Pretty fun, although I agree it was more fun when I stopped trying to use blink. It may be too incentivized, unless I'm just using it wrong? The timing between "showing red" and "dashing" is really tight, although after a while I got more used to it.

The laser dissipation effect is still really cool.

Probably, but it doesn't need to be too complex - a simple linear regression will do. You'd have to store the previous coordinate of all enemies/players, and determine the next position by moving forward the same distance along the direction of travel of the player. An illustration might help:

The colour matrix is as follows: (where T=-1 is the previous timestep, T=0 is the current and T=1 is the next)

Name\Timestep |     T=-1    |  T=0  |  T=1  |
--------------+-------------+-------+-------|
Player        | Light green | Green | Blue  |
Enemy         |    Orange   |  Red  | Brown |

The black line shows the calculated trajectory of the player, and the grey line shows the calculated trajectory of the enemy.

Then, you determine if the distance between the player and enemy at T=1 is smaller than some tolerance E. If it is, then you got yourself a near miss. If not, then you don't.

Here's some python / pseudocode:

getPos = lambda x: (0, 0) #returns a tuple of the object's (x, y) position
diffPos = lambda x, y: (0, 0) #returns a tuple containing the result of x - y
distance = lambda x, y: 0 #returns the distance between x and y (scalar)
updatePos = lambda x, y: {} #returns a dictionary of all x + y

def calc_near_miss(threshold, all_projectiles, current, previous):
  """
  Calculates whether there's a near miss or not.

  * lookahead - how many timesteps of warning does the player have to move out of the way?
  the smaller the lookahead, the less time they have (e.g. if lookahead is 1, they have
  to wait until the last second to move away for it to count, or else their trajectory 
  will change)
  
  Let's assume the player character is called "main_player" and "all_projectiles" is 
  a list of all characters, projectiles, etc. Since we're using a simple linear 
  regression, we can assume that the position at T=N is just N * distance(T=0, T=-1)
  """
  
  if (currPos is None or prevPos is None):
    return False #no trajectory => no collision

  difference = {
    player: lookahead * diffPos(
      current[player], previous[player]
    ) for player in all_projectiles}
  }
  
  #updatePos() returns a new dict where each 
  #element = current[player] + difference[player]
  newPos = updatePos(current, difference)
  for player in newPos:
      if(player != main_player and distance(newPos[main_player], newPos[player]) < threshold):
        return True
  return False

timestep = 0
currPos, prevPos = {}, {}
#game loop
while(True):
  ###
  # <rest of game code>
  ###

  #calculate the distance the player has moved since the last timestep
  #basically, X_0 - X_{-1}, Y_0 - Y_{-1}
  currPos = {player: getPos(player) for player in all_projectiles}
  if(timestep > 0 and calc_near_miss(threshold, projectile_list, currPos, prevPos)):
    #custom code here - display a message, etc.
  timestep += 1
  prevPos = copy_dict(currPos)

The choice of distance function is up to you - be it euclidean or taxicab. Taxicab distance makes it much easier to reason about.

There's probably something I might have missed here, but the principle isn't too different from Continuous Collision.

Thanks for the detailed post, I'll consider it, but later.

Anyone considering joining the GMTK game jam (https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2021) on June 11 ?

I haven't published any games in a long time. Last thing I made was Hikari's Station which was porting a friend's game maker game to the web which brought me so much joy to make and share:

I think I want to try making something small and really polished. I usually go for overly experimental. Just gotta find an artist to colab with.

I haven't made any games in forever (and no, clock day one-off BS doesn't count imo) either. The last thing I was working on this year was a fighting game, but life got in the way big time and progress in that ground to almost a halt.

I want to get more familiar with heaps before jamming. It really makes you think from the ground up it seems, like the base API is more of a demo for how to deal with the innards yourself when the time comes. I'm definitely not writing my own renderer in a jam.

Also, my snowboarding game got frontpaged, and there have been over a hundred notifications in a few days. I've had several things there before, but it really does feel like there are a lot more ppl visiting the site now. I know there actually are, but this hits it home for me.

It only needs 0.02 more score to be my #1. Vote 5.

