New User, Nothing is working!

[jfrfilm]

Hello, I just browsed through all of the threads. Nothing to help my issue.

I have downloaded and tried the boilerplates platformer and space invaders. No matter what I do, nothing runs. Just a black screen.

I'm running them locally, using a Laragon apache server. The documentation seems to say that I don't need to use nodejs or grunt. But the boilerplate git says I need both node and grunt. I've been trying over and over, different ways, since yesterday, and I'm about to quit. Can someone help me get these things running? Thanks!

 

 

[obiot]

grunt is used in the boilerplate to automate all the minifying of the source code and the creation of the resources list to be loaded based on the data folder. Now you can do all this manually, and if you look for example at the platform example here it all manually done. else just upload a zip file of you current project here to see if anything else is missing ("nothing is working" is not really specific enough for us to provide any further hint on how to help)

 

 

[jfrfilm]

Okay, I followed your link and it doesn't work either. By the way, pixiJS works fine, and I was running simple tutorials in minutes. It seems that your tutorials need tutorials to tell you how to use the tutorials.

I just spent over an hour trying to start over, using the code from your GIT link, then I had to add the resources files but it still just ran a black screen. There are PNG files referenced that are not included:
 

{ name: "tileset",         type:"image",   src: "data/img/tileset.png" },

    { name: "background",      type:"image",   src: "data/img/background.png" },

    { name: "clouds",          type:"image",   src: "data/img/clouds.png" },

I'm super frustrated after 3 days of this. Three days. I don't want to use pixi. I want to use MelonJS. 

I want to do this just using VS code editor, local apache server, and my browser. I'm not ready to get into complicated frameworks yet, or node and all of that. I want to learn this and make my great simple game. 

Question #1. Can you help me get this running without node or grunt? A complete tutorial project without any missing files or graphics?

I'm even willing to use Grunt.
But I don't know how to do it and get your boilerplate running.

Question #2. Can you show me that node and grunt are easy - and explain how to set them up?

Your instructions everywhere are way too terse and require prerequisite knowledge. Beginners can't understand. Are you trying to discourage beginners?

I do have node installed. But I don't know what this means:

git clone https://github.com/melonjs/boilerplate.git

Where do I run that command?

Then how do I do this:

npm install -g grunt-cli

Is Grunt already included with Node?

 

 

[jfrfilm]

I just saw another tutorial elsewhere about digdug. He says to use github and clone and don't fork, and I don't know about any of that. Does your boilerplate tutorial require a github account to coordinate everything? I don't have that and don't want it at this point.

[jfrfilm]

Oh well, looks like the door must be closed to beginners. Too bad. Melon seems like an awesome library with great features. I'm disappointed that the barrier to entry is so steep and nobody has realized this is a grave mistake. I'm going to say goodbye now, and use pixi. How many hundreds or thousands have checked out this library but gave up and silently disappeared? My advice, if anyone cares about your library, is - take a few days out of your schedules and write some simple tutorials. Proper app setup, hello world, load a sprite, draw a line, check for key or mouse input - simple things, one at a time - working examples people can just copy and paste and not a big complicated complete arcade game - and end up wondering why they won't run because they don't have something installed that nobody told them about. Thanks, and good luck.

 

Edited April 27, 2020 by jfrfilm

[obiot]

all right mate, I guess that if you managed to rule out any issues on your side by checking on the console log for any potential errors/exceptions, and if you do not need to share here what you have done here as proposed so that we can quickly assess where is the issue, and if you have read thoroughly both our tutorial without being able to make it work, and if none of the example available here nor our poor documentation or the wiki could help you, I guess indeed we failed as a free company in trying to provide something usable to the others and especially beginners. Pixi is a great library, have fun with it and keep us posted about your exciting project !

[jfrfilm]

Thanks for your reply. The examples on that page look interesting, but it's difficult for me to try them for myself.

I go to the page, but all I can do is run the examples, and there is no code to download unless I view the page source and then try to assemble the whole project myself, but that too hard, and many things can go wrong.

How can I try the examples? Thanks!

 

 

 

Edited April 27, 2020 by jfrfilm
simpler explanation

[jfrfilm]

I think maybe I should start developing my game just using html5 canvas, no webgl engine. It's a simple vector line drawing style like Asteroids. But I want to learn how to use Melon js. There will be no big hurry, but if you can help me get started, I'll appreciate it. And actually, I want to create youtube videos for beginners like me so more people can use melon.js. I just need some extra help from you to get me started. So again, my question is, how can I use your example programs? There is no code I can find to download.

[obiot]

all examples source code is provided with melonJS source code, so you can either browse it here or download as I think you mentioned it earlier, by cloning the melons repository.

there is also a great blog entry from Fernando Doglio, on building a typing games with melonJS that starts from the very basic : https://blog.bitsrc.io/writing-a-typing-game-with-melonjs-ef0dd42f37bf 

[jfrfilm]

So the source code for the examples is available.. that's good. But tonight I decided to just start programming in vanilla javascript. I will look at MelonJS whenever I have time. I think I will want to use it for final version of my game, since it uses webGL. I just did a test using canvas draw, and I can draw about 600 instances of a three-line asteroids ship rotating before it starts to slow down. But I'm sure people's phones won't be so fast. I'll need webGL. Thank you again

[Thuan]

Hi I'm also new to melonJS and I stuck at the platform tutorial step 3, my sprite keep moving where he stands even tho i dont press the keyboard. And all the key left, right, up not working. Any ideas about this problem?

[obiot]

@Thuan see my answer in your post

[blahblahblah]

I found some bugs in your space invaders tutorial

Somehow I found this page before I found the github one: https://melonjs.org/en/home/spaceinvaders
It doesn't contain the link to the tutorial image assets on the third line of the Introduction section which the github page does

The index.html file tries to access build/js/resources.js which doesn't exist. I assume its supposed to be js/resources.js.
And the tutorial states js/resources.js should be in the boilerplate but you have to actually create it through the tutorial.

Also, I'm getting a 404 trying to load icons/touch-icon-ipad-retina-152x152. It may need the full name icons/touch-icon-ipad-retina-152x152.png in the manifest.json files.

[blahblahblah]

Got past all that. Now there are no errors but the ship does not show up in the section that declares "Yay, the ship is on the bottom of the screen!".

In play.js, game.PlayScreen object is me.Stage in the boilerplate and me.ScreenObject in the tutorial. Is the tutorial written for an old version of the API?