How powerful can Stencyl exe games get.

Dincicode

  • Posts: 215
I'm making a game where I wanted to have a large city full of zombies. I always wondered how many zombies/enemies I could have  at one time without dropping the frame rate below 50. I did a test and recorded it. Here is the link to the vid for anyone interested.
The screen size is 960 x 576.


<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/KoAi2ri-TSs" target="_blank" class="new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/KoAi2ri-TSs</a>
 

« Last Edit: July 28, 2017, 01:10:43 pm by Dincicode »

KaB00MxRHx

  • Posts: 30
Very awesome!  :)

How are you managing to keep that framerate when I can't even have a guy shoot more than 30 bullets without my flash freezing up.
Work in progress: Rusty Floyd Shotgun : http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/37449

NickamonPoppytail

  • Posts: 1141
Very awesome!  :)

How are you managing to keep that framerate when I can't even have a guy shoot more than 30 bullets without my flash freezing up.


Desktop games have better performance than Flash (I think it says it somewhere on this website, and I also know from experience
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NickamonPoppytail

  • Posts: 1141
Desktop games can handle more actors
Upcoming Projects
Poppytail 5 and Pixeltail: Fifth and sixth main instalments in Poppytail series. A Game About Trimming Hedges: Final Version: An updated version of the original AGATH. One Million: Last-one-standing style small project. The Poppytales: Platformer boss rush with character collecting. Skies n' Fall: Boss rush shooter prequel to Rise n' Brawl. Precious: Weird platformer. Christmas Time 2: Sequel to Christmas Time 1.

Bombini

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  • Posts: 1400
Also check if you need Box2D or SimplePhysics. This makes a huge difference.

vikingpotato

  • Posts: 852
I am assuming the characters are box2d. Looks pretty cool! Flash would have died at the 30th actor.

Dincicode

  • Posts: 215
I am assuming the characters are box2d. Looks pretty cool! Flash would have died at the 30th actor.

I managed to get 30 of them in flash at 50 frames. But yeah flash is weak.

Dincicode

  • Posts: 215
Very awesome!  :)

How are you managing to keep that framerate when I can't even have a guy shoot more than 30 bullets without my flash freezing up.

It's an exe export. You gotta start making exe games flash is about to die in less than 3 years.

irock

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  • Posts: 2891
Very awesome!  :)

How are you managing to keep that framerate when I can't even have a guy shoot more than 30 bullets without my flash freezing up.

It's an exe export. You gotta start making exe games flash is about to die in less than 3 years.
Technically, flash is being discontinued at the end of 2020, so it's actually more than 3 years. :)

For those who want to continue making web games, HTML5 is the way to go, and Stencyl's HTML5 target should be out of the beta phase by 3.5.

Fool

  • Posts: 88
Give it the art style of don't starve, and I'd drop $15 bucks on it. Like a better looking boxheads game.

Edit: Still looks cool as hell. If you don't mind some amateurs backseat design input, I'd try boosting their walk speed the further they are from the player, and in random bursts. Look at the Days Gone By gameplay preview. The feel they are going for is that hollywood 'run for your life, hold them off, but keep going!' feel, or terror by proximity. You want that, your game looks like it would match that sort of game feel perfectly.

What will kill it is once players figure out how to circle-strafe hordes, so you want to prevent that as much as possible.

« Last Edit: September 15, 2017, 07:17:50 pm by Fool »

Dincicode

  • Posts: 215
@Fool.

I only spent like 10 days on the game so far its  still far from being complete. I had to put it on hold till 2018 because I need to publish a game out this month so I can pay the bills.

I'll be putting the money maker (Early Access Version) on steam before September 30th here is some in game footage if you are interested http://community.stencyl.com/index.php/topic,54563.0.html

Fool

  • Posts: 88
Looking forward to it!
I don't know how you managed all of that in 10 days.
Suppose its the difference between hobbyists and professionals.

