NetOne Cheers mate, thanks a lot for your interst! Right, gotta say your "nobby" advices are helping me greatly -- or rather, I hope they'll help me greatly -- i dont know kug fu, yet. I downloaded the examples on the video. A quick glimpse of the code gave an headache.

I've search around a bit and saw a few threads and tutorials mentioning all this array thing, but they're mostly outdated, and they refer to quite specific issues like "generating random levels" etc. Anyway I seems like there's some interest on the topic, so I'm opening a new thread on sandboxes and arrays and all this stuff in the howDoI's.

But as starters, a couple of quick questions to the air, more related to my particular case:

• you load the tilemap from the array? Does that mean that my lovingly crafted tilemap will be useless? Tilemap's got no collisions enabled an it's pretty lo-res -- hope i can spare it somehow :/
• can i, er... find a converter that magically turns my level into an array or something XD no, what I mean is, will this array thing mean that I'll have to start the whole level from scratch again? (AGAIN??) or will i be able to load my current level into an array? Or at least, can I keep some objects, or layers, to be loaded normally and then load some others thru the array?
• I keep thinking on grid terms... but some of my invisible platforms are sloped (yeah, even the jumpthrus, never knew what people always moan about jumpthrus and slopes). Is that "arrayable" too?
• ...

As u may deduce, I still dont even grasp the core idea (eg still not sure if we're playing with pixels, coordinates, or wtf). Anyway this whole thing gives me some hopes. Thank you guys!

PS: on the other hand, this may be all shit but innit right that in a few years time, say, most of these issues may well be overcome by awesome tomorrow's technology? Hell they sent the apollo to the moon (if they did at all) with little more than a goddam calculator! Have you heard about roko's basilisk...?

Yeah, you mean like a grid movement system. There's this old pacman tutorial, on page two it explains how to do that. It's a tricky thing, with sines and cosines and stuff, but the guy explains quite clearly. Mind it's an old tuto tho, may be outdated.

NetOne

tunepunk

arcab072081

Well thanks a lot for yr answers and tips guys. So yeah I red this blogpost about collision (or was it draw) cells and thought the sky was the limit. But load levels from arrays...! That's rocket science for me :/ Do you fellas know a good tutorial or... ah nevermind, i'll have a look meself. Btw when you say "load map from array"... whatya mean, the whole layout? Or... the different layers of sprites instances? My basic scenery is all included in one single tilemap object... and (as usual) i dont know if thats a good or a bad thing, performance-wise.

Id really regret to have to split it apart in stages, coz the sandbox concept is one of the main points of the game, in many ways. I even did consider hiring me some thug (programming thug) from the forums to do the job... but Im not sure i could bear sharing my prrrrecious with somebody else XD Also, buying one of those natty game templates they sell in the store (and iv never even been in the store yet), if i could find something that fix me. Anyways I'd like to try myself first, so i'll have a look at this "level from array" stuff -- and see if i can grasp it!

Thanks again! y'all rock!

PS: Hey here's an unofficial, very incomplete, glitchy, bound-to-be-destroyed-in-a-couple-of-days demo of the game -- if you wanna see what youre helping me to achieve, hopefully. As you see, there's still large empty areas still with no enemies or objects (and many more straight undone), and the tilemap is not finished either -- which means that everything's gonna be much worse, in performance terms :/ still, should flow alright on pc...

arcab072081 thanks again for your interest mate. Yep, I've been re-reading several blog entries like that and I'm making some improvments. So enough with the wailing and the moaning. Main problem is im no coder, and find it difficult some(most)times to understand how javascript will react. C2 makes it easy, but i guess you still need a bit of lore sometimes...

arcab072081 Thanks for your answer! Unfortunately, kegs can't be placed at random places. It's not that they need to be at specific points, it's rather that they dont look good just anywhere – and of course they should be on floor too. Sure must be some way, but wont be easy to achieve – not without arising other brand new performance pains. Anyway kegs are no there all the time, they appear when a “proximity box” hits a “token sprite”. But still there's that collision to check. I have not mentioned, the idea is to make everything “autorespawnable”, as it's likely that the same area will be walked through several times.

But see, it's not just kegs... I'm doing something that I thought was pretty cool for the freeversion of C2, with its event limitations, but now that I got me a licence I'm wondering if it wont be causing more trouble than good.

