JAk HAk

GM:S is having trouble with the remote login to the host Mac. I've entered my host IP, the user name and password, and it keeps telling me to check that the "host name and user name (with password) are valid." I went on ahead even though it was giving me this error and tried to compile an .app.zip to manually transfer to the Mac, but the compiler threw a couple of errors. First, it said "FATAL ERROR: Network Error: Connection timed out," which I figured indicated that my host name and user name were actually valid. I thought this was confirmed when I tried again, having changed the user name to the Mac user's full name, and instead got the error "Unable to open connection: Host does not exist." Next, I changed the user name to a random string, and again got the timed-out error message.

Further examination disclosed that I'll get "Host does not exist" as long as there's a space in my provided user name, and I'll get "timed out" otherwise. So, Abe, abex, blah and Abraham%20Robinson all get timed out, but Abraham Robinson and Abraham Robinsonx say host does not exist.

Before trying all of this, I made sure to go into System Preferences -> Sharing and enable remote login for my account on the Mac. Not sure if there's more to do than that. Something that might be the matter is that I don't yet have an Apple developer's license, but I imagined it would throw a different error from what I've been getting.

Does anybody with more experience know what I might be doing wrong? I've been able to get the Windows and HTML5 versions running splendidly, but I'm Windows guy and this has me stumped, so I'd appreciate any help I can get. Thanks!

Not sure how many of you watch Extra Credits, but Game Maker got a plug from today's episode.  For those of you who don't know, Extra Credits is an entertaining, informing and insightful video blog on the Escapist Magazine covering video games as an industry and what makes it work and how some things are hurting it.  In their own words, "Join James Portnow, Daniel Floyd and Allison Theus each week as they take a deeper look at games; how they are made, what they mean and how we can make them better."

Unfortunately, they recommended Game Salad for the Mac, but that's probably to be expected at this point.  Still, it's neat to be seeing something like that help promote the program we all know and love.  Any thoughts?

Something I've been subconsciously noticing finally hit the light of day for me today when I was playing one of the Comp 06 entries (Circle Rider).  The still images don't do the game justice since you can't tell what's going on or what makes the game so unique.  Currently, you have to go by hearsay and actually play the game to discover what's going on in it, which is unfortunate for people like Spydog and whoever else makes games like that.

So, what I thought would be cool is to have animated previews for games instead of just still images.  Obviously, it would be quite a lot of work to implement, and I know that the animations would have to be restricted somehow.  It wouldn't have to be full-blown movie support, but animated GIF at least would be nice.  Also, I'm not talking about trailers either; just a loop at like five seconds max would do to demonstrate the game.

Besides being cool and nifty, it would help out several groups of people.  The first group is those who have a unique play style.  The second is those whose play style isn't very obvious from a still image.  The third is those whose images are chaotic or which have confusable elements in them (some things are much easier to discern when the background changes or it moves around).  Animations could also help people relay that their arcade game is fast paced and snappy, which is harder to illustrate with just one image.

So, disregarding intrinsic difficulties for implementation, does anyone else think this is a good idea?  Would you submit an animated preview image rather than just static images if the option was available to you?

So arctan is supposed to be inverse tangent right? Or tan^-1 right?

http://willhostforfo...hp?fileid=43877

Link to a test project I was working on to help with vectors. The function I need is tan^-1 but arctan isn't coming up with the right angle. I then tried the exact same (or so I think) function in my calculator, and the computer's calculator. It gave me just the right angle.

The function comes to play in the creation event...

width=get_integer("width",100)
height=get_integer("height",50)
angle=arctan(height/width)
rotation=get_integer("rotation",0)
hypotenuse=sqrt(sqr(height)+sqr(width))

where I get the dimensions of a triangle. I then proceed to draw them like so:

draw_line(320,240,320+lengthdir_x(width,rotation),240+lengthdir_y(width,rotation))
draw_line(320+lengthdir_x(width,rotation),240+lengthdir_y(width,rotation),320+lengthdir_x(width,rotation)+lengthdir_x(height,rotation+90),240+lengthdir_y(width,rotation)+lengthdir_y(height,rotation+90))
draw_line(320,240,320+lengthdir_x(hypotenuse,rotation+angle),240+lengthdir_y(hypotenuse,rotation+angle))

The only thing that is drawn wrong is the angle of the hypotenuse, which is anchored on the same point as the base of the triangle (of distance "width").
If somebody knows what's going on, or knows a replacement script then I would be very grateful.

Thanks,
JAk

Hi there. I'm making a game and am working on shadows.

Now, I use blend modes a lot in Adobe Illustrator, and so have a pretty good idea of how to use blend modes.

Or so I thought.

Now, the blend mode I am going for is one that I believe would be named bm_min. Similar to bm_max, which takes the highest RGB and A values and uses that. Except, I need it to take the lowest value... id est the darkest area. So if I have two shadows overlapping (two black parts of a low alpha value) I don't want it to get extra dark there. It needs to stay one constant opacity.

In Illustrator the blend mode is called DARKEN, which should basically imply that if it is darker than what was already there then it can add darkness to it, otherwise adding no color (or subtracting it actually).

Please if someone knows the combination of source and destination blend modes to use I would be exceptionally grateful.