Just a few things I'm wondering about

[GlassShard]

First of all, I LOVE MMF2. It's one-thousand times superior to other gamemakers I've tried in the past, and I've really run the gamut in search of a tool that would let me produce what's in my head. I'm an artist and a very visual person, so the program's visual "programming" interface really scores with me. Clickteam has a fan.

I've been lurking on the board the past few months, soaking up all the sage wisdom, examining other peoples' programs (nivram's stuff in particular has helped me out enormously a few times - thank you, nivram, your page of example programs is awesome), and so far I've been able to do everything I've wanted to do in the game I'm working on. I don't need any specific help at this point, but was wondering a few things, and hoping for some advice from you gurus--

1)Is there a reason to use the avi object instead of the animation object for playing fullframe avi movies (without sound)? I've been using the animation one and it works great, I was just wondering. All my cutscenes are animated in Flash, converted to avi, then imported.

2)What does the LoopIndex expression start at? 0 or 1?

3)Will having too many frames slow the program down? My game's a sort of dungeon-crawler, and there are around 150 rooms in eleven different zones. Right now I have a frame for each zone (there's a forest zone, a sewer zone, etc, each with their own tilesets) and I'm working on building with a function each room in the zone on the fly in that zone's particular frame, when the player hits a room-changing trigger. It's a pain. Is there a reason not to simply dedicate one frame to each room and just have 150+ frames in the application? Is MMF2 smart enough to reuse the same graphic across frames? My graphics are all digitally painted and most are pngs, so reusing stuff is important to keep the size down.

4)How big can a 3D array get before reading from it begins to noticeably lag stuff? On the subject of arrays, I've noticed a lot of array-related extensions. Which do you feel is the most useful, the speediest, and the most stable for a game that requires almost incessant reading to and writing from multiple global arrays?

5)Is there a way to change the Behaviour of an object from the event menu? Like, if I have an object with two different programmed behaviours, can I change to behaviour#2 with an event? Speaking of behaviours, I understand how MMF2 prioritizes events and deals with fastloops each frame, but how do the behaviours of objects fit into it?

That's a lot of stuff and I'm long-winded. I'm sorry Thanks for reading though, and any advice is so very appreciated!

[Popcorn]

Welcome to the community!

1) I don't know as I don't have experience with this. You can however use activex to run flash .swf files directly in MMF2.

2) 0.
Unless something else is specified, everyting in MMF2 is 0-based.
For some reason, arrays by default are 1-based, but that you can change in the object properties.

3) No, it should not have any impact on runtime speed. However, unless you set everything in the frames as global, it may eventually slow down your game development speed when you need to do important changes in the frames That also answers your reuse question. Set the active and backdrop objects to global, and it will be instances of the same objects throughout the entire application, meaning if you change your player gfx in level 5, he will also been changed in level 42.

For a game if the size it sound's your game will be, you should also consider making a level editor. You'll lose the power of the frame editor, but you'l have your own totally customized editor specifically designed for your game instead.

4) I don't know.

5) As far as I can remember, behaviours are read AFTER the events in the event editor. I believe you find more about this by doing a search in the forum, it has been brought up several times.

[GlassShard]

Thanks for the welcome, Popcorn

1)The Flash movies are rather complex and lag on most computers I've tried them on. The best way to get smooth, high-res playback for me is just to convert them to avis. Thanks though, I didn't realise there was a way to play Flash files directly.

2)Haha, that's so good to know. I'd assumed it started at 1 and it drove me insane one night trying to get something to work. Now I know for certain.

3)I'd considered building an editor but it's beyond my skills at this point. I'll have to look around at some other examples and see if anything clicks. That's really good to know about the frames though.

5)I shall search! Thanks so much

[nivram]

Thanks for the comments GlassShard. I am humbled.

4) Depends on what kind of system the user has. I might test your application in my Win98 test machine it would take 6 minutes to load. The application my take only 10 seconds to load on your computer system.

That's a challenge. Try to balance everything. Get all the testers you can, with different systems.

Marv