I'm making a new game and now it's at 163 frames and not close to being finished. I read in a tip of the day that having less frames is good, but how many frames do you need for your game to lose performance?
DaVince This fool just HAD to have a custom rating
Registered 04/09/2004
Points 7998
13th July, 2005 at 06:13:57 -
It's not about losing performance, but about filesizes. Every new frame will make your file bigger.
If it's one of those games where you have one screen and you can go left or right, you'd better not do that with seperate frames but with a scrolling technique...
Old member (~2004-2007).
DaVince This fool just HAD to have a custom rating
The frame limit is about 30,000 I think. So you're not in any danger.
If your new frames use objects that exist in other frames, then it won't add to the file size that much - MMF pools identical objects across frames and only saves them once.
IMO the biggest problem with lots of frames is maintanence. If you find a bug with your movement engine... are you gonna replace the code in 163 frames??
163 sounds a lot but that depends on the game really. Say it is a Text adventure style game (interactive fiction), Each new screen could be a new frame. It's not very efficient but better than a Platform game.
A platform game with one non scrolling level per frame, people would get fed up way before getting to the 160th level unless it is very addictive.
Frames aren't a problem by themselves. The problem is if you use the same objects in them. Say you have this guy with about 4*(5 + 1 + 6 + 2) = 56 frames of animation. 5 for walking, one for stopped, 6 frames of shooting, 2 for falling and jumping, and times 4 for the 4 common directions.
So, assuming this guy would already take 2 KB (2 times if 16-bit, 4 times if 32-bit), a 32-bit character like this will take 326 KB if he's in 163 frames!
And that's just assuming an average main character. What about repeated interfaces, explosions, enemies, etc, etc?
You might not care too much about file size yet, but release an average game in 30 MB and the anti-noobs will slaughter you .
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Muz, if you read my post, MMF doesn't save identical objects more than once. If you copy and paste the player object in to a new frame MMF isn't going to save it all over again, it's cleverer than that.
I never had to use THAT much frames! When they start to get ''full'(if thats even possible) then just make another game and find a way to connect both to eachother
If you want to keep the filesize down (if only a little) you could make a larger area in one frame and put more than one area inside it.
say for instance in a village, you could make the houses in a different area not accessable normally but in the bottom left and your character warps there when they open the right door. Maybe lock the scrolling too to make it look like a seperate area.
I feel that is better than making a new frame for each room.
Each new blank frame adds 5.4k to your filesize (The Games Factory anyway maybe MMF is more?)with over 160 frames this adds up. Well it's not much really.
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