Best posts made by Aidan_Fire

In some projects, you might want to have labels that constantly change what they display very quickly, but the font you like is in TTF format, and updating TTF fonts is quite laggy. So what you will want to use is a BM format font, they are far faster at loading but they only load in one line and don't get the shadow effects etc that TTF get. This post will hopefully show you how to import your own custom BM font instead of using the default ones.

1. You will need to have the files for your BM font. This will include the .fnt file (basically the settings, spacing etc) and the .png file (image of all the characters you are using). How you get these would be another topic entirely, you might need to use another program to make them (perhaps a program that converts a font from TTF to BM) unless you can download your font from somewhere (I couldn't find the one I wanted in BM).

2. Get your hyperPad file to export to something that can edit files. Maybe your PC or laptop, but I am using an app called File Browser. Press the ... on your project, then press Airdrop, after it loads I chose Copy to FileBrowser, but you might need to email it to yourself if you're using your PC.

3. By now you have the .tap file of your hyperPad project somewhere. You need to change this extension to .zip so that you can get your project as a simple folder.

4. With both of the files for your BM font copied, open your project folder, then open Assets, UI, Fonts, and add a new folder in here, the name of the folder will be the name of your font. Paste the two files you have copied in the folder you make.

5. Go back out of your folder, and open one of the already existing BM fonts (e.g open 8bit, 16), you should find a .png and a .fnt for that font, but if you have your settings set to view hidden files (which are just files with a . at the start of their name), you should also find .metadata.plist and .thumbnail.png. Copy the .metadata.plist, you can ignore the rest. Now you can exit the folder and paste this file into the folder you made earlier.

6. That's it! Exit your project folder, create a zip folder of it, rename the file from .zip to .tap, then send the project back to your iPad to open in hyperPad. You should now have a custom BM font in your project. It's thumbnail will probably be missing at first, and if you reload the project the thumbnail might become massive, like mine:
   

If you don't want to go through all of this, I'd be happy to put a custom BM font into your project if I you send me your BM font (.fnt and .png) and the project file (.tap) (and send me a forum message). Hope this is useful 🙂

A few years ago, I uploaded a project to the hub called Three Dimensional. It's the only project on the hub with actual 3D at this time (isometric, no perspective). It's very very laggy. When I made that, I didn't even know how the 3D maths worked, I just found some formula on the internet and used that. I am thinking of remaking the whole thing from scratch because I've finally worked out how to make 3D myself, and I've done it way better than before.

Here's a pic of what had to happen on a timer to move points in 3D:

Now here is what I've got working in a separate project:

The old one could render a cube at just under 10FPS on my iPad Air while updating the points positions on a 0.1s timer. The new one stays at 60FPS while updating positions on a 0s timer.
Quick video of new test project:
0_1561413360099_71834F8E-F72C-4F87-817C-86B5D9E10A91.MP4

@deeeds Yes you give some constructive criticism, but sometimes you're not constructive, and you come across as very aggressive and judgemental. You're saying hyperPad or Murtaza and Hamed do nothing for us? What are you saying, that every time Murtaza and Hamed say they're working on the next update, that they are just lying? Lol let's add a new forum post called "Arguments with deeeds" at least then it'll be a forum topic that will actually stay on topic. 😝

@bosswave I made an example here:
https://go.aws/3eSSUsO
Press the red octagon to spawn missiles, press the blue one to spawn targets. Targets can be dragged around to test missiles. These homing missiles will calculate distances once and continue to home in on the same target (rather than constantly switching to whatever is closest). The homing trigger behaviour bundle is made in a way that it can be triggered at any time to cause the missile to choose a new closest target (or the same one as before if it's still close) but I would not recommend triggering this on a fast timer if you have lots of targets.

It took me a while to get it right because there were a few minor bugs I had to work around that I might try to figure out more details for to submit bug reports soon. (Just saying this in case you see the logic and see a more efficient way to do it, you might run into the exact same bugs I did)

Also they use very simple homing mechanics obviously you can easily change them if you have your own fancy cool looking homing missile physics, just have to use the same referenced object.

EDIT: this example sucks. This one is way better: https://go.aws/2zEM8XH

Why is there no way to set the colour of the health bar? We can set the container, but not the bar. This problem also applies to joy sticks.

This could also help with making sure rhythm games are perfectly synced I think.

