Does Unchecking preloaded art mean we could have a limitless scene?

ozboybrian

So, loading the art while the game is playing... Cool.
So we could have a huge scene that goes on and on and on... and has hundreads of animations?

HOPE SO!

mynameisace

Nope lol.

Although you could trigger animations and rules when you are within a magnitude of 555 (best number I've found through testing) and the animations and rules will only fire when they are visible on the screen.

Ace

ozboybrian

Thanks Ace.. Add that to the check list! :P

tutyses

what you mean with trigger the animation ? how can i trigger an animation? do u mean like a rule like if the camera is touching this actor then animate?

mynameisace

Kind of... I would create a self attribute called distance and set it to 555 and have the players X and Y's contained to real game attributes.

In every actor you want to trigger when the player is near, you would just need to do a rule saying if self.distance > magnitude(game.playersX - self.position.x, game.playersY - self.position.y) then put all of your rules and animations, etc in here.

You could do it with the camera's position also, instead of using game.playersX and game.playersY, you could unlock the actor to get to the scene attributes and use the camera origin.x and camera origin.y. Having loads of instance actors that are duplicated from the prototype bogs your game down though, so would probably be better performance with the players X and Y.

Ace

tutyses

i see, will it also work to make an image appear, this way the iphone will load only the images if the player is near to the actor which contains them?

mynameisace

Yeah, if pre-load art is off, it will only load the animation images when you are within a magnitude of 555

Ace

mynameisace

I've made a template for you to take a look at:

http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/36177/mynameisace-free-performance-template-how-to-only-trigger-actors-movements-when-on-screen#Item_1

Ace

tutyses

thanks ace!, this is very useful for big scenarios!

ozboybrian

Is it possible in the future? Can't you like "Dump Ram" once it's been used. If that makes sense....