Hello, and introduction

Metronome49

Hello, Gamesalad community,

I've decided to start my fumblings in the Creator and am having quite a fun time so far.

I'm starting with what I think is a simple idea, not as simple as I could start with, but I have a couple more ideas coming down the pipe if all goes well and I have a grasp of how versatile GameSalad can be.

So, does anyone think I'll run in to future problems separating my players/enemies and their artwork into separate actors with the artwork tied to the actor's x/y? So far it seems like a versatile way to do it, but down the road I might have issues, I don't know, maybe it'll make it hard to trigger animations.

quantumsheep

Firstly, welcome!

That's quite a novel system you've come up with - but be aware, constraining attributes (which is what you'll need to do) is quite resource heavy.

Unless there's a VERY good reason to do it, I'd personally try and avoid it!

Hope that helps!

QS

Metronome49

Well, the first reason I started doing it so that I can have a smaller collision area on my player than the whole height of the artwork. But it seems like it would be handy also when trying to do something like this: http://gamesalad.com/wiki/how_tos:multilayermovement

You see, I have some 3-D movement, so, the player's/enemies' heads shouldn't collide with the back wall, just their feet, I guess maybe I could just make the invisible collision wall a certain amount up from the floor of the back wall, as long as everyone's height is the same.

Hmmm. What else is particularly resource intensive, I've seen that I should recycle instead of destroy and respawn, but it would good to know more, are there any compiled resources for that info?

quantumsheep

Hey there,

I see where your issues would arise. Yikes! Good luck with it!

Other things to avoid would be:

*Timers
*Using prototype actors (you can make a generic actor prototype, drag this into a scene, unlock it and chuck all the rules you need into that - this will save on memory I believe)
*Putting a lot of rules into one actor makes it heavy - though having lots of actors with few rules probably has the same effect

Hope that helps somehow!

QS

Metronome49

Yeah, that helps.

Hmmm. On the prototype actor thing, so your saying less unique actors and more instances of an actor with edited attributes?

quantumsheep

Metronome49 said:
Yeah, that helps.

Hmmm. On the prototype actor thing, so your saying less unique actors and more instances of an actor with edited attributes?

I believe so - though people's experience of this has varied.

For example, I use generic prototypes on every menu item as much as possible, as it appears to shorten load times (as, the theory goes, does having less actors overall in your project).

It's not an exact science of course. But it *appears* to work.

Cheers,

QS