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Crash Course 2: Invaders - Part 9
by Hectate (Updated on 2015-02-01)
Part 9: Keeping the Ship On Screen
You probably played around with the game so far and noticed something; the ship can go off the screen (and doesn't come back!). Let's fix that, we need to restrict the Ship’s position so it can’t go past the screen’s edge.
Step 66: Create a new When Updating Event for the Ship. We need to add an If and an Otherwise If block inside.
We will use the first to check if the Ship’s position on screen is beyond the left-most edge of the screen (an X position of 0). The second will check if it’s past the right-most edge (a value equal to the screen’s width) of the screen.
Note that it will need to take into account the Ship’s width. Stencyl measures an Actor’s x position from the left-most edge of the graphic; if we didn't account for the Ship's width, the right side of the ship could go further than the right side of the screen.
Step 67: For our conditions, we need to compare two numbers; the Ship's position and the left or right edge of the screen. Let's grab the Greater Than and the Less Than blocks from palette. You can find them in the Flow category, Conditions sub-category, in the Equality section.
Put the Less Than (shaped like < ) block in the top If block's empty space. Put the Greater Than (shaped like > ) in the second, Otherwise If block's empty space.
Step 68: As mentioned previously, one of the numbers we want to compare is the Ship's position. We need a block that tells us that, and we can find it under the Actor category, Position sub-category, Position section; visible as x of Self.
We want to drag two of these blocks out; one for each of our comparison blocks (the < and > blocks). We need one in the left side for both. We need one more change for these two blocks, we want them to say "x (on screen)" instead of just "x". We can click on each one and change them easily with the drop-down menus that appear.
Step 69: Now that we have our first value to compare, we need a second value to compare it against. For our first comparison, we are just going to compare to 0; since an X value of zero is the left side of the screen. All we have to do is type a 0 into the right half of the Less Than block.
The second, Greater Than, comparison will be slightly more complex, however. As previously noted, we have to account for the width of the actor on the right side. Let's get the following blocks and drop them side-by-side in the workspace.
- Minus (found in Numbers & Text > Math > Arithmetic)
- Screen Width (found in Scene > View > Screen Bounds)
- Width of Self (found in Actor > Properties > Size)
We then need to drag the Screen Width into the left side of the Minus block, and the Width of Self into the right side. The result will be a stack of blocks that looks like the below image.
We need to drag this set of blocks into the other half of our second condition. Be sure to grab the Minus block to move them in, or we might only get one of the blocks inside of it instead.
Here's a image of what we should have so far.
Step 70: The goal of setting up these two conditions is to identify when the Ship has gone too far and has reached the edge of the screen. Since we now have those conditions set up, we can have something happen when they are true.
Given that our goal is to keep the Ship on the screen, we want to reset the position of our Ship Actor so that it is back on-screen anytime these conditions are met. To do so, we need two of the Set X to [ ] for Self blocks; one for each condition. Let's drag a couple out and put them where they belong.
Step 71: Just like with the comparison for our condition, the first value is rather easy. We just need to put a 1 into the block so it reads Set X to 1 for Self. Simply put, if our Ship is ever at 0 or less X position (further left than the left edge of the screen), we are going to force it back to 1 instead. This will prevent it from ever going off the left side of the screen.
Again, like our second comparison for our condition, the second value requires a few more blocks to do what we want it to. In this case, let's get the following blocks. Remember that you can ALT-drag on our existing blocks to duplicate them; you should do this to grab the entire stack out of the comparison.
- Minus
- Screen Width
- Width of Self
- Minus (yes, we need a second one)
Again, we need the same math to subtract the width of the Ship from the width of the Screen. This time though, we put that stack of blocks inside the left side of the second Minus block. On the right side, we enter a value of 1 so our Ship gets replaced 1 pixel inside of the right edge of the screen.
Step 72: Now we just need to take the above stack of blocks and insert it into the second Set X to [ ] for Self block in our conditionals. The complete set should look just like the image below.
Once you’ve got this new Event set up, test your game. If it’s working, and your Ship stays on screen, it’s time to move on to our next major Event, enabling our Ship to fire the Bullets we created earlier.
97 Comments
Had the same problem as piehead, to fix it make sure that in the last blue box is set to
width of self
And not
half width of self
0
There was some weird glitch but restarting stencyl fixed it! BTW, this tutorials are great!
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I' trying to follow this tutorial but there are no "x of Self" blocks at all. What am I not doing?
-1
FYI: This article received a major update on 2/1/15 with many additional images and steps added. Please consider that if you happen to be reading comments that are older than that (e.g. older than this comment) that they refer to an older version of this page. I hope that it's much clearer now for everyone. Thanks!
1
i did it exactly like in the picture by my ship just gets stuck on the right side and it wont let me move it
2
I am alright with how it has left us off here
The only thing I am a little confused about is it doesn't state if we're making this under the Actor Ship's events or the Scene's(Level One's) events
I have to imagine the ship's events ;u;
0
Thank you, now I got it. It was kind of hard to figure out. I don't understand why the author just left us hanging here?!
0
Hopefully this can save some people some frustration down the line, since this truly isn't written out very well.
The blocks on how to create these are:
Always (create a new event and choose "when updating")
if: start with a {0 < 0} block then put {(x on screen of Self)} in place of the first zero
-- set x to 1 for Self
otherwise if: start with {0 > 0} and replace the second zero with {0 - 0} and replace the zeroes with the correct values (screen width and width of Self)
--(start with) set x to 0 for Self: replace the zero or blank space with {0-0} then replace its zero with yet another {0-0}; then replace the zeroes with the correct values (screen width, width of Self, and 1 respectively)
Hope this helps someone!
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