How many attributes are too many?

muoch10

Im making my game and I am thinking about how it will work and it seems it will have a lot of attributes in the game, how many attributes are too many, because i try to keep it under 10. Im not sure if thats a lot or not? will it slow down the game if i have so many attributes?

DrGlickert

I have a game that will end up with over 200 attributes.

I asked this very question when I started with GS, and someone replied that they had over 500.

From what I can tell it shouldn't effect the game too much. Timers and moveable actors will more-so than lots of attributes.

BRGKeen

I'm creating a RPG and have easily 75 game attributes and maybe 50 scene attributes so far and I'm half done. They're mostly simple booleans, though, and nothing complex with math or functions.

DrGlickert

BRGKeen said:
They're mostly simple booleans, though, and nothing complex with math or functions.

Just a suggestion; use integer's instead of booleans. You can make an integer be true/false by making true=1 and false=0. This allows for more flexibility in your game. Booleans can ONLY be true/false.

muoch10

thanks for the reply's, this makes me feel a lot more reliefed, just one more thing, how do you keep track of what does whats when you have so many attributes?

BRGKeen

DrGlickert said:
Just a suggestion; use integer's instead of booleans. You can make an integer be true/false by making true=1 and false=0. This allows for more flexibility in your game. Booleans can ONLY be true/false.

Yeah, I found that as well. I have a lot of dialog and conversation trees. For those I DEFINITELY use integers. A lot of stuff like "has this happened yet?" checks I'll use Boolean.

DrGlickert

muoch10 said:
thanks for the reply's, this makes me feel a lot more reliefed, just one more thing, how do you keep track of what does whats when you have so many attributes?

This is super tricky. As it stands now, GS does not have a good way of determining that. Darren of UtopianGames has an attribute organizer program for sale, I think it's a couple bucks.

The way that I do it, is I go to my game.attributes and click on the "-" to "remove" it. GameSalad will pop up with a window that asks are you sure? and lists the actors that reference the attribute (if no actor references it, the attribute will be deleted). Just be sure to NOT delete it by accident as this will cause some serious problems digging through actors to find it.

BRGKeen

I keep track of mine with a naming system. I'll do something like "From_Scenename" and use that for all of my attributes involved with changing scenes. I'll use "SceneName_DecisionNickname_Choice#" for dialog decisions.

It's convoluted, but it works for me. At first I didn't keep track and ended up spending 6 hours untangling a mess of rules and attribute logic because I had conflicts. It was a mess.

tenrdrmer

FMG, one of the best GS developers ever, Said one time what he does is only use numbers for attribute names. Then he keeps a notebook next to his computer with the attribute number and a good description of what it does. Thats a little much for me personally but honestly if you have 500 attributes which I think he was way up there. its a pretty good way to keep track.

scribblstudios

I just name them all really odd stuff and remember it.