Benefit of loop behavior
RossmanBrothersGames
Member Posts: 659
Hey everyone, pretty exciting to see the new features in GS 11. I was looking at the loop behavior and was trying to think of any ways it might help the efficiency of my code. I was wondering if anyone would share the benefits they have found of this code as I haven't found it much different than the rules we already have set up.
For example I don't see it much different than using a rule with a constraint:
Rule version:
If right key is pressed-
Constrain velocity.x to 100
Loop version:
While right key is pressed-
Change velocity.x to 100
This seems to achieve the same thing with first possibly being more efficient
I would love to hear people's examples of how this behavior benefited them, or made things more efficient as it could greatly help me in seeing how I may want to change some things in the game or use the loop function in the future.
Comments
Loops are used when you want to repeat behavior, not when you want to constrain behavior.
So if you need to spawn 800 actors on a scene (think tiles), you might use one or more loops to generate those actors in a single rule instead of trying to have 800 spawn actor behaviors.
Or if you need to search through a table of data to find one word out of a dictionary of 150,000 words, you might loop through the rows of words and check each one. Again, coding that without a loop would be a nightmare.
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Here's a demo I made a long time ago when the loop behavior was released for PROs. As @tatiang said: this demo checks to see if a word is in the table, then displays the row that the word was found in.
http://gshelper.com/shop/gamesalad-templates/table-word-checker-loop-behavior-demo/
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Thanks guys, that makes a lot of sense. Especially the example of searching through rows.
I think I was trying to look at how my code would benefit from it and there wasn't anything that actually would, but I could see this being something I use in the future.
Also, I noticed sometimes threads get marked as "answered" is this something a moderator does or something the original author does? I have not seen a way of doing this.
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If you begin your thread as a question, you will be able to choose the answers. Because this thread wasn't started as a question, there isn't a way to pick an answer.
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Does anyone know if the new loop behavior + engine optimizations are working well for line drawing? I've struggled to find good line drawing code that works fast enough. Thanks!
I posted a demo here that might interest you.
http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/66124/table-row-and-column-search-demo#latest
Darren.
Thanks. I couldn't work out how to open it though as I didn't see a project file (rather just the package contents). I'm on a mac. Thank you.
Ah, makes sense. Thanks