Use of controller actors

RocketBrain

i've been manually setting each behavior speed and whatnot isntead of putting a single variable

is there an advantage to using a controller over setting each amount manually? performance good or bad? or is it just about ease of tweaking.

RocketBrain

bumpity bump.

more i think about it, i could see it help with settings. anything else?

joemauke

Im using a control actor as my GAME LOOP which is what I would normally do if I were writing a game loop in C or LUA. I think this is a good idea as it has helped me greatly to CENTRALIZE the games actions, and rules in one location. It may require some tweaking on your part to figure out what should stay local, scene or global. Spawned entities cant take advantage of scene only ram, so thats something that has hurt me a little, I just make sure to keep that at a minimum.

So in my Controller I am controlling what spawns, how the player interacts with spawned objects etc through global and localized spawned variable matching.

Its been a little rough as far as keeping track of things. Something that happens inside of a spawned actor cannot be shared with scene variables, it has to be a global variable, so that boosts ram for the entire game. but even, then I have found it to be invaluable in control of the game.

if you have more specific questions, let me know.

RocketBrain

yeah thanks bud. great explanation. the game i'm working is a bit of an action game but after about 8 continuously generated and destroyed actors the game starts slowing up.

i hadnt used the controller actor idea (my first game) so its all done individually.

that being said, i am running it on the 3g not 3gs or 4. maybe just the old hardware?