I'm using MMF2 for the first time, and I haven't used these extensions before. I'm trying to make a level editor, but both of them ignore empty elements which will obviously play havoc with necessarily sequential values. What am I missing?
Hmm. Can't you add a space between the delimiters? Obviously it depends on what you're attempting to do, but you can always set up events to consider " " (space) to be nothing.
Edit: Ah, I didn't read the part where you said you'd hate to use another character. There's nothing to be done about this with the string parser, I think. My game's delimiters all have a space between them, but I made an editor to never have to see the mess.
Yeah, I was hoping there'd be a more watertight method but it's not too big a deal really.
While we're here, anyone know if one of these extensions is preferred over the other? The string tokeniser seems to be newer but does less stuff. They're both apparently Flash compatible.
I haven't really used the String Tokeniser to judge, but if you really want to avoid using a null character, perhaps it might allow for it. Whatever is more useful, I think.
I am storing most of my level data 'tile style', that is: a set of number going from zero till the number of objects needed. The 0 character means I've stored nothing in that place. You could use the empty spot from the spacebar character, but I am unsure if that's a wise thing to do. I would suggest another character to use for empty stuff.
The 'tile style' is a set of lines with characters with a delimiter just like your string is. I am using a string like: "0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, " and continue on the next line with the net row.
I am not sure what you want to do with your string, but if there is an empty spot you also need to know that (mumble something about the zero character in our decimal system, before we had the character the spot of 0 was left empty which could give a value of 1, 10, 100, 1000, etc... to the number 1 since one could know how many zero's were used, well one could count the empty places but this was often very confusing).
If your item list just is for placing items at some spots, you could calculate the spot from the item number.
But it probably better to save your item as an object and give it the properties it needs (picture, coordinates, etc...) This way you only need to store the objects you need, so you can skip "item3".