If you don't mind my asking:
What is it like as far as your development experience goes?
How many 'functionality points' and/or bugs would you say you fix in a day?
Did you have experience before moving to stencyl?

Dincicode

  • Posts: 215
@Fool

I don't have any real experience in making games. I did make some crappy sites back in the day but knowing Html and PHP are not exactly transferable skills when it comes to Stencyl.

What really got me started is working on game art for other people. I studied their methods along the way and got started.

As for the "functionality points and bug fixes" This is how how I usually tackle things. I make some basic art (I usually take it from older projects). Than I make the behaviors in any way I know how, adding a whole bunch of useless code to get things to JUST RUN, where I can't figure out how to do things directly I add any kind of workarounds I can think of. I do this for all the basic elements in the game. At this point everything works but the games FPS is usually bad, actors have weird problems and do unwanted things, there is bugs and crashes everywhere, but the game basically works. Than I go back from the beginning and start trimming and improving the code. After this everything should work as expected but there will still be some minor bugs and errors which I write down somewhere so that I can tackle them later.  At this point I make an input system where I can create any actor anywhere on the map in game so that I can test out all random stuff that might happen in the game. With the input system I also make it so I can alter all kinds of attributes for all the characters so that I can test out different movement speeds, bullet speeds, actor's heath etc. Once this is all done its time for the art. Which takes forever. I make the models in Blender do all the animations and what not and I put them to export. It usually takes like 6-12 hours to export all the art in one game. This is where I go back to my notes about the minor bugs and errors and while I wait for the art to export I fix all the bugs that I can and after that its pretty much done.

Now depending on the size of the game this can all take 10 days or 3 months, but its pretty much how my processes goes. In the zombie game above I made the Player and Zombie Logic in 1 day, than it took me a whole other day to make the buildings logic and item crafting system ( that's not in the video ). In the other 8 days I did the art and worked on making the code better so that it can handle 120 zombies at a time.

I also started making some Unity game but again since I have a full time job working on other peoples game art I had to put it on hold as well. Plus in Unity its much harder to figure things out when a problem comes my way. I'v attached some images from the Unity game.

Fool

  • Posts: 88
Hey thanks for answering. Your process is actually close to the exact one I use. Still can't get to the same level of productivity.
Mostly I end up reimplementing functionality because the performance is always just below where I want it.

I never knew you could be that productive in blender. How many months of practice did you have? Were you already an artist/animator? I don't mean to shower you with questions, just curious.

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I had to put it on hold as well. Plus in Unity its much harder to figure things out when a problem comes my way.
Yeah from what I can tell unity is good for 90% of use cases, and the 10% of the time when you want to do something it can be really opaque about the nature of problems that arise. I ended up either asking for help or resorting to the unity marketplace, which is just as well because only fools (no pun intended) and the devil insist on reinventing the wheel. I mean it would be the same thing if you ended up on a team instead, using others code. Just as well we're all standing on the shoulders of giants.

Looking forward to blasting enemies!

As a general heads up, I was reading over some design posts by the guys that made Rust. They were talking about the problems they had with a blueprints model of crafting. You can find the post on their blog, very interesting read as far as flow and game feel go.

Dincicode

  • Posts: 215
I started using Blender as a hobby 6 years ago, I think. And before I know how to do much I landed a job as a 3D molder for this one indie company. I did 3 basic characters for them. I had to follow YouTube tutorials because I didn't know how to do almost anything.
This is one of the characters I did for these ppl.



As you can see its very basic.  But as I did stuff for them I got to know the basics.  Than I got several other jobs and with each new client I picked up new skills and that's pretty much it.

On the productivity note. I find its useful to keep a notepad with a "to do list". I find myself coding and recording things if I don't know what I need to do next. The same goes for the modeling in Blender, I write up the character on a notepad than I make it. If I make a character from my imagination I find that I never finish it. I'm always adding tiny details here and there and that eats up a lot of time.