Oh that's awesome! I also noticed today the view counts for all the Pico Day winners are super high. Seeing that definitely is a good motivation to spend some time making something and put it up. And hopefully it has a similar effect on others and more people make awesome things and it just snowballs from there!

I don't know anyone who would write a renderer in a jam, especially if it's one of the shorter ones lol

Whoa, that's neat af.

I actually finished a game for the GMTK game jam! You play as a pair of snakedragon spirits and do little rain dances to bring rain to the village:

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2021/rate/1084264

People seem to like it. Balancing it was really hard. It's definitely really confusing at first right now, there's kind of a lot of hidden mechanics.

On a side note, it's kinda weird joining a game jam run by one Youtuber. I feel like every other jam I've ever done has been organized by like a community, as opposed to "Mark". But this is the biggest online game jam now (is that right?) with over 5000 entries, which is more than the last Ludum Dare (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/stats).

I see a few of them made it to NG: https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/gmtkjam2021

RIP Audacity: New privacy policy is completely unacceptable! · Issue #1213 · audacity/audacity (github.com)

My old version didn't try to auto update, and I couldn't find a setting to do enable it, so it's hopefully still OK.

So who's planning on joining the upcoming NG jam (https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1474833) ??

I'm super excited. I'm planning on it, pending finding an artist to collab with.

I'd love to, but I've a paper due the very next day. Grad studies has really taken the wind out of my sails when it comes to making games. Mostly because I can't manage my time for shit.

Ah the good ol days. You can look at my GH commit history and see when I finished grad school lol.

I'll be on vacation and traveling unfortunately. I'm having fun using Heaps though, and I'd like to make something soon.

I feel so overwhelmingly happy having joined the recent Newgrounds egg jam. It's already so much fun to do game jams in general and work with a team of very talented individuals, and have full creative ownership over your work, and release it the next day to an audience of thousands, which is something I hadn't gotten in a while.

But there's also just such a beautiful feeling of a lasting, awesome, supportive community. Watching @Figburn and @Eli 's stream (https://www.twitch.tv/eiiart/videos) was just so awesome. I honestly expected they'd just cap it at like 2-3 minutes per game or something but they went for 10 (!!!!!!) hours total giving each game as much time as it needed and pointing out everything they love about it and overall being so positive and supportive and it was just wonderful.

It was also super cool seeing a lot of games have like cameos of famous NG characters, and that's one thing that made it all feel like such a cohesive and tight community.

Seeing our game be played on stream was super fulfilling, and it kind of makes me think about how awesome that'd be as a regular thing for game jams. Almost feels just as nice as any prize to see that. Although I can imagine it being very difficult as the number of entries grows.

I was speaking to a couple of people a short while ago and the topic of programming came up (they were not programmers but other creatives - artists, musicians, etc.) and their remarks on it had reflected a common viewpoint I'd encountered multiple times, and it was usually some sort of "programming sounds great, but I can't do it/don't know where/how to get started" which is understandable because, well it's intimidating as is every other new skill that people try to pick up.

I've been of the opinion that anyone can program - that if a dunce like me could then surely more talented people out there would be able to, too. Unfortunately, the intimidation factor is very real as most of y'all probably already know. There's a lot of things to learn before you can actually see the results of it pay off, and some people might take to it less easily than others for various reasons. In my limited time TAing a programming course for non-CS students, programming seemed to have instilled a sort of fear in students, where they'd take one look at the task at hand and go "that's too hard".

And it's understandable; I tried to learn how to draw sometime midway last year and I dropped it, tried to pick it up and dropped it again because of that. There were so many concepts I'd have to learn before I could actually get started drawing the good stuff, if the course I was using at the time (drawabox.com) were any indication I'd have to have drawn hundreds of boxes before I could even begin drawing my first portrait. And no, no amount of "well you can do both you know" could convince me to stray off the beaten path; I'd rather stop making progress entirely than try to stray away from the course, even if it would have helped me make strides in my ability to draw.

I've seen quite a few programming courses also fall into the same path of "start at the basics, then build your way up to the more advanced concepts" which utterly SUCKS when it comes to those who like instant gratification. I'm not going to make any generalizations here, but I'll just say what worked for me was NOT starting from a blinking cursor in a console printing out "hello world". That was mind-numbingly boring to me when I started out programming, and was the same story even when I had experience programming and was trying to learn a different programming language. To this day I haven't done more than simple console applications in C++ because I haven't gotten a need to do more. If I were put to the task I'd most likely be able to step up but the comfort zone is like a black hole; damn near impossible to escape for me.