In the early days I decided that all the enemies would be but different animations of the same sprite, and each enemy attributes would depend on instance variables (class=”orc”; hp=”8”; etc). Same applied to items.

Now in the bigger version im working on at the moment, I applied the same philosophy to a new class of sprite, called miscStuff. And miscStuff is everything from kegs to chests to lamps or gates or ships. Each class has one animation, although many are static, and most of them have some rules, which can be as simple as “enable jumpthru”, or more complex things like triggering a function that moves certain elevator, for example. This miscStuff sprite has the following (str) variables: class (“chest”, “lever”, “bonfire”...), then aux1, aux2, aux3. These aux variables can be different things, depending on the class (treasure from a chest, parameters for a function, the hit strength of a trap...).

And (oh surprise) this miscStuff is what's giving me performance pains. Enemies are under control, as they always appear at the same distance (proximity box1) form the player. But then some miscStuffs are doors that you need to open with a key, and I dont want to have them reclosing emselves everytime you get 960 pixels away. So we get proximity box2. Then for some other stuff I want something intermediate, that's proximity box3... I try to use the smallest one whenever possible, as it affects obviously less objects.

This means that I have less than a dozen of visible animated sprite types (not counting invisible boxes or hud elements). That looks good, but there are many instances of them, and the code for each is quite complex, so as I said I have growing concerns about this technique. I wouldnt mind to reconsider it – this or any other thing, really, but it would be very frustrating to take the pains and split all the miscStuffs into many different sprites, then adjust the code accordingly, to finally discover that performance's still shite (or even got worse. That stuff happens).

After all, if I was to split my game blindly, not knowing if it's gonna run better or not, my bet would be on the layout, which I think would be the surest way to improve my fps.

So for more than two years (three? a thousand?) I've been intermittently working in this MEGAQÜEST o' mine. The idea was to do the game whole into one single sandbox level. Backgrounds, as megaqüesters worldwide well know, would be random, same as music. Eventually the player would be able to unblock new ones, and some songs and backgrounds would be unique of certain locations in the map. I wanted also the game to be rather minimalistic in mechanics: jump, walk and attack (three arrows + one action button) should be all. Not even a secondary button for abilities or spells. Rocknrawl. Similarly, aint no inventories whatsoever: one item replaces another.

This approach was challenging and interesting, developer-wise. A bit too challenging sometimes! But the final issue that has me considering a dramatic change in my scheme is (alas!) mobile performance. Yes, I've optimized it right enough (with no little help from many of you guys), to the best of my ability, which aint much anyway. Objects are only active at a certain range from the player etc. But as soon as I began to place barrels and kegs everywhere (its a big map) all my optimizations proved useless again. I have an objectCount of 3800. But even worse: for the idea I have in mind, there's gonna be many (many!) more, so my problem, rather than how-to-handle-4k-objects is how to handle an indeterminate number of objects in my canvas. “Can't” being a very real possibility too, I figure. In that case I guess that, with bitter pain in my heart, I'd split my sandbox into different stages, which would force me to reconsider a lot of basics, and ultimately would mean another waste of time work and effort (not the only one so far, not even the worse... the second or third worse. Most of them are of course followed by several months of crippling depression and detachment to the whole project).

So I'm not sure of what shuddadoo. Not even sure of what I'm asking here either. I'm facing a dilemma: option A may be unattainable, option B would mean lots of stuff to be redone. I feel that everytime I optimize it up its all just a little bit slower than the previous time... and when I compare it with the older versions, where maps where smaller and things went smoother an life was happier, I get depressed.

Any musings?

whoaa ºoº impressive -- but you didnt do that with construct didya

if it's done with other engine, the the open topic i guess?

if you did it in C2, then the construct creations section...

website aint working ·_·

and add some pictures anyway!

Coolest game ever!

[quote:14vy384w]

Yo no maldigo mi suerte

porque minero nací

aunque me ronde la muerte

no tengo miedo a morir

Reminds me a lot of the ol good Sierra graphic adventures. But it's also has a very "slasher film" taste that's rarely seen in other games and makes it very original. Looking forward for more!

— Games (shit howma supposed to "@" that?) Thanks brother! I was actually thinking rather a new thread (twas ayear after all), but now i dunno anymore lol I'll see -- game's first, then forum 3)