Spaceship combat project and a LOT of questions.

Hi there everyone.

I have an idea for a opensource spaceship game, a little similar in some strategic aspects to the classic sega game Herzog Zwai. I have some experience with MMF and the old, OLD myghty classic Klick & Play.
And GD looks really promising, because it allows to make a LOT of things i only dream about… so i was making some testings and reading tutorials and here are the collection of questions i have…:

1_The idea is create a big space map where the player can move around, like any top down shooter, my question is about the size of the map…how big can it be? also, what could be the best “approach” using a big image for background or some kind of tile map? maybe can i specify the size of the map and “paint” it with black background color instead of white? can be done? sounds like less memory or cpu usage to me. :slight_smile:

2_I have some problem : i create a new project, put an sprite with 8 direction automatism and 2 little events. Works fine, save the project yesterday, and this morning when i open up the project it is totally empty. There is the scene i create, but doesnt have the sprite or the events in it.
I try again, and the same result. The graphics resources are in the same folder than the project. Dunno what i am doing wrong. I make a test with the examples (copying to a new folder and save a new project.) and extrangely…it works ok.

3_In some testings with the lights, i notice that the lights cast the shadows without taking in account the shape/size of the object. I mean, is like a invisible box (bigger than the sprite) that cast the shadow. Is cool, but is any way to “reduce” the size of the box so the shadows appears more close to the sprites borders?.

4_Gdevelop supports LAN game creation? and splitscreen?

5_Related to the image bank, lets say i create and 8 directional sprite with a walking animation. Is really necesary to duplicate the frames of the right walking animation to create the left walking animation?. I remember K&P, having the option to automatically “flip” the frames for the right to create the frames for the left. Has GD a method / option to make the “flipping” maybe without creating the new frames images so the project would take less hard drive space or cpu? if not, may be a good idea to have that. :slight_smile:

6_If i create a game (for native) , and i compile it, its executable will be compatible with both windows and linux automatically or i need to make something else to make it compatible with linux.?

7_Is possibly in this universe make GD more awesome???

Thanks in advance, and sorry for my pity english.

You could make a very very large map… There are many methods for doing this. If you need an absolutely enormous map, with hundreds or thousands of planets, then you can separate these into sectors and have each sector to be a separate scene (so as to not kill the computer with memory requirements).

What do you want the background to be? Surely if it is in space, you could just generate some stars on the fly for a background?

2: Did you say yes to the question about putting the resources in the same folder as the game when you were prompted on saving?

3: Don’t have a good answer for you sorry.

4: Split screen you can do. I don’t know about LAN sorry.

5: Flip the object itself rather than the animation.

6: Need to compile on Linux to make it play on Linux (don’t most Linux people have WINE anyway though?).

7: Even though GD is very good, it’s still improving. Take a look at GD’s Trello page to see what is coming up in future releases.

Oh Mats! Thank you very much you has been very helpfull i am gonna check that option!!! :smiley: