GAME-MAKER Owner's Manual UPDATE April 2, 1992 This document describes new features, additional instructions, and any corrections that have come to our attention. NEW FEATURES 1. Control of screen scrolling. Using the Integrator, you can control the direction that the screen will scroll for each scene in your game. Normally the screen will screen will scroll in all four directions, but for each scene in a game you can turn off scrolling in one or more directions. 2. See section 4.7, Sound Designer. Sound #2 is listed in a table as the sound Game-Maker makes when the character loses hit points. Change the table to read "Monster Dies". When hit points are lost, Game-Maker will make the sound you designate in Character Maker's Injured Sequence. Thus you can now have Game-Maker make sounds for both when the character dies and when it is injured (loses hit points). 3. Special Counters. The five special counters (they are described in section 4.2.3.2) can not be decremented past zero, although their initial value can be negative. Using the special counters, you can force the character to contact one or more specific background blocks before it can cause a change to another block. For example: upon contact by a character, a block showing a key could increment Special Counter #1 by one, and a solid block showing a door could decrement the same counter by one before changing to an open door block. If the special counter's initial value was zero, until the counter is incremented by the 'key', the door will not change on contact to the picture of the open door. 4. Function Key F8. This function key turns on and turns off the Joystick. Please update the table in section 3.0 of the owner's manual. The joystick is off at the start of a game, press F8 after starting a game to enable it. 5. You may create a monster that doesn't have any monster picture blocks associated with it. Of course the monster will be invisible and harmless. Section 6.2 paragraph 2 describes the use of a clear block to create repetitive one way monsters; but it is far better to use a monster with no picture block as much less processing is required. 6. Various Super VGA boards behave differently, even if they have the same super VGA chip set on them. Game-Maker usually automatically determines the type of board. If the video breaks up and doesn't scroll while playing a game, you can assume your board is not automatically handled by Game-Maker. (See chapter seven in the Owner's Manual). You may be able to play games even if your board is not supported. To do so, go to the \GM\ subdirectory and type 'PLAYGAME xxxxx' where xxxxx is the name of the video chip set on your board. Valid names are: TSENG3000, TSENG4000, ATI, TRIDENT, PARADISE. If you are running a 'transferred' game, type the name of the game followed by the chip set name (Game_Name xxxx) to run the game. 7. Users tell us you can run Game-Maker within the MS-Windows environment as a full screen DOS window, however we have not tested this capability extensively. ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS 1. Restoring Games. Function key F5 saves a game in progress, and F6 restores the game at the exact point where it was saved. Once a game has been saved, you may restore the game anytime during play. If you've saved the game and then quit, you may restore by first starting the game from the beginning, and then by pressing F6 at any time. 2. Here's a few more techniques for having characters shoot. a. Using Character Maker, you can set a single character sequence to shoot once each frame, resulting in multiple identical or different monsters shooting from the character for each stroke of the key or joystick button. If you have shooting alternate with frames in the sequence that move the character in new directions, then the monsters will shoot in each of the directions. b. For monsters that are shot from characters, it's usually best to have the monster blocks not have solid sides. 3. Joystick Controls. When assigning joystick controls to character sequences, be careful to select exactly what controls you want. For example, to move left choose 'left' and 'no buttons'. To shoot, choose just one button. For a left jump, you might want to choose 'left' AND 'button 2'(both must be active for the jump to work). 4. Helpful Hint: Many games use the numeric keypad. These keys are interpreted differently by Game-Maker depending upon whether NumLock is on or off. Be sure and put the keypad in the mode that matches the game. OWNER'S MANUAL CORRECTIONS 1. Section 4.2.3, table. Change "0 to 9999" to "-9999 to 9999". Section 4.2.3.2, paragraph 3. Change the sentence "All repetition counts go from a low of 0 to..." to "a low of -9999 to...". 2. Section 4.3.4, paragraph 5. Cross out the second and third sentences that start with "Draw this sequence...". Add: "Objects must NOT have solid sides." 3. Section 4.3.5, paragraph 2. Change "The maximum initial repetition count is 254" to "is 32766". 4. Section 4.4.4.3. Add: "Monsters that move in a pattern can now be stopped by or pass through solid blocks, your choice on a per monster basis." BUGS 1. The TRANSFER utility forgets to transfer any image files associated with a game. The game still runs, but it won't display the initial or final 'backdrop' images. You can transfer them yourself as follows: first, create a subdirectory called \GIF on the floppy or in the game's new subdirectory. Then COPY the backdrop files that you named in the initial and final scenes of your game into this new subdirectory. The backdrop files are named as you specified, with extensions of .BKD and are located in the GM\GIF subdirectory. Next copy the .GIF files that the backdrop files point to (that is, the GIF files that you used when you created the backdrop) into the new subdirectory. The MS-DOS commands you will probably use are MKDIR GIF COPY C:\GM\GIF\name.BKD A:\GIF\*.* COPY C:\GM\GIF\name.GIF A:\GIF\*.*