Why do I say all this? Because (visual) game development was the thing that got me to take programming more seriously. It was effectively like drawing, but with text - seeing things move before my eyes based on what I typed was an allure that was hard for 10 y/o me to resist when I first got started. (I didn't know what I was doing for quite a while but that's a story for another day.) It presented a clear and achievable goal that was yet flexible as well - making a game that was as simple or complex as I could make it, but the end goal to have fun. Didn't matter if it was an objectively shitty tamagotchi game, if I had fun playing it then it was mission successful. That was in contrast to the only other endeavour I could have had at the time, drawing, where I subconsciously nitpicked at the final result if it wasn't just perfect, because a lifetime of using my eyes made it easy to pick apart the flaws (and no, the same could not be said for my brain LOL)

I'm still unsure whether the tool I used at the end of the day (Flash) mattered or not. Because I'm biased, I would say it absolutely made a huge difference, because I would have had to futz about with building and other things that were not the actual game development itself, or I would have not received a canvas-like feedback (and instead more banal text-based stuff), or I would have been too intimidated by the API (there's a reason I didn't try out AS3 until a few years later), or it was just a case of right place and the right time (I had been introduced to Phrogram, CeeBot, CeeBot-Teen and Alice much before that, when I was around 7 or so but none of it clicked at the time).

If you've made it all the way through this post, then you might be asking where this is all going. Consider this a lead to the next post, or an ode to Flash, both, or just a long rant.

To lead off from the previous post, I'd been thinking about how this reflects on newgrounds as well. While the site's slogan is "everything by everyone", a lot of people tend to pigeonhole themselves into certain defined positions - either they're a programmer, or they're an artist, or they're a musician. I don't have any data to back this up, but I'd wager that those who play more than 1 role are probably in the minority of users on this site, purely due to how difficult it is to switch gears and pick up a new skill and to do it consistently to the point where they're equally good in both.

It's a lot like being bi/multilingual; there's not much of a need to speak more than one language if you're getting by fine with just the one, so those who learn a new language probably do so because they have a specific goal in mind, be it to converse with others around them, or with the intent to eventually use it - very few do so for purely academic reasons.

Way I see it, it's because of the comfort zone - as long as the job gets done, you'll probably always expend the least amount of effort. This is a good thing! People collaborate because no one individual can do everything, and even if they can, not under the time constraints imposed, and/or not to an adequate enough degree. However, this does mean that things that could be accessible to others are locked away behind an invisible barrier of sorts - of one's own making. As a corollary to "if you don't use it you lose it", why would you learn it if you never use it? You'd just end up losing it eventually!

Combining the things from the previous post and this one, what if people who were used to fulfilling a certain role (programmer/artist/musician/etc.) were instead thrust upon another role, and had to collaborate with others to get up to speed? In the format of a game jam, this could be motivating enough to get people to finally start the ball rolling, as that's the hardest step. By giving people an ultimate goal (making a game), those who are weak in something - be it drawing, programming, animating, composing, etc. - can use this opportunity to see what kind of progress they can make - with the knowledge that everyone else is also in the same situation, it's less likely that people will care about what the end result will be, because at the end of the day what's important is that people tried out something new, and that'd be a bigger win than any prize, the way I see it.

Pardon the triple post; this was a lot of words to essentially say that I'm thinking of a game jam where "newbies" would be in charge.

TL;DR/Details:

Provisional name: "role swap" jam

Team/Solitary: Team (individual submissions not allowed, see notes)

Concept: Those who are X (artists/musicians/programmers/etc) should be in charge of Y (where X != Y)

Time frame: Obviously, nobody can be expected to learn anything worth a damn from scratch in a weekend, so I'm thinking this would be for a week, a fortnight or possibly even longer.

Notes: Collaboration would still be key here. Instead of each person doing what they're good at, though, the goal would be to get them to do what they're the worst at. This would involve - theoretically - a lot of collaboration amongst individuals in a team to effectively teach/mentor the others so that they can learn quicker than if they were left to their devices.

