Help! Actors appearing in the same place! Need tips on polishing this.

romma

Hi guys, Im fairly new here but I come from a design/program background so I think logically, anyways im really tied up in a knot on a specific issue regarding my first game.

I have several actors which appear randomly (based on random numbers) (they have there own "ID" atribute) in 8 different positions of my screen (iPad). There are 4 categories of actors. (but lets proceed with just 2 for this example) Each with 8 actors. Let's call them blue and yellow.

The game starts with spawning the "blue" actors, after a certain amount of those, we move onto the "yellow" (without stoping the spawn of blue).

My problem is at certain points I get blue and yellow actors poping up at the same time.

I've tried different approaches to having this solved but all methods seem to fail. Including a rule detecting collision. This latter doesn't work because of how I've set the game up in the first place.

Please help me, if I can pay whoever for 20 minutes of your time via skype that would be amazing!

tatiang

It's a bandaid solution, but what about having a game.spawnTime (real) attribute and changing it to game.time each time an actor is spawned? And then in your spawner(s), have a rule that says When game.time does not equal game.spawnTime ... [spawn actor].

The other thought I had was to create timer "windows" for your spawners. I'm not sure if this would work for what you need, but it's a way to alternate spawning without conflicts:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19602014/timer windows.png

(all four timers are set to "Run to completion")

Basically, the blue actors "spawn" between 2.1-3.0 seconds (game.Time) while the yellow actors "spawn between 3.1-4.0 seconds (game.Time), and then the whole process starts over again two seconds later with blue spawning between 4.1-5.0 seconds and yellow spawning between 5.1-6.0 seconds.

JohnPapiomitis

Add me on skype if youd like

JohnPapiomitis

romma

Bump.

romma

Why would is be a bandaid solution?

Since there are 8 different spawn locations, i've set a "if slot used" boolean and each animation has a rule that works "if slot used = false" - This is not working either.

tatiang

Why would is be a bandaid solution?

I just meant that it's not an elegant solution. It doesn't create a way to spawn in a random pattern without conflicts, but it does prevent two actors from spawning at the same time.

romma

I will give this a try, just need it to work. It's been a hole in my first game creation step.

Thanks!

tatiang

Also, if you don't want the actors to appear to spawn at the same time, you may need to adjust the condition so that the Spawn Actor behavior only occurs when game.time>game.SpawnTime+0.5, for example (wait 1/2 second after last spawned actor).