Thoughts about data control
Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 10:31 pmI want to explain that i'm not trying to be a professional telling everyone else what to do, rather i'm still learning how, and often debating the very methods i post.
This is a learning game we're all playing together, and though we may be playing different levels of this game, we're all playing the same game.
So it seems to me that there are 3 main issues that keep appearing over and over again on the forum.
These forces are not simply obstacles to be overcome and left behind, they're more like mountains to climb - you are always climbing up one of the mountains, and you cannot ever reach the top, because the top would be perfection. There is no such thing, all the best company in the world can do is be "higher on the mountain than any other person has been".
The overall concept of game structure will assist you in all three; as you learn one, parts of the others become more obvious. There is a super sensible method for handling nearly everything, if we could only find out what that method is, and be able to comprehend it.
First let me point out that Rome was not built in a day. What this means in learning, is that you can't learn C++ in a day. To do so would damage your brain beyond repair, we generally refer to something like this as "Trauma".
Not only does it take time for your brain to build pathways(just like it takes time build muscles), so too the data is only useful if its relative to everything else; For instance, what good would it be to learn how to rebuild an automobile transmission if you haven't yet learned how to remove the housing and take the transmission out first?
So its gonna take time. That's all there is to it.
One of the problems with trying to learn these things when you don't have much money, is that generally, the more successful a product is, the less willing the authors are to share the details of it with you. Any of you who have looked at flash tutorials on the web know what i mean - thousands of incomplete, outdated tutorials, or ones that simply don't make any sense.
You can go to a university to learn flash, but that costs more money - you can google free tutorials for about 50$ a month, or whatever your internet connection costs. But college costs you 1,000$ a month.
And of course, cheaper schools pay their professors less, so they get crappier professors. The top dog programmers at Rockstar games don't have time to teach; they're too busy getting rich making games.
It would be nice if we could develop a few branches of ge programming and establish them as a standard. Perhaps there could be a community project, whereby teams take the existing demos and scripts and develop the smoothest established template for these;
Then the teams could post their final script/ged on a top-link page or post, where new users could find out things like anti-moonwalk and view follow actor right from the start.
And what i mean by branches is that there could be multiple versions of a script with multiple teams on it; if one team wanted to make an rpg setup by arrays while another set it up thru actor scripts - we could end up with multiple methods. And I think the methods would sort themselves out - especially if people posted about each one as they used them, so that methods that don't work in the long run could be dumped.
A binary tree can be used to locate screen areas; notice how you can get to the corner with only a few 1's and 0's - by the time you've narrowed it down to a 32x32 square, you've only used two bytes of data - or less, depending on how exact it needs to be. A targeting or pathfinding system could really benefit from this. (A* pathfinding uses 3 integers for each path cell - which could number in the hundreds!)
Its not that there's anything wrong here that needs to be fixed; its just that things could always be better. We could all be learning faster. This forum is a catalyst for learning, and we could develop it further and make it ....neater.
The reason animals, reptiles, fish, and insects all breath air is that oxygen is used in metabolism; Inside the cells glucose is converted to energy. It is literally set on fire. And of course, oxygen helps fire burn.
The difference between an anaerobic creature (one that doesn't need oxygen like mold and bacteria) and aerobic creatures like us is a final energy return of 19 to 1!!!! For every nineteen calories we can get from a piece of sugar, the bacteria can only get one!
Is your current game 19x better than your first one?
This is a learning game we're all playing together, and though we may be playing different levels of this game, we're all playing the same game.
So it seems to me that there are 3 main issues that keep appearing over and over again on the forum.
- Controlling physics in Platformers
Handling data over multiple actors - especially assigning/retrieving actor variables from other actors/scripts.
Errors with crashing/freezing.
These forces are not simply obstacles to be overcome and left behind, they're more like mountains to climb - you are always climbing up one of the mountains, and you cannot ever reach the top, because the top would be perfection. There is no such thing, all the best company in the world can do is be "higher on the mountain than any other person has been".
The overall concept of game structure will assist you in all three; as you learn one, parts of the others become more obvious. There is a super sensible method for handling nearly everything, if we could only find out what that method is, and be able to comprehend it.
First let me point out that Rome was not built in a day. What this means in learning, is that you can't learn C++ in a day. To do so would damage your brain beyond repair, we generally refer to something like this as "Trauma".
Not only does it take time for your brain to build pathways(just like it takes time build muscles), so too the data is only useful if its relative to everything else; For instance, what good would it be to learn how to rebuild an automobile transmission if you haven't yet learned how to remove the housing and take the transmission out first?
So its gonna take time. That's all there is to it.
One of the problems with trying to learn these things when you don't have much money, is that generally, the more successful a product is, the less willing the authors are to share the details of it with you. Any of you who have looked at flash tutorials on the web know what i mean - thousands of incomplete, outdated tutorials, or ones that simply don't make any sense.
You can go to a university to learn flash, but that costs more money - you can google free tutorials for about 50$ a month, or whatever your internet connection costs. But college costs you 1,000$ a month.
And of course, cheaper schools pay their professors less, so they get crappier professors. The top dog programmers at Rockstar games don't have time to teach; they're too busy getting rich making games.
It would be nice if we could develop a few branches of ge programming and establish them as a standard. Perhaps there could be a community project, whereby teams take the existing demos and scripts and develop the smoothest established template for these;
Then the teams could post their final script/ged on a top-link page or post, where new users could find out things like anti-moonwalk and view follow actor right from the start.
And what i mean by branches is that there could be multiple versions of a script with multiple teams on it; if one team wanted to make an rpg setup by arrays while another set it up thru actor scripts - we could end up with multiple methods. And I think the methods would sort themselves out - especially if people posted about each one as they used them, so that methods that don't work in the long run could be dumped.
- A binary coordinate map
A binary tree can be used to locate screen areas; notice how you can get to the corner with only a few 1's and 0's - by the time you've narrowed it down to a 32x32 square, you've only used two bytes of data - or less, depending on how exact it needs to be. A targeting or pathfinding system could really benefit from this. (A* pathfinding uses 3 integers for each path cell - which could number in the hundreds!)
Its not that there's anything wrong here that needs to be fixed; its just that things could always be better. We could all be learning faster. This forum is a catalyst for learning, and we could develop it further and make it ....neater.
The reason animals, reptiles, fish, and insects all breath air is that oxygen is used in metabolism; Inside the cells glucose is converted to energy. It is literally set on fire. And of course, oxygen helps fire burn.
The difference between an anaerobic creature (one that doesn't need oxygen like mold and bacteria) and aerobic creatures like us is a final energy return of 19 to 1!!!! For every nineteen calories we can get from a piece of sugar, the bacteria can only get one!
Is your current game 19x better than your first one?