When: If this were ever done, I think a good time would be sometime when traffic to the site is high so that more people would get interested - I don't see this being too effective if it mainly involves users who have already participated in previous game jams as there'd already be some experience carried over from them. Not that they can't participate (indeed the opposite - see below) but I think it'd be best when traffic to the site is high.

As for how the roles would be picked out, I suppose it's best if it's on the honour system - someone says they're going to do X, they can do X as long as it's not blatantly obvious they're already mainly working with X. For those who are involved with everything, they're free to choose as they please (a suggestion would probably be doing something they have least done, e.g. more art if they've submitted more games than art, for example).

Obviously, this would be more demanding than previous game jams because of the complexity involved - it would effectively be up to the programmers (who are working on audio/art/etc.) to manage expectations, scope and all on behalf of those who are trying out programming, and vice versa. Setting expectations would be a huge hurdle to get through because nobody starting from scratch has a good enough idea of what's realistic in a given timeframe ("I want to make an MMORPG where do I start plz", anyone?), not to mention that mentoring in itself would be very time consuming in itself.

If this were picked up for serious consideration, then it'd probably be best to a) compile a list of resources for people to start out before the actual jam occurs (so that transitioning roles becomes smoother than just starting from scratch on the start date), and it'd probably require buy-in from the already experienced people in the art/animation/gamedev/programming forums who are interested in participating (because if the experienced users don't participate, it'll probably be a shitshow of the blind leading the blind.)

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, it's been something I've thought of for the past couple days so there's likely to be lots of glaring holes in this plan. Reading it again, there's probably some stuff I've plain forgotten to include but I might remember it later. It's 2am and I'm probably in heavy need of shut-eye because this became way longer than it was ever intended to be, but I appreciate you if you've read through all this.

I really like the idea of an "out of your comfort zone jam," but programming is the hard part. I can be the worst artist or composer on earth and still export a valid PNG or OGG at the end of the day, whereas I'd be a little surprised if every non-Windows person could even install Haxe correctly within one week.

I'm not familiar enough to know what a "safe" option would be, like a guaranteed non fucked up game by the end of the jam. Maybe a "template" game or a few that everyone can swap roles and make assets for, and the brave souls who want to try programming can have at it? In Flixel with JS export? Not sure if it can be any more accessible than that (no Visual Studio, game works by default, maybe NGAPI thrown in that you can fiddle with, fantastic docs).

(I forgot to mention this earlier, but I decided to reply to MSGhero in a separate thread so as to not hijack this one.)

ok well make a flash game in 2021

Let's play a game: what does this Qt webassembly demo remind you of?

Any AS2 veterans still around? I need some help with a this little particle fountain I'm dabbling with. I followed this basic ball physics and particle fountain tutorial on YouTube and combined the two, but the particles generated from the fountain (i.e. mouse cursor) just keep bouncing higher and higher unlike the instances already onscreen which eventually stop bouncing.

Here's the raw .fla file. Can anyone tell me where I went wrong?

This doesn't completely solve it but you could move the incremental gravity to be above the y adjustment, like this:

doStuff = function() {
	//particle code
	this.ySpeed += gravity;
	this._x += this.xSpeed;
	this._y += this.ySpeed;

In your current code, you are increasing the Y speed after you've moved the object, so when the object reaches the bottom of the screen, it's speed is already 1 faster than what it took to get there. When it reverses it now has a little more speed going up, making it go a little higher each time. This change doesn't totally fix that though, curious if someone else has an exact solution.

If you want objects bouncing less high each time in general, you could multiply the y speed by -0.9 or whatever each time it bounces, too.

Holy Jesus, thanks Tom. I'm gonna' try this when I get back home to my computer.

Best first post to a long-running thread ever

I think it’s awesome. I think the reg lounge moved when Tom wanted to sparce out the forums to dev and art?

Fractured into a million lounges

True. I’ve talked to him years later and there’s still a mutual respect I think.

I was an arrogant 16 year old - sorry for the years of being a knob :)

To be fair, that's how the Internet was back then wasn't it? Felt like part of the charm, even if it was just general assholery.