Any way of registering once an actor has been spawned?

flurospeedoflurospeedo Member Posts: 33
in Working with GS (Mac)
Okay, I am having to change all of the "Move To"'s in my game to "Interpolate", fine, but I am having trouble with the way Interpolate handles itself during lag caused by long loading/spawning of an actor. My game is an adventure game not an arcade game so I rely on large high-res graphics for my actors, which move only occasionally. I have reduced the graphics in filesize as much as possible without losing picture quality (colour/transparency etc.) What is happening is when I say "Spawn Actor X, Actor Y and Actor Z" and simultaneously say "Interpolate X" for two actors (A & B) already present in the scene, the actors temporarily freeze (which I expect and which happened with "Move To" anyway) but then once presumably the actors that are causing the lag have loaded/spawned actor A seems to jump as if catching up to where it should be and actor B seems to not jump and carries on moving from where it is.

So my solution is to use some kind of "loading message" and put the whole movement thing on hold until X, Y and Z have loaded/spawned. Does anyone know of a way to tell when X, Y and Z are spawned and ready to go? Then I can use that to trigger my movement. Thanks.

Comments

  • flurospeedoflurospeedo Member Posts: 33
    I may have found an answer myself after reading the wonderful Timers are for Chumps by @domenius. I'm guessing if self.Timer starts once an actor is spawned then I should be able to set off a trigger variable for my animation say 1" into self.Timer. Will give it a try and report back.
  • BoomshackBarryBoomshackBarry Member Posts: 712
    Yeah from reading the thread title I was about to make the same suggestion to you, that should work fine.
  • flurospeedoflurospeedo Member Posts: 33
    Just an update in case it is of use to anyone: I tried using a trigger for the delayed movement of actors A & B based on a self-timer for one of the actors being spawned, it worked, only sporadically however - I am guessing that the size of actors X, Y and Z means that at spawning they are taking up so much resources that even their self-timers are sometimes being affected. Anyway, my solution was to base the (delayed) movement of A & B on a self-timer within actor A ie. just waiting a few seconds before moving while X, Y and Z are spawning. This seems to be working (fingers crossed) and the movement of A & B is much smoother. I don't know if this will be a help to anybody. Please keep in mind that the actors I am talking about are very large (1024 x 1024).
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