SilverCreator 1.5 review
DownloadSilverCreator is a new card-based game and application development system from SilverNetworks! SilverCreator lets you express your ideas quickly, easily, and freely.
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SilverCreator is a new card-based game and application development system from SilverNetworks! SilverCreator lets you express your ideas quickly, easily, and freely.
You can even sell your programs, because there's no royalties. Sprites, movies, sound, and more let you create a multimedia rich game.
Scripting, Methods and functions let you create a modern game easily. 2-player ONLINE games are easy, with built-in game socket support. And with click-areas and keyboard support, there's so much more.
What's New:
Sound support has been expanded. First, STOPSOUND will now stop all sounds currently playing, unless you specify which sound to stop in the command, i.e, STOPSOUND "Gun". Also, LOOPSOUND can now loop a specific sound if you specify it. If no sound is specified, the sound which was played last will be looped. Additionally, SOUNDPLAYING now returns true if any sound is playing, unless you specify which sound, and if you do, only if that sound is playing will SOUNDPLAYING return TRUE. Finally, PLAY has been depreciated, and PLAYSOUND should be used instead.
- Added a new compiling window. When you choose Compile from the Special window, this new window will appear and let you select which platforms you want to support, and allow you to enter in your game's version, creator code, and info text. When you click Compile, SilverCreator will ask you where to save each program and then compile the program(s). In the future this window will let you paste the icon you want to use on your program. Also includes a new option to make .sit files of your games. DropStuff required.
- Significantly redesigned button, click-area, card setup, and game setup windows. These new windows are non-modal and follow Aqua HIG guidelines. You can now open multiple button, click-area, and card setup windows, each editing a different thing. You can even edit buttons and click-areas on cards other than the one currently being displayed in the editor!
- Fixed INPUT command bugs which let you manipulate text which should not be manipulatable: Placing the cursor outside of the editable area now moves it back into the editable area, Select All now selects only the editable area, and selecting part of the editable area and some uneditable text will change the selection to only the part of the editable text that is selected.
- Fixed the splash screen on OS X preventing double-clicked project files from loading if SilverCreator was previously closed (ie, double-clicking the project file caused SilverCreator to launch). This also removes the splash screen flicker on OS 9 where you would see the splash screen for a split second followed by the project window.
- The filter windows have been touched up a bit. The exact center of the card image is now always visible in the preview area, and if you resize the window, you can see the whole image, but you will no longer see white area because the window can no longer be resized bigger than what is necessary to show the image.
- Various scripting commands have changed. For example, INITSPRITE is now CREATESPRITE. Several other commands have also changed. SilverCreator will automatically convert all old syntax to the new syntax and will let you know if any syntax was changed. Please read the Help window for the new syntax.
- Fixed additional or incorrect error dialogs, crashing, and/or failed assertions occuring after error dialogs caused by syntax errors or invalid values in values passed to scripting commands. The majority of commands in SilverCreator were affected. This should fix most scripting-related crashes.
- Close widget in the game editor window is now active. Closing the window asks to save changes. If the window is ultimately closed, either by successfully saving, or clicking "Don't Save", then SilverCreator will act like it does when clicking "Nothing" or "Cancel" in the splash dialog.
- The "save your changes before closing/quitting" dialog is now more accurate. In some cases it would have shown up even when no modifications had been made, and in other cases it might not have shown up after manipulating card text, sounds, or sprites, causing potential data loss.
- Most read only functions, including SPRITEX, SPRITEY, WINDOWLEFT, and WINDOWTOP are now settable. This means you can use code such as "LET SPRITEX(1) = 50" to move around sprites and "LET WINDOWLEFT = 200" to move around the window.
- Fixed visual problems which temporarily occured when first seeing the running/compiled game window on Mac OS X. This includes a bug where extra buttons would be shown in the game window if an ALERT was shown in the Open event of the beginning card.
- The game editor window now has a proxy icon and, on Mac OS X, now displays the red dot in the close widget if modifications have been made since the last time you saved. On Mac OS 9, the proxy icon will be dimmed when modifications have been made.
- Fixed a terribly peculiar bug where after a scripting error in a click-area, the script might be replaced with either "RuntimeViewWindow" or a bunch of random garbage, or the program might have just quit or freeze up the computer.
- Fixed a cosmetic bug in the Sprite Editor which caused the "i-beam" cursor to inappropriately display when the mouse was in the picture area, and caused a blinking dot to appear in the corner of the picture area when you clicked on it.
- Added SELECT CASE support! SELECT CASE is similar to IF... THEN but you can check many different values against the value you are checking while only using one SELECT CASE block. See the built-in help window for examples.
