Looking for advice, working on engine worried about too many objects

[kainminter]

I am currently making an action RPG game reminiscent to Secret of Mana meets Legend of Zelda.
The base engine is about 60% done, but I've got a few challenges I need to plan how to overcome.

Some context:
In my original plan, I was going to make an engine and then duplicate that frame for every map. The plus side was that I could limit the number of objects and code on any one frame by only including the enemies and objects used for that map. The down side would be that I would have hundreds of frames and any bugs fixes or changes to the engine would become incredibly difficult to execute.

The more I thought about it, the less I want to have to deal with that latter, so I have decided to streamline things. I am making it now where there is a primary engine frame where you use a map editor to set up the contents of each map, and specialized frames for any maps that have events or objects that don't fit into the cookie cutter of the primary. This should save countless frames and make updating and debugging the engine infinitely easier later on.

Making a primary engine frame and a map editor, the one frame will need to be able to call forth almost everything that can be in the game. I have plans on how to handle the maps, NPCs, interactive objects, and background animation objects in a way that I will only need a hand full of objects for each and the rest will be handled by coding and file loading. My main concern is enemies..
There are more than 150 standard enemies planned throughout the entire game with unique objects and behavior coding. I should be able to write code to have sections disabled when they are not applicable for the current map loaded, enemy code wise. I am worried having so many objects, however.


I was hoping to pick the brains of veteran clickers here.
-Do you think that having 150+ enemy objects with their own sets of animations and graphics on the frame will cause issues? (Standard enemies will range in size from 8x8 to 192x192, the screen being 256x240)
-To help save memory issues, Is there a way to limit colors or change format on an object's graphics to lower the amount of memory they take up?
-Is there any chance that clickteam does an out of sight out of mind kind of thing with graphic memory? Like having objects way off frame, will it still load all of their frames into memory?
-Is there any way to remove objects so they do not take up memory from the frame for now, and then have them back if you reload the frame?

[DaveC]

If you untick "create at start" they shouldn't be loaded into memory until you create them, just create and destroy objects as you need them, you shouldn't really need more than say.. 300 objects at a given time.

[kainminter]

Great info, Thank you! This puts my mind at ease.

[Sparckman]

check out this test



sparckman benchmark start.mfa


sparckman benchmark.mfa

[kainminter]

Thanks for showing me that, Sparckman. That's really neat.
Its a little different since they are all copies of the same small object and the object does not have a lot of frames of animation, but still very cool.