alee's Forum Posts

  • Thanks man. Sounds good!

    Also, may i say its impressive that you can hold down a wife AND be THE playa at the same time.

  • Hi there,

    I remember this was an absolute hassle making in MMF and i never got it working. Basically, my online game was meant to have real time shooting involved. Collisions would have to be server controlled. I would input each bullet into an array and change the array values to represent X/Y co-ords.

    Heres my question

    1. Huge amount of loops/For Eachs? (You would have to loop through every bullet each tick, moving it xpixels in the x/y directions. You would then have to loop through every bullet and every ship checking if there were any collisions?

    Surely there is a more CPU efficient way of doing this? For example, is this how construct handles collisions?

    Thanks for reading. I'm looking for people's opinions/theorys on this.

  • Thanks for checking that out David! I really appriciate it!

    Deleting the debugger text object seemed to sort it out. After that was gone, creating more ships didn't make much impact on the FPS at all! (althought the FPS for me still hangs around 100 when it used to be around 200). I found that deleting the object that masked the radar (with the mask effect on it) and unticking "force own texture" on my HUD layer caused the FPS to rise up nearer 200 again... This may be just my crappy 9550pro being crappy though, and I dont think I can get around the fact that i need to force own texture can i?

    All in all its running tonnes better. I also optimized the turret and engine placement code. I used the idea that it doesn't place the turrets correctly unless the object is onscreen (although i may need to force this when the game goes online, but thats another matter). Now i get a pretty solid good FPS and can create alot of ships.

    OPTIMIZED-

    http://edenofficial.com/beta/clientb41.exe

    (hold C to create minions and make my beautiful radar looks crappy!)

    Let me know what FPS you get (FPS in lower right corner)

    Also, what exactly are batches? Couldn't find anything on the wiki or forum about them.

  • FPS should be shown in the lower left corner Sol

    Yeah theres definately something fishy going on here... I look forward to the mails from the masters

  • I can't third this enough. I have horrific amounts of respect for the developers.

  • No ash, theres really no effects used at all except the mask effect which i just recently added to make the radar with...

    Sent the link to both you guys just incase Ash wanted to take a look also.

    Hope I haven't made any stupid mistakes. Infact, I probably have... *braces self for ridicule

  • Guys, what FPS do you get on this example?

    PRESS 'C' TO CREATE MOCK BOTS.

    http://edenofficial.com/files/clientb33.exe

    I'm just using 1 effect (mask for the radar). I AM still using the for eachs to stick the turrets to ships. But its really slow even with just one ship (I get around 90 FPS). Wondering if its just me.

    I suppose I'll re-code it when the pairer plugin is released.

  • The Mask and Erase effects are definitely the way to go for this. You don't need the canvas object - it would actually be slower. Mask and Erase are very simple effects and don't require pixel shaders - they should still be very efficient. All you need to do is draw a circle on a sprite and give it one of the effects (one erases the transparent areas, one erases the solid areas). It even works with alpha blended sprites to erase smooth edges!

    A drop of 50fps is not always bad news - the difference between 1050fps and 1000fps is pretty much negligable, whereas 100fps to 50fps is significant. In other words, a difference of a fixed number of FPS is a fairly meaningless statement. 1 divided by the framerate is the time in seconds it takes to render each frame - you can use this to work out exactly how much extra time it takes to process an effect, per frame.

    It was a change of 150FPS to 100... So its quite alot, but I'll roll with it and see how it goes! Thanks Ash thats exactly the reply i was looking for.

    finally, before i start making it. Do i need to make a seperate layer? I probably do right? Because the mask needs to be quite large to make sure objects don't appear again when they are no longer covered by the mask? And if this was on the same layer as other stuff wouldn't it mess the other objects up?

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  • Agh I hate bezier curves. I used them for the beta dead reckoning on Eden back in the day. They are pretty genious though. And that game is looking ridiculously nice. Nice work!

    PS. Comment that code!

  • So are you suggesting the second method? So basically I just always paste blips into the canvas at certain X,Y positions relative to your current position on the map (Divided by a large number to scale down the map size to fit into the radar), then just erase everything outside of the radar's circle. Is this possible with the canvas object now? Can you paste in images at specific X,Y points?

    Also what can i use instead of SQRT? I'll keep that in mind, thanks!

  • Basically, when objects go outside of the circle, they must be hidden, but only in part (so i can't just make them invisible).

    Sorry man, i dont think that would work. Like, if i had a planet on the radar, that means when it hit the edge it would just disappear. Hope that made sense, thats what i was trying to say in the above but it was a bit unclear

  • Well I just noticed that even having an object with mask enabled reduced my average FPS by 50! Hah thats not good!

    I'll wait for some more info before I get stuck in with development.

  • Hi there,

    I'm making a circular radar, similar to this - http://www.crestock.com/images/440000-4 ... 234-xs.jpg

    Basically, when objects go outside of the circle, they must be hidden, but only in part (so i can't just make them invisible).

    The two ways I can see of doing this so far is-

    • Make a radar layer, use the mask effect and make a square the size of the screen with a circle cut out in it to allow to see into the radar. This way when objects move out they are hidden by the large mask object.
    • Paste the blips into a canvas, then use erase effect on the canvas to delete any pixels outside of the circle.

    Which is the more CPU/GFX card efficient way? Is it even possible to use the canvas method? I tried and it doesn't seem you can choose where to paste images in (x,y) and generally feels a little bit limited?

    But im mostly keen on keeping CPU usage low, as this game will one day be a bit of a beast and thus i want to keep it fast from the start.

  • David, firstly you are a ledge. Secondly, that seems to be some impressive FPS. Is this pairer plugin going to be awesome for my ship/turret problem?

    Also, any chance of it getting released before the next build?

  • Big bonus!