Going the External Level route, any advice(object and event limits, any other tips)

[DinnerSonic]

A lot of the time, it's better to use a single active object, with different animations representing different objects (you probably only need one "coin" object to represent all 256 flavors).

While I was starting to joke a bit at that point(going from reasonable estimatesto something over the top to say "of course I'd never have that many at once") that makes me wonder.

Lets say I have a somewhat simple object, 5 or 6 animations, but I want to have a couple dozen variations each with their own sprites/skins. Would it be reasonable to just have events that say "Set animation to 10+(TotalNewAnimations*ObjectSkinType)", so that Animations 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 were the first skin, 15 16 17 18 and 19 were the second and so on and so on? Would this result in always loading all those skins into memory even if it never needs swapping or will it only load them when MMF2 uses them, otherwise ignoring them till then? (I swear I've seen the memory rise up as more animations are played but I'm not positive of the specifics... I don't want to load a 15MB object of highly animated NPCs to toss in two little ones from it that end up having 3 two-frame animations =P)

If I have unlimited animations(or near-unlimited, considering the suggestion of 256 coin types being reasonably possible it should be a good amount) I could easily save on used Active Objects for some things this way. Say, a generic NPC active object that spits out lines from its own Alterable Strings, while using that method to store standing, talking and "ow stop hitting me" animations for any number of decorative characters or signboards, letting me liven up some places. Perhaps even some of the "hard mode" enemies could be done this way. Though simply sticking one or two wasteful things into one object would make it so I won't nearly reach the limit and thus not have to do that for everything.


One other question, about... questions: In my quest to work with these more advanced techniques... if I've got other misc questions like this, issues that pop up, techniques to handle (x) thing better, things like that, what's the best way to ask here if I can't figure it out via search? I really don't want to make more threads for various questions, I already worry I've done enough in the past, but I don't have anyone I know to ask personally when I run into a coding wall, of my group of friends I'm (somehow) considered the best at Clickteam products. Is there a "generic stupid questions" thread I'm missing, or a chat or general etiquette for someone who's got questions?

Ideally once the level editor/loading part is done I'll be all set, as I won't have to finish conceptualizing and putting in an entire game's worth of character interaction code before starting a single thing and can just add as I go, but I just know I'm gonna have some oddball game-killing issue, it's a tradition of mine. So I thought I'd ask about asking, while people are still looking here.

[Konidias]

For my current game I have a single active object that has probably around 300 different "objects" in it through various animations/directions. I use an array to load up all the data and it creates hundreds of these objects at runtime and sets their direction/animation accordingly.

A lot of stuff is just like background tiles or solid obstacles so what I do for that is just create backdrops for those and then destroy the active so it cuts down a ton on the total number of actives at runtime.

By the time my game is complete I will easily have 1000+ different things being stored in one active object. I haven't run into any problems yet but I have no idea how MMF will handle this down the road.

[nivram]

For my current game I have a single active object that has probably around 300 different "objects" in it through various animations/directions. I use an array to load up all the data and it creates hundreds of these objects at runtime and sets their direction/animation accordingly.

A lot of stuff is just like background tiles or solid obstacles so what I do for that is just create backdrops for those and then destroy the active so it cuts down a ton on the total number of actives at runtime.

By the time my game is complete I will easily have 1000+ different things being stored in one active object. I haven't run into any problems yet but I have no idea how MMF will handle this down the road.

You'll be ok on this Konidias. Sounds like an interesting project.

Marv