hi,

what is the most efficient way to pick sprites in a sorted manner?

i've got another fake z-depth scenario that does not handle well with a lot of objects, probably due to bad loop management. here is the cap, in a nutshell: i want to create the illusion of skyscrapers by stacking rectangles (floors) onto each other. currently there are sprites for the bottom & a number of sprites for the floors (the bottoms are invisible). the sorting works like this:

1) pick each bottom, one after another, sorted by their y-position

2) pick all floors belonging to that bottom (by comparing a private variable)

3) pick each of these floors, one after another, sorted by their intended height (another private variable)

4) put that floor into position & send him to front

like this, it works mostly correct (few glitches): the top floors are covering the lower floors, and the closer skyscrapers cover the ones further away. but adding more skyscrapers drastically impacts the framerate (my laptop drops <60 with 100 bottoms and ~800 floors). i suspect that the three nested loops are responsible, blowing through ( bottoms * floors(all) * floors(selection)) = 640k iterations each frame.

sooo... any ideas on a more efficient approach? anything i can think of using other objects (arrays?) hits the bottleneck of picking the corresponding sprite after the sorting. any help would be welcome!

(otherwise i'd have to scale down from downtown to suburbia ;))

well, if the objects on the original layer are influenced by events from their respective layout's event sheet, you'd have to include that event sheet in the inheriting layer's layout, too. but that is still rather comfortable :)

the 'compare value at x' condition of the array does not evaluate correctly if x is 1; that's a bug. i've added it to the tracker.

you could work around this by using the 'compare' condition of the system object.

i rather like the asthetics of the screenshots, but seeing the game - and it's filters/shaders - in motion makes my eyes hurt. not the general colors, just the dirt/grind-filter that is laid over the top. i don't think it's a good idea to use abrasive visuals like that when you need someone to actually pay attention. so i hope the game will allow you to switch off that 'very old movie'-filter, because it really impacts everything else; although i can't imagine anyone driving that sort of art direction to allow the audience to mingle with it (that might be a prejudice there). but let's not speculate on anything that hasn't been released yet, right? :)

agreed. and at the time of your posting, it already is :)

awesome!

It's very hard!

nd also very much fun!

(i like how vert is next to spelunky; raising expectations there )

http://i43.tinypic.com/11twhzn.png

(the on-screen keyboard was necessary because my keyboard does not have a print key. it did not hide anything except an exciting shade of gray.)

you could also set the application to 'unlimited framerate' to measure the performance impact with higher granularity.

1hr, overtime, but not much to show for it:

just cruising.

cursor keys.

that looks pretty cool! when watching it in lq first, i though the police cars were 3d, too! the style is a lot more consistent than most other hi-res indigames; there is only a slight aftertaste of too many smooth gradients ...

i can't stop thinking of this as a mix between Einh�nder & Max Paine... Einpainer? Maxh�nder? Mainpainer? Einmaxer? ;)

i like games that don't chain their playtime to their 'story' content. when GTA: Vice City came out, i played it regularly, several times a week in 4-6hr sessions, for about 6 months with a friend; we never got past 31% completion. we were having a great time with the 80s music, the color palette, motorbikes & rumble controllers ... and yes, drugs were involved :P the storyline was fun, and nice to have for when we felt 'productive', but not our main concern. if gta:vc would have been cut short for any reason, i could not have had such a great time.

i could never relate to most videogame stories, at least those that are really just 'content' in the sense of levels & things that occur. but i am a big fan of stories that mesh with the game, as in killer7 or the silent hill series, where the progression through the story has an impact on the entire game, and where the game supports the story in all its parts (and not just text boxes & dialogs). completion of these games did not feel bad, even when they were short: it was a great experience, expertly crafted into the videogame medium. but with gears of war 2, i felt like the story was a long list of bullet points that had to be worked off, and there was nothing to do (in singleplayer) besides grinding away at it. that is my wrong kind of long: expecting the player to enjoy an 8-hour movie when he has to turn the crank on the movie reel himself.

with less time & no console around, i prefer pc games like spelunky, with dynamic content and progression hooked to player skill. i can go in & out whenever i please, i don't need to remember any arbitrary bs, and the progress i see is really mine.