@Stephenn The answer to that would differ depending on people's beliefs. I don't think talking about religion in hyperPad forums is a good idea.

@EpicCakeGameMaker Small improvement MAY have prevented the crash:
These animations caused instant crashes so I turned them off:

This here should be more efficient than what you had before (I deleted the timer you had before and the behaviours that I didn't need), and after doing this it stopped crashing instantly on loading:

If your iPhone 6 still crashes, I also deleted all of your bats to see whether they were the cause of the crashing (which they were not because it still crashed after I deleted them all) so you could do the same if it still crashes. The bats are calculating a lot of stuff very quickly compared to the rest of the enemies.

This doesn't sound easy to make, but it would be VERY awesome if more that one person could edit a project at the same time, like a cloud project or something, similar to Google Docs or the new iOS 10 collaboration stuff. The only way to collaborate now would be to keep sending a project between people and only 1 person could edit at a time.

@Deeeds It does, instantly. I use this HEAPS. Can test it easily by running a timer to constantly set a label to the container’s value, then on some event (like touching the label) have it set the box container (using Set Input Field) to something (like Text Input).

@krdavis I’ve been able to upload videos here, but I’m not sure what the size limit is. Animation priorities might be tricky, especially if you’re using the inbuilt ones in the behaviours I think, but I have very little experience with them as nearly all of my projects don’t have animations.

@Deeeds Isn’t this why forums exist? They can either create a post and ask their question, or they can search through posts with a keyword or whatever and see other people’s problems and how they were solved.

@kamdroid Picture of basically what @iTap-Development said, put into behaviours (except I'm using 0 rather than 1)

@Deeeds This could’ve been done with a tonne more Ifs, but I can just disable behaviours, then enable them again once they’ve been missed. Taking advantage of how hyperPad executes behaviours.

When adding a new save key, the default value used by Load from File will not be used until either you use the Reset Save Data options in the debug menu, or you have actually used Save to File on it. Otherwise, the save value just returns nothing. So for something like a high score system, I want it to display as “High Score: 0” for users who open the game for the first time, using Load from File’s default value as “0”, but instead I will get “High Score: “.

When I use for example a timer, and I set it to run at every frame (0.016666666666666667 seconds because 0 seconds causes annoying stutteriness), it at first works fine, it repeats at the time I want and it displays the time I want, but when I select that behaviour again after deselecting it, it rounds it to 0.02 (but it doesn't actually use that time, it just says that), if I try to edit the time, it still says 0.02, and if I don't change a thing and save it, the timer will start to use 0.02 from then on. Does anyone else think this rounding thing should just be removed? It even does it in non-number input fields just because hyperPad detects that it is a number (like Set Label or Box Container).

You kinda need to make a second version of your whole game and move all the buttons and stuff. Often when you look for games on the App Store there are two separate versions one for iPad and one for iPhone (but iPads can install iPhone apps). I think it is possible to make one game work for both but you would need logic that detects what you're running on and then move all your buttons and stuff accordingly.

@deeeds Some people have swear jars. I need an undo in the behaviour editor jar 😂

@SplitMindGaming I think adding a play sound integrated into the shoot behaviour isn't too bad of an idea. I don't think adding to health bar is a good idea though, and you would also have to select the health bar to add to in the behaviour too. I also think destroying the object should be a separate behaviour as well.

I think it would be useful if play animation only outputs once the animation is finished, but since it doesn't what you should do is instead use the Wait behaviour, find out how long exactly your animation is, when when the object is hit by bullet it plays animation, waits for the duration of the animation then destroys itself.

To be honest I never use the bullet behaviours much any more anyway so I don't care too much what happens to them lol.

EDIT: As a more experienced hyperPad user I just prefer to do stuff manually, to me it's more fun and makes me feel like I have more control over exactly what happens in my project, and I suspect other experienced users might feel the same. As long as the option is still there to do things manually, it's fine. If adding multiple in one behaviours helps new users learn, maybe it's not a bad idea.

Maybe an idea somewhat related to plugins: the plugins are created by the community. Allow us to copy blocks of behaviours across objects, objects and behaviours across projects.

Perhaps also add a "behaviour block" for extra neatness which does a similar thing to what used to happen where you could tap and hold a behaviour to cause everything under it to hide, if anyone remembers that (so we've basically created a custom behaviour).