Messages

1

Chit-Chat / Re: Loading times

« on: October 14, 2012, 04:07:48 am »

The 4x4 tiles are for testing purposes so I can see the whole map. They're going to be somewhere between 16x16 and 32x32. It's a randomly generated top down shooter. Imagine something like dwarf fortress mixed with endless zombie rampage. The tiles themselves are going to be square collision boxes. Screen size would be something like 640x384 (20x12 in 32 pixel tiles, 40x24 in 16 pixel tiles).

I'm kinda sick today, so not doing any actual work.
@Silux- I think I'll do that, thanks for the idea.

2

Chit-Chat / Re: Loading times

« on: October 13, 2012, 01:21:29 pm »

Just before I go:
tiles are 4x4.

For testing purposes, a maximum 36864 tiles are drawn (192x192) it's usually around 3/4 of that, so roughly 27000 tiles are edited. Maps are planned to be 1024x1024 (over a million tiles). I'll probably have to work out some sort of chunk-loading system for that.

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Chit-Chat / Re: Loading times

« on: October 13, 2012, 01:10:26 pm »

The act of editing a tile on the map takes a long time. I run through a 2D array with the map's tiles in it. Creating the array doesn't take long, but making tiles appear takes forever.
I've only been working on map generation so far, so there is no collision. It just renders empty tiles.

By rendering less tiles (say, if the item on the map says 0, then I don't change the tile I'm looking at), things are a lot faster. It still takes a while if I want to make something big though.

EDIT: There will be actual collision with the tiles once the game is done though.
EDIT2: Going to bed. Sickysickysickysick :c

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Chit-Chat / Re: Loading times

« on: October 13, 2012, 12:14:19 pm »

The problem isn't my calculations, it's the tile API. All calculations happen within 1-2 seconds, but the tiles being drawn will stall the program for about 30-40 (we're talking about a small map here, large sized ones would take forever). I've managed to eliminate the problem where the game would literally give up on calculations and give you a half-finished map by spreading things out, it draws one "slice" of the map per frame.

Pleasantly funny text is planned (along with progress bar that totally does not move backwards every time you look away).

I suppose I could use the tile API to render things in chunks, but I'm trying to minimize calculations during gameplay because of all the stuff that has to happen.

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Chit-Chat / Re: Loading times

« on: October 13, 2012, 11:48:12 am »

On release, a bunch of people claiming the game wouldn't load would definitely kill ratings though.

I don't exactly have a portfolio of past successes.

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Chit-Chat / Re: Loading times

« on: October 13, 2012, 08:58:48 am »

Doesn't matter if you quit before it completely loads. I'm looking for the time it takes for someone to give up on the game loading the first time that they play. Doesn't matter how good it is if you left before you started.

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Chit-Chat / Loading times

« on: October 12, 2012, 03:50:43 pm »

Basically, the game I'm creating requires an extremely lengthy loading process. I'm just wondering how long people are willing to wait for a map to load (note- this will only load ONCE per play, unless you decide to start a new save)?

The game itself would be quite complex (performance doesn't suffer except for that initial loading hit, so there aren't any limitations there).

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Ask a Question / Re: 15 second rule- disabling?

« on: October 11, 2012, 09:03:38 am »

Oh, I had no idea I could do that, thanks.

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Ask a Question / 15 second rule- disabling?

« on: October 11, 2012, 07:29:30 am »

If I get anything less than 0.0667fps (15 seconds per frame), the game will give up on executing anything going on that frame.

I get this:


Instead of this (pretend the checkerboard pattern is solid orange for a second):

(This time it worked because replacing tiles is what slowed the framerate. The checkerboard pattern led to replacing half the number of tiles, drastically improving performance).

See how it cuts partway through? I'm wondering if there's any way to prevent this apart from spacing everything out to not happen in one frame.

EDIT:
Anyone know any image hosts that have an auto-resize option? (NOT IMAGESHACK. SCREW IMAGESHACK.)

10

Paid Work / Re: Uber geeks wanted

« on: October 03, 2012, 05:21:39 pm »

I'm actually doing something pretty similar, but I work terribly in groups (just talking about ideas however...). Looks pretty cool, just a few things I've noticed when working on my own game:
The tile API Is really useful for this kinda thing. You get zero FPS drops with it, compared to spawning actors/drawings for terrain.
Actors existing, even offscreen and not doing anything with no physics, can drastically slow down your game.
While you're at it, minimize any use of drawing functions.
Might just be me, but stencyl occasionally spits out errors that get fixed if you just fiddle with them. If you get an error and can't figure out why, change some numbers, change back to the original values, and the error's gone (no, I was not using random numbers).

Just how randomly generated is this anyway? Will there be inconsistent uses of objects on different playthroughs, or is there more or less a pre-generated set of creatures, items etc. with slight variation?

11

Ask a Question / Re: How can i pause a periodic? issue with pausing

« on: October 03, 2012, 04:33:43 pm »

I wasn't offended, I'm just saying- just because something looks really confusing at first glance doesn't mean it's actually confusing when you look at it.

Also, my typing tends to be a lot more formal than when I actually talk, so it's kinda hard to figure out the tone that I'm typing at.

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Game Art / Re: So...What do you guys think of this?

« on: October 03, 2012, 04:26:16 pm »

The mountain lines look really out of place to me, I think it'd be nicer if you made them slightly tinted in the color of the rest of the background.

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Ask a Question / Re: How can i pause a periodic? issue with pausing

« on: October 03, 2012, 11:29:18 am »

Anything that does anything mildly complicated will look confusing as hell until you actually try and understand it. The really confusing as hell stuff doesn't make sense to you even when you've read through it multiple times.


You could try and use a timer that counts up a global variable every frame (unless paused), and then check based on that number. Let's say you need to do something every second after 5 seconds. Instead of doing after 5 seconds, you could check if frame count is more than 300, and the remainder of frame count divided by 60 is 0, execute the action. Not sure how you'd stick to checking if paused for seconds-based stuff though.

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Ask a Question / Re: 2-3 performance questions

« on: October 03, 2012, 08:12:35 am »

If there is nothing to do with collisions, you could remove all collision boxes entirely, and disable all physics for an actor.

Not sure what you mean by the second question, sorry.

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Chit-Chat / Re: Getting Work Done - Pomodoro Technique

« on: September 16, 2012, 09:56:54 am »

Tried this, I'm the exact opposite. I need to be glued to the screen without interruption for a minimum of one hour before I can get serious work done. Anyone else like me? :/