Object behaviors have issues and become a huge hassle to work with... continue using them if you want, but if I were you, I would be taking the advice from people who have been using these products for years (some of us over 10 years)
Object behaviors have issues and become a huge hassle to work with... continue using them if you want, but if I were you, I would be taking the advice from people who have been using these products for years (some of us over 10 years)
Why are behaviours bad?
'Frame Events', 'Global Events' and 'Behaviour Events' are all part of a MMF2 Applications code.
Although they reside in different locations/ windows, they are all interconnected.
Meanining they are not confined to, and do not work exclusively within, their Event List.
To clarefy further, all three Event Lists are part of a unified "Master Event List":
- 'Frame Events' go first
- then 'Global Events'
- 'Behaviour Events' come last
So for example, since ALL Events are connected , 'Behaviour Events' can very well affect 'Frame Events' or 'Global Events' or the other way around.
But ( ant this is whats realy bad ) the 3 different Event Lists reside in different windows, meaning if you are looking at the 'Global Events' and want to view Goblins 'Bahaviour Events', youl have to:
- Close 'Global Events' window
- Find and Click the Goblin
- Change Properties Tab
- Click on the Behaviour to view the 'Behaviour Events' for Goblin
Think about it, if all of your different Game Objects have seperate Behaviours, and you want to view the code to see how they all affect eachother, or your going bug hunting, or its not your application but your just trying to help...
Youl have to do alot of closing and openig of windows to be able to cross check Events which reside in different portions in the Application.
For medium to large projects, this is doom.
It all becomes very unorganozed to the eys and mind, time consuming, dissorienting, unclear and blurry.
...
Why are Behaviours there at all?
The sole purpose of Behaviours is to make duplicating Events easier for you, well and maybe to reduce the total Event count, and thats it ( correct me if im wrong ).
Having too many Events is almost never the problem with MMF2 creations.
I dont think it even makes the top 10 list of MMF2 roadblocks.
If you organize your Events properly within one of the Event Lists, say the 'Frame Events', duplicating your Events is easily done by marking and copy-pasting.
...
Bottom line, if you ( or you want others to ) want to have a good understanding and totall overview over whats going on in your application, then confine all your code to 1 or as few Event Lists as you can.
Qualifiers ( Qualifiers gives you the power to have multiple different Objects have a single and same referance, for easier coding and saving time ) apparemntly dont work inside 'Behaviour Events' as well.
On the other hand, as i recall, Objects can have differents 'sets' of Behaviours which can be swiched out durring runtime, but for me the downsides of Behaviours heavily outweigh this little feature.
Runs slick and quick, 120 FPS when uncapped and thats mostly graphical.
What game is that Pixelthief?
Asunder, project I've been working on as a full time job for a couple years nowOriginally Posted by Outcast
What game is that Pixelthief?
Woah! A couple of years? That must be a big game...
Dev log?
Excuse me Konidias, can you explain more about the issues with behaviors in MMF2? I'm just curious, not taking any side here.
Yeah I've been meaning to restart that
Suffice to say Asunder's enginework is basically 99.9% finished, and all the enemies are fully drawn/implemented, and about half the minor 'objects' for the game (doodads, physics, ambient creatures, etc), right now I'm starting tilesets (1 finished, ~17 to go), and applying a layer of polish to enemy sprites.
Anyway I don't want to sidetrack the thread. But I want to assure you its not an abandonware or project spinning out of control, I've got a project plan and work method all figured out for it, its still at least a year off however. The majority of the content is finished and all the real programming is done, its just a matter of filling in the rest of the content and then piecing it all together and building the levels / game itself. Left myself a lot of room to iterate, and I have 6 bosses planned that are undrawn/implemented that will probably be a significant amount of the time
but erm yeah, offtopic
I'd put it like this: objects and events won't stop functioning just because you add more content and features to your game. If things stop to work, it's almost always a result of your events being wrong.
However, when it comes to performance, it's a whole different thing. MMF2 is very weak with iterating through objects. Even with the ForEach object and the most optimized events imaginable, there are operations that you can get away with applying to a hundred objects that you could in other game dev platform apply to to tens of thousands of objects. With sub-events (to get rid of redundant duplicate conditions), a built in ForEach that iterates more efficiently, and other optimizations (for example not evaluating every "on loop" and "on foreach loop" condition every iteration of every loop), MMF3 could become waaaaaay more efficient for power users. Like, fifty times more efficient without exaggerating a bit.
MMF2 is very capable in many ways, but there are boundaries, so yes, a game can be too complex for MMF2. I have some new projects I want to dig into, but they're just too heavy for MMF2 (plus I need sample accurate music layer synchronization), which is why I'm so eager for MMF3.
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