Hi Thomas,
I would personally very much suggest that you do this, both from a gamer's
and a developer's standpoint. From a gamer's because it provides for more
realism since, as you say, you can actually hear monsters properly etc and
it provides for some randomization while still following your plot with
specific monsters in specific places. And from a developer's because it just
makes the whole thing a lot easier to maintain, balance, and customize. If
you generate everything at the start of the level you have a boatload of
extra control that you lack with the design you currently describe. This of
course does not mean that you need to have all the sounds playing at once
since that kills hardware a lot more than just loading them and having them
in ram. What I do in Q9 is load one copy of every sound, and then use those
to clone things whenever they get near enough to be heard. So essentially I
do start the sounds for things on the fly as they approach, but they are
just being cloned so you get no lag. The original buffers that actually
allocated the memory are kept silent, in a separate preload list.
Just my two cents.
Kind regards,
Philip Bennefall
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Ward" <thomasward1...@gmail.com>
To: "Gamers Discussion list" <gamers@audyssey.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 1:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] MOTA Last Minute Comments
Hi Phil,
Phil wrote:
I am not sure why you can not have random monsters and specific monsters.
In the Sarah game, I decide which monsters show up on each level and
how many of them. Then I also adjust the number and type plus
adjusting their capabilities
before the level starts depending on your difficulty setting.
My reply:
Two reasons.
To begin with I never wrote the game or game engine specifically with
random items and monsters in mind. That was added well after the game
and engine was in development.
For one thing, instead of randomly placing items at the start of the
level as you do in Sarah everything is randomly created right on the
spot. If you leave room 1 and enter room 2 it automatically randomly
places a monster and/or items in the room at the same time. As a
result I can't limit the number of items, monsters, or anything else
because all of this needs to be handled before the level starts not
after. It's a pretty poor design and I know it. As I said, it was
suppose to be a quick fix not a long term solution.
This poor design is the cause of various other problems with the game.
One, I can't limit the number of items or monsters per level. Two, you
can't hear items as soon as you open the door because they aren't
there until you actually enter the room. Third if you save and reload
from your checkpoint everything will be totally different making it
easier or harder than it would have been before just because not all
of the rooms were filled with items and enemies.
Of course, all of these issues can be fixed. However, what it takes is
ripping out the temp random code and creating a better solution. This
will take time to do, and if I'm going to rewrite the random
monster/item code to do it right I want to be sure this is a serious
issue for people or not.
Cheers!
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