Anyone working on super large projects?

[knucklecrunchgames]

Just wondering. It would be nice to see your progress on your big games

[CrackedP0t]

No, just the tournament one.

[bat78]

Well... nice topic i can say ^^
I am currently working on a lot of things.. but i don't think they are in interest for others tho..
It's just an table editor for my goal game, online module, cybertext, textbox etc.. well actually that's all. ^~

[knucklecrunchgames]

Well... nice topic i can say ^^
I am currently working on a lot of things.. but i don't think they are in interest for others tho..
It's just an table editor for my goal game, online module, cybertext, textbox etc.. well actually that's all. ^~

Cool, thanks for sharing some info. I hope all goes well.

[knucklecrunchgames]

No, just the tournament one.

I can't wait to see more games from you. Revolt is awesome!

[gamemakerdude]

I am still pretty hard at work on my RPG game (full thread here, viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12329) and am hoping I will be ready to Kickstart it in a few months so that I can devote much more time to development. For the time being, I spend way too much time working and in school to get any serious progress done at once, so the progress I have made has been slow and steady. I have been working primarily on the Tile/ Map Editor as opposed to the game itself and it's coming along fairly well, I would upload it for others to see but it's not functional for the most part, should be ready here soon though? I have no idea really haha

[sonicforvergame]

i ha ve been working on sonic HD for a long time already

[Zivouhr]

How long do you imagine it takes to complete a game like Sonic HD while describing briefly the number of the levels, enemies, etc? Sounds cool.

My current and first video game project in many years, first time with Game Editor, (used to create games on the Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit and some other make your own games software in the past), and it's a big adventure game that can take hours to complete, but I still have to iron out a couple last items. On that subject, I noticed the game editor version is 27 MB, but when exported exe, it jumps up to 100+ MB.... I'm thinking I need to be careful with the tile asset graphics I have been using for smaller, single enemies and objects, as they are probably taking up that whole tiles graphic per actor.
If I cut and paste the actual tile from the large tile graphic, and just use that tiny one per each actor (not the world itself which uses the tiles), then I'm guessing I can shed a decent amount of MB's from the total.

Does that sound like it could help? I haven't had time to test it out yet, but just wondering if 100 MB is way too big for a big game made in Game Editor, with the largest graphic tiles file being under 1 MB, but often used for multiple actors.

Thanks.

[lcl]

@Zivouhr: Yes, cutting the tileset in to smaller sections will help reduce the size. Also, one thing that makes the file size grow a lot if you're not careful, are musics and sounds, if you use wav files, especially, they are huge in size.

Also, the reason the ged is way smaller, is simply because your ged file itself doesn't include any graphics, musics, sounds, nor game engine in itself. It just has the information of the actors, events, actions and codes you have in your project. When you open the project, it loads the graphics, etc from the data folder, and the game engine ia built in game editor itself, not your ged. So, when you export the game, all those things are added to the exe, growing the size a lot.

[Wertyboy]

Is Enblast big enough? xD

[Zivouhr]

@Zivouhr: Yes, cutting the tileset in to smaller sections will help reduce the size. Also, one thing that makes the file size grow a lot if you're not careful, are musics and sounds, if you use wav files, especially, they are huge in size.

Also, the reason the ged is way smaller, is simply because your ged file itself doesn't include any graphics, musics, sounds, nor game engine in itself. It just has the information of the actors, events, actions and codes you have in your project. When you open the project, it loads the graphics, etc from the data folder, and the game engine ia built in game editor itself, not your ged. So, when you export the game, all those things are added to the exe, growing the size a lot.

Helpful information, thanks LCL. I'll work on a decent number of tile actors and reduce them down to a single graphic instead of using the whole tile set just to get that one image. OggVorbis for the music is very small, but unfortunate it doesn't extend to sound FX, which can't use that format when I tried. Luckily, I'm using a minimum of Sound FX, with the Music created being the main theme. You're right, .wav files are giant. Thanks again.

[MrJolteon]

Is Enblast big enough? xD

Yes.

[Zivouhr]

For large projects, do you guys ever experience more bugs/glitches/errors in Game Editor the bigger the project gets?

