I just finished up my general level design; Before I actually get to work on making the levels, it'd be nice to know if my best-laid plan doesn't crumble because of some silly limitation.
What is the maximum framesize I can have without MMF2 crapping out on me?
How many active objects can I have per frame? On screen?
How many total frames can I have per application? (External level editors are hard to make/implement!)
As long as i know you can have about 10.000 objects at runtime in mmf2, but i guess the most machienes cannot handle that. I dont know, how many frames you can have
well, it seems, that your engine is now finished. Before you make a hundred frames now for the levels, you should think about that: By making a frame for each level you have to copy the whole engine every time. This results in the fact, that your game will have so much mb, that most people wont download it.
But the most important fact is, that you have to change every single frame, if you want to change parts of the engine. And an engine is never really finished, i guess.
So, the best method would be to have the whole game in one frame an load the actual level in the frame at startup. This isnt very hard to do.
I've tried to make a single frame and load level data on the go, but that's beyond what I can do right now. This game is actually being made for the retro competition that was front-paged the other day, so I actually haven't started on the engine yet. I've just been planning everything.
Yeah, you really want to try to have everything you'll ever need on your first frame before you move on to your 2nd, 3rd, and beyond. Almost nothing is worse than having to make changes to your engine when it's late in the game and there's a million frames to go back and make the changes to.
Even if you do it right, you'll probably still have to go back and make some changes. That just happens.
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About 1000-2000 objects, don't go more than than that or it'll jam up the computer.
A level editor is usually the best. Making a lot of frames is a lot of work because you'll repeat the same thing for every frame! It's also a lot of hassle to debug, because if you have a bug on one frame, chances are you'll have to fix it again for all the other frames, if you're copying and pasting frames.
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mmf is not only for games. its for presentations as well. so frames are good for short bits of animation, information, etc. in a real programming language you will literally be forced to load data from a file for different levels. otherwise you will end up with tons or repeated code. biiig no no. id suggest doing everything on one frame that the entire game encompases. then build levels from that one frame, in other frames. if the game is short than no problem. but huge games will suffer.
I started making a level editor, and I've hit my first snag. It's set up so that there are 4 types of tiles: Backgrounds, items, doodads, and enemies. I can click the "New BG" button to put a tile under the cursor (it snaps to the grid, too!). But then when I click "Add Item" it turns the background tiles into items.
There's only one tile object. Clicking the tile types just modifies an alt value to reflect which type it is going to be.
Had a sudden thought on how to fix this. But I'm attempting to make an editor! (I'll likely need help with how to turn editor data into level data, though, and how to store it.)
In my game i have stored the level specific objects and backgrounds in another frame.
The whole backdrop is put together out of tiles to large 640 x 640 pixel active objects.
One after another, these objects are now created in the game frame, pasted into the background and then destroyed.
After that, there come the wall detectors and all other objects.
You just have to type in the coordinates manually, when you create the objects.
The advantage is that you dont have to build a real editor.
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