- Includes new method for including runtimes in SilverCreator's data fork. This allows Stuffit to be more efficient when compressing resulting in a smaller download size, and also fixes situations with people losing their runtimes.
- Fixed various commands not accepting a variable for the boolean part. So, if you set a variable to TRUE, and then tried to pass the variable to these commands, it would not work and instead would act as if you had passed FALSE.
- Fixed various sprite and socket commands not handling commas correctly. This would cause these commands to break if, for example, you used something such as "MOVESPRITE 1, SOMEMETHOD("48,56"), 59".
- Added SPRITETOUCHINGXY function that returns true if a sprite is touching an X, Y coordinate! For example, to see if sprite 5 is touching at 52, 60, you might use "IF SPRITETOUCHINGXY(5, 52, 60) = TRUE THEN".
- Fixed an error handling bug which caused some game functions to continue running after a scripting error in an Open Card or Close Card event. This would cause additional fatal errors and/or unexpected behavior.
- Added Script Formatting button to the script editor window! Just click this button to reformat your script into an easier to read format that's great for fixing bugs and understanding other people's code.
- Fixed HUGE memory leak which caused games with a lot of card changing to quickly fill up large amounts of RAM. This will greatly reduce the required memory for games, especially on the classic Mac OS.
- Fixed a significant long-standing IF...THEN handling code bug that caused the code after ELSE to occur when the code before ELSE should occur, and there was no code before ELSE (and after the IF...THEN).
- Fixed close and quit events still being executed after a game error on Mac OS 8 and above on PPC, or on Mac OS X. This caused erratic behavior and/or additional errors. 68K and System 7 were not affected.
- Faster Sprites! The Simple Test Game's "Sprite Test" and "Optimized Sprites" are both 26% faster versus SilverCreator v1.1!
- Added SETWINDOWTITLE command and WINDOWTITLE$ function. The function is both gettable and settable, meaning you can set it with the LET command and the window's title will actually change.
- Fixed KILLSPRITE not completely removing the sprite from memory. This meant sprite commands could still call on the sprite number even though it was supposed to be completely gone.
- Improved project saving and game compiling speed by as much as 220% in some instances, and improved project and compiled game loading speed by as much as 30% in some instances.
- Fixed minor drawing bug which caused a border of the game window's background color to be drawn inside of the text field frame. This was noticable if the background color was not white.
- Added a new preferences option, "Open filter windows at full size". When selected, all graphics filter windows will open at their maximum size, which shows all of the image.
- Added SPRITESTOUCHING function that returns true if two sprites are touching! Just indicate the two sprites, for example, "IF SPRITESTOUCHING(2, 3) = TRUE THEN".
- Added two ways to move the window around: by using LET to assign WINDOWLEFT or WINDOWTOP the desired coordinate, or by using the new MOVEWINDOW command.
- Fixed a bug in the internal script optimizer which left extra spaces at the end of a scripting line if the end of the line had a comment which was prefixed with spaces.
- Fixed the font faces, sizes, styles, and colors menu items being inconsistently checkmarked much of the time. Now the items should be appropriately checkmarked.
- Internal script optimizer now trims non breaking spaces as well as regular spaces. This fixes an uncommon bug where perfectly fine looking code would not work.
- Fixed scripting errors that occured if you used REM at the end of a scripting line but REM was not captialized, ie., "LET x = 5 rem This command sets x to 5".
- The game about window has been redesigned and now resizes to fit the about window text, meaning you can now fit more text (but only up to 255 characters).
- Now supports compiling PPC and OS X games which are larger than 16MB. Previously, this would cause the compiled game to be corrupted and not work.
- Added sprite flipping! Use the XFLIPSPRITE and YFLIPSPRITE commands to flip a sprite horizontally (X), vertically (Y), or a combination of the two.
- Added SPRITEWIDTH and SPRITEHEIGHT functions that tell you the width or height of a sprite. Changes in the sprite, such as scaling, are considered.
- Fixed a problem where custom methods that started with "REM" would not work, because they would be mistakenly filtered out by the pre-parser.
- Added a new floating info window that tells you the width and height of the card picture, and the X and Y values of the mouse relative to the picture.
- Fixed game text field not being scrolled to the top when changing cards. This should fix the text sometimes being clipped off or not visible at all.
- Added "Clear" button to the Button Editor. This allows you to clear all data associated with that button, including the caption, script, sound, etc.
- The version number and get info text that you enter are now actually used to make a vers resource (and a plist on Mac OS X) for your game.
