Open World Game

[barney12345]

Ok so before I get well into it, I want an experienced opinion, do you guys think that GE can handle an open world top down game without having lag and framerate issues. When I say open world I mean that I will create a small city for the main character to go through and interact with most things

[skydereign]

It can, but it involves a bit of work. The general idea is to limit the number of actors you have in game at any one time. You can do this by only creating the actors the player is near, and as you move away from actors destroy them. If you feel like you can do that, then most of the complications go away.

[savvy]

You have to be clever, as Sky says, destroying things outside of the view or which aren't being used is how to keep the frame rate up,
the same as in 3d games, every polygon you can't see isn't actually being rendered, such as the front of Isaac in dead space and such (until he turns around).

Your issue is deciding how aggressive with the removing of actors you want to be, and how you program things to react, it all depends on how much you use the
PhysicalResponse function over your own say... array based collision system.

Try experimenting by using the distance function to remove actors.

savvy

PS: GE could definitely handle open world if done right.

[edogames]

If your city isn't very big, you can divide it to regions, so you will see things only while inside their region.

[Zivouhr]

I have a giant open world land (Platformer side scroller) in my new game at 100 MB and it would not have been possible if I didn't create Regions (not activation regions, but regular green region actors/square empty boxes), that shut off and on the creatures and actual tile regions activated by the player's view (which is parented under the player). Once I got rid of these visibility zones (you can use transparency or the slightly more complicated by possibly more reliable Visibility State) for each clone or actor, the game would crash, until I reactivate these regions.

I have huge lists of 50 or more actors that get activated or shut off depending on the zone you're in. You can set it up so the player collides and sets the action, or have the region, which is motionless and takes less memory it seems, activate the on/offs.
The game plays at a good pace as intended on my computer, and features many items to collect, parallax scrolling mountains, a day/night cycle, lots of creatures and traps to avoid, and a good 4+ hours of questing depending on your skills.

So yes, an open world game is possible using Game Editor. I'll post details soon on the game, which I'm happy with so far, though testing on other computers is still in progress.

[gamemakerdude]

Congrats to you Zivouhr! I will say that I have also recently made some progress in creating the tile/map editor which I will use to construct my game's world (a ridiculously large semi-open world RPG) Fairly soon, within a month or two I would imagine, I will release a public version here in the forums. Of course, it is designed to create top-down RPG-type games though with a little understanding and some work it could easily be remade to work with any kind of game platformer or otherwise.

Hopefully this will be a useful resource for the forum, if nothing else for example or illustration purposes. Though for me at least this also means, I will be able to begin the next phase of development here soon and work towards a playable demo or something to that effect so be ready GE

[bat78]

Hello,
Since i created Wanle Loading, which basically boosted S.A.B.R.E 2.0 with 50 fps and its looses are really reduced, i will give you some tips.
Actors do not really reduce the FPS XD It's their events.
Once you load a picture it just pre-renders at the start of the game. So. The only thing that draw FPS mostly is the Draw Actor event.
For example.. draw actor event where drawing functions are parsed.. thats the only thing with the power to enzero your FPS quite fast.
Use EventDisable/EventEnable to disable/enable draw actor events, that gives you a control you might like to use to boost FPS when its possible.

gE has a basic loading, based on a simple one-time rendering. It won't load the game until all actors are loaded. Thats not even loading. lol.
The speed the actors are "loaded" depends of the proccessor, gE.. Aways maxed out. Thats not good. What if your PC suck. Then your game suck too.
The best way to load your game startup is to make a filled region over the game space and use getAllActorsInCollision to return all of the actors in array.
Then use a draw actor increment to load each actor with the speed depended of the FPS. (put 512 FPS). How?
VisibilityState to off by default. Then enabled with the speed of 1xfps. One of the things that wanle does is actually trace for ticks.. and when there is a tick it reduces the speed the actors are loaded.. but thats already too adanced. Besides.. wanle is the only one loading system yet. When i start redesigning gE.. i'll implement it.
Aslo.. the online module we are working on contains wanle boost.

But.. there is another way. Put Create in startup to "No" then use the same scenario to create the actors by sequence. Thats actually a faster way on startup, because gE won't listen to Create Actors in which you use VisibilityStates. Thats for the startup loading. It only reduces the fps looses (fps being unstable for e.g)
To boost the fps you need to control the actors like i said. Using EventDisable to draw actor. Avoid constantly parsing codes. Thats all you can do in gE.

[Zivouhr]

Bat78,

Very good points about FPS and how they're affected not so much by the actor, but by the actor's Draw Events especially. I did find that to be true and had to use their draw events sparingly depending if they were chasing the main character or not. Keeping them on a simple loop path was a nice secondary option that didn't slow the game down as much.

Congrats to you Zivouhr! I will say that I have also recently made some progress in creating the tile/map editor which I will use to construct my game's world (a ridiculously large semi-open world RPG) Fairly soon, within a month or two I would imagine, I will release a public version here in the forums. Of course, it is designed to create top-down RPG-type games though with a little understanding and some work it could easily be remade to work with any kind of game platformer or otherwise.

Hopefully this will be a useful resource for the forum, if nothing else for example or illustration purposes. Though for me at least this also means, I will be able to begin the next phase of development here soon and work towards a playable demo or something to that effect so be ready GE

Thanks GameMakerDude. Your game sounds great. Please post your progress when you have time, I'd be very glad to see it!

[gamemakerdude]

I recently decided to post my progress in the Game Development thread, and going to try my best to be more active here in the forums. I have been checking out your game Zivhour and it looks great, haven't gotten time to play it quite yet but it is definitely on my list of things to do. It's awesome to see other people's projects come to life, keep up the good work!

[Zivouhr]

I recently decided to post my progress in the Game Development thread, and going to try my best to be more active here in the forums. I have been checking out your game Zivhour and it looks great, haven't gotten time to play it quite yet but it is definitely on my list of things to do. It's awesome to see other people's projects come to life, keep up the good work!

Thanks! Your game is looking very cool and thanks for posting the screen shot and info.