Loading Management
gariantroll
Member Posts: 219
Are there any tutorials about the way we should load information into our games? Or does Game Salad load everything at once? I am a bit confused about our abilities to load and free up memory as a developer.
Thanks if you can shed some light on the issue.
Thanks if you can shed some light on the issue.
Comments
Where did YodaPollo post this?
The thread starter asked for a tutorial... question-answer
Dude... this is rampant abuse of power. I'm answering the question. You spam the forums with ads with almost every post you make.
http://gshelper.com/?p=155
Also theres a lot of good stuff there so you might want to watch other videos as well.
-Drahc
...and perhaps that's the core issue here... that people are actually willing to pay for a good tutorial.
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Here's a bunch of links:
BOT now available
The Unofficial GameSalad Textbook
Pixelmator - a cheap alternative to Photoshop
Sound Stage - Makes it easier to make movies for your app
Yahoo news... like you can read news articles and stuff
Commove... Oh snap... a puzzle game made with GameSalad?!
Waste time online by looking at Kitten Videos!
Learn web development
Looking to buy a house?
Got questions about Viagra?
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GIMP is free... I think Pixelmator is better.
If the question was, "Are there any Free tutorials?" and I replied with a link to my textbook then I can see that as spam. But here... it's question and answer.
If you're going to remove links to my site... you should remove links to yours... if those are the rules.
To answer your question - there are a few things you can do to optimise your project.
I'll use Tshirt's iDot template as an example, as I gave myself a challenge to make something cool with it
Now, before I start, there's nothing wrong with the template per se. It works as advertised - i.e. as a *template*.
This is a common misconception with templates (and yes, I've seen quite a few of them!). They are great as learning tools, but they're lacking in certain areas with regard to full games.
And if you don't know what you're doing, well, you're stuffed!
Anyway, tshirt's template is useful for powerups and movement and scores and keeping stuff on a minimum amount of scenes in-game.
Here's some issues and how I optimised the template to be an actual game:
1. Issue: Bad guys were destroyed if you touched them with a shield, and respawned elsewhere.
What I changed: Spawning will gradually increase the amount of memory usage. My solution was to set up walls around the arena (a little way offscreen of the edges) with rules in the bad guys that if they touched the left wall, to change their X position to just before the right wall. Vice Versa with hitting the right wall, and obviously a change of Y position for ceiling and floor collisions.
This meant that the enemies would only spawn once, when the player pressed 'start'. It also got rid of the need to have X and Y wrapped, which was causing other problems.
2. Issue: Now that the enemies only spawned once (when the variable 'start game' is true) memory usage has gone down. BUT - there's a 2 second 'stutter' as the enemies spawn when you press play.
What I changed:
I essentially made the enemies spawn right at the start of the game, and made them invisible (alpha 0) until the player pressed start. Pressing start changed their Alpha to 1 and moved them to their starting positions off-screen (they're constantly moving).
This made the start of the game seamless - you don't notice the enemies stutter because they're invisible. I set up a timer to let them spawn in ok, and after that they're never destroyed. So the player doesn't see the problem at all, and it's not visible at any other time in the game.
These are just a couple of ways to optimise your game. There are others:
*Try and avoid constraints and timers. Sometimes it's inevitable you use them, but try and keep it down.
*Make a generic actor with no rules in it that you use for lots of different things. Give it a few self variables (just in case you need them) and when you move it into a scene unlock it from the prototype. Then put in your rules and images into this empty generic actor. An example of this kind of use is menu buttons. You don't need a different prototype for 'Start', 'Options', 'Help' etc - just use one actor and change the rules. It will help keep your memory use down.
*Try and use mono music tracks - stereo tracks will essentially double your memory footprint.
There's lots of other tips on the forums - try searching and looking at videos as suggested by others.
Hope that helps,
QS
The question is about tutorials, so my answer was relevant.
Question: Are there any tutorials about the way we should load information into our games?
Answer: The Unofficial GameSalad Textbook has a chapter on optimization.
He asked if there were any tutorials (which as far as I can tell are only free NOT paid for) so he wasn't asking to be sold to. You tried to sell, other posts linked to free stuff .. pretty clear to me .. so you're wrong!
The Textbook is helpful. That's why people buy it.
If you really want to you could have just answer his question first then follow up with "ïf you want to know more detailed about optimization you could check out this and that". I think thats more reasonable.
If it makes you a bit more comfortable
I'll use this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NXVA21vuEGo
But of course i have to give credits to TSB and his website http://gshelper.com because thats were i found it first.
chill man...
-drahc
Sure, Tshirtbooth is helpful... but he has paid services too. I've even recommended him as a freelancer to people too. So, when my post was deleted by Tshirtbooth, I don't see that as someone trying to protect the integrity of the forum. I see that as an abuse of power... and that's far worse for the community.
I thought it was odd that Tshirtbooth would charge $10 for 15 minutes of help. Isn't that what so many of us do here for free? Whatever, that's cool if people want such services. Yet, my textbook is competition to that. It educates GameSalad developers so that they don't need to pay for such services. So I have problem when I see Tshirtbooth deleting my posts that mention my textbook — especially when he doesn't even link to the rules he's mentioning.
Someone asks a question.
The answer to the question could be answered by either a template or free knowledge.
If you give out free knowledge, why sell a template with the same info?
If you're selling a template, why would you tell for free?
Now i guess the general rules could be posted for free but also mention, there is a paid template available which implements said feature. If the user cannot be bothered to try and implement it or cant, then they now know of the template.
Otherwise, if a template isnt mentioned, how do people know?
Now the grey area for me is what do you do when you've learned from a template?
i.e. i didnt know how to accomplish said action. I purchased a template which was said action. I then learnt and understood said action from looking at the template.
Can i now pass on this info or am i hurting the original template creator? Surely if i post what i have learnt, everyone will know, tell everyone and the person who put a lot of effort into the template is now left with nothing!
I think that's why vBulletin would be better for so many reasons.
Angry Birds had a rough start too. It's rare for games to make a comeback, but I uploaded 1.1 to see how it goes.
...and now I have an app that's portable. Mac App Store... Android... and maybe Apple TV will play games one day