soon for my big game or just use it later for smaller games and app dev. I know some of the questions particular question 6 may be hard to answer, please just give me a guess if so and sorry for that. Happy coding all :) Thank you in advance for your time on answering these. |
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| 1. Correct, Monkey gives you native translated code. 2. I have heard it talked about and I think Monkey has support for it, but haven't done it myself. While it is not an answer to your question I have found using Atlases and the TexturePacker Tool has been a great productivity boost. 3. exe is windows (won't work on Mac) and the .app is for Mac (won't work on Win). Clicking those runs the default IDE and I use this for compiling on Mac, however I use JungleIDE on windows since it is generally better and has intellisense. 4. Yes, pretty sure, checkout the ios forum. Myself I have added Ads using Chartboost, Revmob for iOS/XCode and it worked great! 5. There are many frameworks that allows you to make things simple by having a Camera Class. This is very easy to do if you use a framework. If you want a "homemade" simpler version of zoom it is a few lines of code. Checkout "Autofit" in the CodeSection for the simplest version I know of. 6. I have found that Performance Limits has more to do with your game logic and less to do with the image count. Fillrate is important on mobile-devices. It depends on device and has less to do with Monkey and more with Android + Hardware, same goes for Unity is my experience after having tested both. For big projects I'd recommend you get JungleIDE, TexturePacker and pick one of the many great frameworks that exists for Monkey to boost your productivity - anyway that is my experience! |
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| 1. correct, but you will need to download the SDKs (Ant, JDK, Flex, XNA, Microsft, etc.) 2. Monkey has an image.Discard() command, but no resource manager. there are some that people have posted in the Monkey Code section. 3. on Mac use the Monkey.app or Ted.app 4. not sure, but some people seem to have worked on it http://monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=3215#33439 5. you will need 3rd party code, flixel for monkey or diddy. but it's not difficult. monkey also has a 'SetMatrix' so that all drawing can be effected by that command if used effectively. 6. yes. monkey speed has been tested to be equal to most 2d engines available. most performance problems are not due to monkey. http://monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=3129 you will find that you may need 3rd party framework. i recommend Diddy, FantomEngine, or the commercial Playniax Ignition as the authors are frequently available. There are many other frameworks, just search and ask if the author is still developing it. |
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| Thank you very much, it is nice to see such useful replies. The replies fill me with confidence in the product for my game. So my plan: As the game is 99 percent complete on other framework, finish it and deploy to android market (release date estimate is January or February 2013). Then if the game is successful port it to Monkey and deploy to IOS app market before the spring. It's a plan. If that all goes well then future development will be with Monkey. Thanks again for the replies, a good helpful forum is such a decent feature in itself. |
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| Hi Silverwolf, welcome to the forum. May I ask which framework/tool you are using currently for your game. If you downloaded the pro version already, make sure you got the latest version V66 from your product updates page. V67 is VERY experimental atm and some things don't work for me so I can't recomment it. Also it changes the way how targets are implemented and some 3rd party frameworks/modules might not work correctly with it. If you have any questions, just post. They guys here are all very helpful and great developers too. Cheers Michael |
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| I am using LIBGDX which is awesome for Android, but the soon coming IOS export for it requires Monotouch at 399$ and then only one year of updates on Monotouch, so could become costly, which is why I am looking at alternatives. Finding it hard to find some Gamecenter code for Monkey which people are sure works in landscape, is there a link for that... I did buy the pro version of Monkey. So About updating it, the folder says "MonkeyPro63b" and when I run the Monkey exe in it there does not seem to be an update feature, or nothing I can find to update it. You mention product updates page, where is that please? Well you Blitz guys gave me a tool which got me a 100% mark on my A level Art when I did it as a mature student years ago. I did this with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX2-s-YYrZU So yea on using Blitz basic years ago I though I would buy it without fully knowing if it is right as the price was fairly good. So I am keeping my fingers crossed it will do what I want. I am nearly finished a rather impressive ('Me not being very modest') top down 2D game which loosely follows Guantlet and Diablo but is rather more surreal. The game is around 33MB and I intend to release it in January or February on Android and done in LIBGDX. I will give you the link then if you wish to see it. There will be Free and Pro versions. Of course as mentioned I am looking at better value ways to get the game converted for IOS app store. But I will definiately want to get also Gamecenter working in landscape mode for the game. My fallback position is probably do it all in Objective-c, but Monkey does look easy syntax, I have done Blitz basic before and I want a value cross platform solution and I am hoping for me Monkey is that. Thanks for the quick forum responses by the way, it really makes a difference. Edit: Michael, you did write the book "Monkey Game Development". I brought that kindle book at the same time I brought Monkey. Not read it yet though, most of my time is focused on getting my game out, but will read it come end of Jan or Feb when I investigate Monkey more thoroughly. |
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| If anyone whats to know more about me: I am an artist as well as a programmer with both of those skills being about equal, so game development is something which interests me because of that. I am forty two, gave up my job as a professional software developer to have a live in Czech with my wife so we can live in bigger house and she can be near her mum. Now trying to start a living as an app writer full time. Will see how that goes :) I am hoping for success with my first game out soon, but I do realize how competitive particularly the games market is, so I tried to do a really good one. |
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| You mention product updates page, where is that please? Click on 'Account' in the upper right corner of this site, then on 'Product updates'. Hard to find, I know. |
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| Thanks Volker, probably would not have found that myself. Downloading now :) |
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| @Silverwolf: Yup, that was me writing this pile of paper :-) |
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| And about gamecenter, ones the new target system is settled I will try to come up with a module and a target. If you need also IAP then you might wanna look into the BONO module/framework. I saw that it implements iAP plus over stuff. Maybe there is gamecenter hidden too. What do you use for Android equally atm? |
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| I'm always jealous of graphics artists who become programmers because their games always look so good. I'm just a programmer. :-) Welcome to the forum - Monkey is awesome. |
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| Tiresius, I have always been both artist and programmer, developed both together, or at least from the age of 11, 31 years ago, before then computers were too expensive and big for parents to buy the kids one. I must say that is one thing my dad did right was by me an Atari 800 when I was 11. MikeHart, thankyou really very much. I have been searching the net for ages for a multi-platform solution that can also handle GameCenter on IOS with stability. A couple claim to but are either 199 dollars every year or another is 399 dollars and just one year of updates. So if I can do it with Monkey I will be happy as it surely has to be easier than getting into all the Objective-C and of course Objective-C is not multi-platform. It will be at least two months before I start any kind of port as I have to get my Android version out first. For Android the leaderboard system I am using is SwarmConnect. In respect of Bono, I had a quick look and did not see GameCenter named in any files in it, but it was a quick look, wonder where the documented features for that are. My other fall back position would be to do my own leader board which is not too difficult and I know PHP and MySql well and have my own site. but I think people will want GameCenter for the convenience and their friends will use it too if they are IOS device users. Really I think to do it right on IOS it is now GameCenter, although I have no stats to prove to me if it is the way or not, it is just my guess. |
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