POINTS SYSTEM ERROR IN LARGE FILES?
I had my points system set up with variables, running interactively with success for the player colliding with various clone groups, some with regions, some with contacting the actual sprite. But later on, when the game got more massive in size, soon the points system began ignoring the prior contact's scoring extra life bonus, defeating the purpose of earning points for free lives. In a prior saved smaller file, I had the same set up, but that smaller file works, while the large one doesn't. It's as if Game Editor began ignoring my variables.

SCRIPTS LOSE THEIR POWER UNLESS DELETED AND MANUALLY RE ENTERED:
Once the game got big enough, I noticed unless I completely deleted the event for a script and manually re entered it again from scratch, adjustments in that old script weren't being recognized, much like when you update a .png or .jpeg sprite file outside of Game Editor, and unless you reload the game file entirely, it won't recognize that you've updated the sprite since Game Editor doesn't auto update. Is this true if the game gets too big with scripts also?

LIMITED TILE COUNT: TILES BEGIN DISAPPEARING DURING GAMEPLAY:
And for tiles, in my large file, if I reach a certain amount of onscreen tiles/animations, even though in the editor window everything is visible, when playing, the zdepth tiles/sprites all the way to the right (fully forward) begin disappearing randomly. The more I add, the more disappear within the game until I delete a bunch of animated tiles or still tiles, like deleting animated water, which I had to replace with still water since it can't fit anymore without disappearing.

I had plans for a game twice as big, but had to cut them short until I can figure out if there can be more tiles onscreen during play, or if this is in fact the limit of Game Editor. Thanks.

[Hares]

LIMITED TILE COUNT: TILES BEGIN DISAPPEARING DURING GAMEPLAY:
And for tiles, in my large file, if I reach a certain amount of onscreen tiles/animations, even though in the editor window everything is visible, when playing, the zdepth tiles/sprites all the way to the right (fully forward) begin disappearing randomly. The more I add, the more disappear within the game until I delete a bunch of animated tiles or still tiles, like deleting animated water, which I had to replace with still water since it can't fit anymore without disappearing.

The same happened with me, but it was just happening in the game preview. When I exported to an .exe file the tiles all appeared.
In my case the tiles would usualy dissapear when I reloaded the level while in game.

[skydereign]

LIMITED TILE COUNT: TILES BEGIN DISAPPEARING DURING GAMEPLAY:
And for tiles, in my large file, if I reach a certain amount of onscreen tiles/animations, even though in the editor window everything is visible, when playing, the zdepth tiles/sprites all the way to the right (fully forward) begin disappearing randomly. The more I add, the more disappear within the game until I delete a bunch of animated tiles or still tiles, like deleting animated water, which I had to replace with still water since it can't fit anymore without disappearing.

The same happened with me, but it was just happening in the game preview. When I exported to an .exe file the tiles all appeared.
In my case the tiles would usualy dissapear when I reloaded the level while in game.

It sounds like these are different problems. LoadGame does not create the tiles correctly when used in the editor but works in the export which is the problem you are running into. It sounds like this tile problem is dealing with tiles disappearing due to too many tiles. Zivouhr how many tiles are you using? I've used quite a bit before and never ran into this problem, nor have I heard anyone report something similar.

SCRIPTS LOSE THEIR POWER UNLESS DELETED AND MANUALLY RE ENTERED:
Once the game got big enough, I noticed unless I completely deleted the event for a script and manually re entered it again from scratch, adjustments in that old script weren't being recognized, much like when you update a .png or .jpeg sprite file outside of Game Editor, and unless you reload the game file entirely, it won't recognize that you've updated the sprite since Game Editor doesn't auto update. Is this true if the game gets too big with scripts also?

This is known to happen once in a while, though I don't know if the size of the project is what causes it. There's not much you can do about it. When I've run into it though it wasn't consistently having problems. A more common problem is cyclic errors that you can't fix until you reinsert the scripts.

POINTS SYSTEM ERROR IN LARGE FILES?
I had my points system set up with variables, running interactively with success for the player colliding with various clone groups, some with regions, some with contacting the actual sprite. But later on, when the game got more massive in size, soon the points system began ignoring the prior contact's scoring extra life bonus, defeating the purpose of earning points for free lives. In a prior saved smaller file, I had the same set up, but that smaller file works, while the large one doesn't. It's as if Game Editor began ignoring my variables.

This doesn't sound like a problem directly tied to point systems. I'd need to know more to be able to understand, but it does sound like this is a collision problem.