ghost characters

RocketBrain

so i was about to run a test in one of my games when i noticed it decided to populate a few actors that shouldnt be there. This is one of my games that i had developed years ago and i'm editing and going to re-release so all the code is in the actors i had dragged to the screen. Yeah the wrong way to do things but hey i was new.

in any case. i've gone through every single actor in that scene looking for the code that spawn these phantom actors. its not there. so i saved a different version of the project and deleted each actor one by one hoping it would show me which one is the problem. nope. they're all gone and these phantom actors are still showing up.

help!!! I've spent several hours trying to figure this out. Is there a way to tell gamesalad to show transparent actors? i'm thinking one might be somewhere in the nether off screen that i can't find.

RocketBrain

solved my own problem. put an actor back on the screen and hit delete. then hit delete again since i know it highlights the next oldest actor on the screen. somewhere in the nether was another actor doing these shenanigans. now to figure out how to do that in my main game without deleting the actors i need.

RocketBrain

nope can't. i'm back to needing help. is there a way to tab or shift-tab through the actors to select them in preview mode?

tatiang

During preview, no. During editing, yes. You can click on the Scene tab and then on Layers and then expand all of the named layers (e.g. "Background"). Clicking on an actor there will highlight it within the scene.

It sounds like you may have a prototype/instance issue where the rules you are looking at are for the prototype but you have an unlocked instance of the actor in the scene with different rules than the prototype.

RocketBrain

ah the final thing i was about to do and it was working was deleting all those other actors, then nudging it to an area i could see. look at which actor it was. reverting to saved. copying the code and deleting it from the project and making a new version of it and copying the code back in.

your way is better. much better. thank you! and i learned something new

tatiang

You're welcome. If you can't see an actor (or even if you can), you can go into the Layers and double-click the actor name within the layer. That gives you access to its "instance" attributes and rules. From there, you can enter new x and y positions and even change the actor color and/or turn off rules until you can find & see the actor.