- Fixed a bug which caused the KeyDown event to be incorrectly executed twice for most keys if the text field was visible and had the focus.
- Added pencil and brush painting tools. The brush will use the line width setting chosen. The pencil will always use one pixel width.
- Click-areas in the game editor are now translucent! Now you can easily see what's beneath a click-area without having to move it.
- Fixed the sound rename dialog being limited to 32 characters. SilverCreator can handle sounds with names up to 255 characters.
- Scripts that repetitively call commands that accept multiple values are now faster on Mac OS X due to a new caching algorithm.
- Fixed game continuing to run and causing unexpected behavior after executing an IF statement that didn't have THEN at the end.
- Added BEGIN COMMENTS/END COMMENTS. Anything between these two lines is ignored and is not included in compiled games.
- Fixed a minor internal bug in various parts of the scripting code that caused an integer variable with no name to be created.
- Mac OS X compiled games are now fully supported on Mac OS 8.6 and up with CarbonLib, as well as Mac OS X (10.1 and up).
- Choosing "other color" in the graphics or text color pickers will now load the previously chosen color into the color picker.
- You can now play a looping sound just by checking the new "Looping" checkbox in the click-area, button, or card editors!
- You can now hold down option while drawing a box, rounded box, or circle, in order to create a proportional figure.
- Fixed NilObjectException error if you tried to access an uncreated socket. Now a more appropriate error is given.
- Fixed FILETYPE$ and FILECREATOR$ not processing strings correctly, making them generally useless until now.
- Added sprite scaling! Use the SCALESPRITE command to set the percentage of the scale for the sprite passed.
- Sprite Manager, Sound Manager, and About Window editor are now integrated into the Game Setup window.
- The compiling status box is now more verbose. It now tells you which stage of compilation is taking place.
- Fixed carbon compiled games possibly crashing on quit by adding ".app" to end of carbon game names.
- Added documentation for UPARROW$, DOWNARROW$, LEFTARROW$, RIGHTARROW$, and ESCKEY$.
- Fixed the Help window text field not scrolled to the top when changing the help topic on Mac OS X.
- Fixed previous card text overwriting current card text when turning off wide picture mode.
- Added PROMPT function (exactly like PROMPT$ but the input field only accepts numbers).
- Fixed CAUTIONALERT and NOTEALERT using the note icon instead of their respective icons.
- You can no longer open the help window or other windows like that while in Run mode.
- Fixed a longstanding bug that randomly caused the picture to be erased while drawing.
- The "Platformer" example has been updated, enhanced, and optimized. Check it out.
- Added more internal error handling to should give more accurate error messages.
- The add graphic window now shows how the graphic will look in the game window.
- Improved error dialog when entering an invalid card into the Go To Card window.
- "Darker" and "Tint" graphics filters are now faster and use much less memory.
- Added a warning dialog if you try to import a MIDI file into the Sound Manager.
- Added Other Font Size option to the Format menu and the Place Text window.
- You can now resize click-areas! Hold down option to reveal the resize box.
- Added COMMANDKEY, CONTROLKEY, OPTIONKEY, and SHIFTKEY functions.
- Fixed movie looping not being turned off after loading another movie.
- Redesigned the Place Text, method editor, and add graphic windows.
- The INPUT command now moves the cursor to the end of the field.
- Added WINDOWHEIGHT and WINDOWWIDTH read-only functions.
- Some windows are now sheets on Mac OS X, where appropriate.
- Fixed SETFIELDCOLOR not setting the field to the right color.
- Fixed several Mac OS X interface and window focus issues.
- Minor error dialog improvements (visual, textual, etc).
- Added FILEDATALENGTH and FILERSRCLENGTH functions.
- Raised maximum number of click-areas per card to 25.
- Added Width and Height text to the sprite adder/editor.
- Updated toolbar appearance to look better in Mac OS X.
- Raised maximum number of on-screen sprites to 50.
- The Help window has been significantly reorganized.
- Raised maximum number of project sprites to 500.
- Raised maximum number of open output files to 5.
- Raised maximum number of open input files to 5.
- Added "AIM/iChat with Developer" menu item.
- Raised maximum number of methods to 500.
- Minor speedup in the Bevel graphics filter.
- Raised maximum number of cards to 5.
- Raised maximum number of sounds to 100.
- Fixed Global Input event not working at all.
- Raised maximum number of sockets to 10.
- Fixed various bugs in the paint text tool.
- Added SIN, COS, and TAN functions.
- Added decimal numbers support!
- Added ABOUTWINDOW command.
SilverCreator 1.5 keywords