Another Problem with Instances...

Hi Everybody,

i' m working on a Jump n' Run-Shooter but i encountered a weird bug in my game.

I have a 64 Zombie-Enemies. They "walk" on Ground (using Vecor-Movement). The Hero-Character can shoot at them
and it would subtract 1 from the enemies health (which is set to 5). Once the Health of the Enemy is <=0 then Change Animation-
Sequence to "Defeat". When Animation-Sequence "Defeat" is over, destroy object. It works but after some time (when enemies "pile-up")
the collision-detection seems to not work anymore. Some Enemies are still walking around, but don' t react to Collision anymore and
on some of them the movement doesn' t work anymore to.

Has anybody experienced a similar problem in the past?

If anybody wants to do a deeper research, then i could ofcourse upload the .mfa for you.

By the Way, i' m on Win7 64 bit, MMF2 Dev is Build 253 and i' m using Direct3D 9 (HWA-Mode) in my Game.

Thanks a lot for all your Help and i wish all the Community-Members a verry happy "merry X-Mas"

Jahkri. Yes, please upload your mfa.

Thanks,

Marv

Hi Marv,

thanks for the fast reply. Tried to upload to the MFA-Repository, but it doesn' t seem to work.
Can you recommend another Site where i can safely upload the .mfa?
Thanks in Advance and Greets

jahkri

Have you tried using the ForEach object to run the set of events against each instance of your zombie? Sometimes working with groups of objects (the default behaviour of MMF) doesn't give the results you expect so that's worth looking into if you're not using ForEach.

Thanks AndyH for your reply too,

i' m looking into the ForEach-Object. I will try with it. I hope that will solve the Problem.
I would still like to upload the .mfa for Marv (or anybody else) so that he could perhaps
confirm that the bug is due to my poor coding (not using the foreach-object) or if it' s due
to another problem.

Sadly the MFARepository seems to be "offline" and i can not upload any .mfa-file to it. Could you
recommend another file-hoster where i can safely upload the .mfa-file?

Thanks in Advance and Greetz,

jahkri

Here if it is under a meg, or dropbox.

Marv

Hi Everybody,

i' m still trying with the foreach-object. But in the Meantime i was able to create an own ftp-account.
You can download the zipped .mfa-File from the following Link.

http://jahkri.magix.net/public/activ...ionproblem.zip

On the first Frame of the Game, just press "esc" to continue and on the second frame you can also press
"esc" to skip the story-intro. Frame 3 is where the problem occurs. Just wait a while until a lot of Zombies have
piled-up around your character, then move a little bit away from them and fire your weapon at them (press ctrl repeatedly to shoot faster,
hold ctrl. to "auto-shoot". You will see that some of the zombies suddenly don' t react to collision with the Bullet anymore. Bye the Way,
please forgive me if the "code" looks somewhat messed up. I' ve already tried a lot of stuff on that frame to prevent that "wrong" behavior of
the collision-handling, but shouldn' t be to hard to interpret.

Thanks to anybody who might help with this problem.

Greets from Switzerland,

jahkri

Sorry, forget to mention that there' s no collision-detection between the main-character and the enemies yet.
And the Enemies seem to do exactly what they should do (change direction to main-character on x-axis), but
as soon as i beginn to shoot at them (especialy when some of the enemies have piled-up on one spot) then
something goes wrong with the Enemy-Bullet-Detection (and sometimes the zombies would also not change
direction anymore when the player "passes" them by.

Anyway, hope someone could figure out why this happens. I know, i' m not the best at coding, but i think
i didn' t make any big mistakes in the code.

Thanks Again and Greets

jahkri

Sorry to post again,
does Nobody know if this behavior is a Bug in MMF or just my "silly" code.

Has anybody taken a look at the .mfa? Is the Bug repeatable?

Thanks for helping me out with this one.

Greets,

jahkri

Anyone?

It bugs me that i' m not able to find out what causes this odd behavior. Could anybody please
point me in the right direction?

In the 7th Post you can download the .mfa-File from my project (with the strange behavior occuring).

Thanks a lot and greets from

jahkri

Hi Jahkri, I believe I have found the source of the problem:

The way you have set up zombie deaths means only 1 zombie can ever die at once. While that zombie is dying, no other one may die. However, their energy will remain at 0 and they will continue to walk around.

This means when the bullet collides with them, the second condition (Energy > 0) is false and the event does not execute, and thus the bullet passes through the enemy.

You'll want to rework how zombies die to fix this problem of immortal enemies.

Hi gastrop0d,

thanks for the reply. I ' ve had similar thoughts about the problem, but so far i didn' t find any proper solution to this
Problem. Do you have any idea how to fix it?

Thanks in Advance

jahkri

mmf can automatically handle it's instances in this situation..you're making it more complex than it needs to be.

simply:

bullet collides with zombie
sub 1 from heallth

zombie health = 0
destroy

MMF will keep track of the health value of each of the zombies automatically.

Hi DaveC,

i also thought that MMF2 would "handle" all the Instances and perform the "Destroy-Action" as soon as the "Death-Sequence" is over. But it
seems that MMF2 gets somehow confused when many instances of an Object are overlapping. I was realy not able to find out how i could
fix it in the .mfa-File that i posted.
I would be realy grateful if anybody could find out whats happening and possibly also how to fix it.

Anyway, Thanks for your Reply.

Greets,

jahkri

okay.. I had a brief look at that code this morning and saw some bad practices but mostly looked simple.. the "animation has finished - destroy" event is kinda unreliable.. I''ll look tomorrow and see if I can make it work bug free, I'm sure it's a simple solution!

Hey DaveC,

thanks for your Help. It' s most appreciated.

I know that the Code is "somewhat" messed up due to try to find out another way to prevent the problem.

but can you still tell me what "bad practices" i have in my code?

Again, Thanks a lot for helping me out with this.

Greets from

jahkri

I never use "when animation is finished", because as people have said it is not reliable if you have multiple objects of that type.

Instead I always use alterable values as timers. Example:

Zombie Health <=0
-> Add 1 to "Zombie Death Timer"
->Play animation zombie dies

Zombie Death Timer >=60 (this determins the amount of frames how long it takes until zombie is removed from the game)
->destroy

This should fix it 100% :)

Thanks Blue66,

i' ll try it with your Solution. Hopefully it will fix the Problem.

Also thanks to DaveC and the others for their help in finding a
solution to my problem.

I will post back when i' ve tried out blue66s method. I' ll post back anyway (when it works and ofcourse also if its not working).

Thanks again for all your Efforts

Greets from

jahkri