make death spikes not an object

[Winston]

okay well my game will run quite a few objects per frame so I was wondering if there was a way to make objects such as deathspikes (you touch them, you did die) and animated backdrops not objects to save on lag in the game

[dragonguy]

Sorry but that can't be done, an extension can be made to do exactly that.

[Werbad]

It can be done.
One way would be to place the spikes in their own layer as obstacles, and add a detector in that layer that follows the player. Then just check if the detector overlaps an obstacle.

[DavidN]

That's very clever, actually! I would have suggested the Overlay object to define damaging areas (not that I've ever used it), but that would certainly work.

[Asholay]

Or, and with far more ease, you could just detect whether a player is in the zone of the spikes?

Only one line of code, and you keep your backdrop.

[Nifflas]

Asholay's solution works nicely, but gets really messy very quickly when you have lots of spike zones. Werbad's solution is really clever!

[Asholay]

AFAIK layers appear to be quite resource-hungry though, and the key point of Winston's post was to reduce slow-down in the game.

[Nifflas]

It's the graphical stuff that is resource hungry, but if that layer is hidden, and quick backdrops are used as dangerous zones, the slowdown is so small it won't be noticed (the spikes themselves has to be put in the main layer of course).

The nice thing with this is that you can just show/hide that layer in the frame editor when dangerous zones needs to be edited or not, and you get an overview that zone events can never provide.

[Asholay]

Yeah, I've been finding the layers quite fruity myself actually - they're a welcome addition over TGF.