The Daily Click

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Project Started:	21st February, 2009	Last Update:	19th December, 2012
Project Owner:	Chloe Sagal	Project Members:
Project Type:	Survival	Project Progress:

spring cleaning!

Posted 18th Mar 09, by Chloe Sagal

rather than impliment new features today, i took the time to rethink and work some of my code.

first things first, i fixed the zombies targetting system. rather than rely on a small target that followed the player around (which i wanted specifically so they would find other things to do while the player was in the attic) i got rid of it completely and worked through the system through there, and it works perfectly, but once the player is in the attic they dont do anything. ill think of something creative for them to do, but in the mean time this will suffice. im debating to create a give up timer for the zombies and have them leave if the player spends too much time in the attic, as well as slowing the zombie creation counter down, so zombies will be more reluctant to visit a house with such an unattainable meal, and allowing the player to try to wait for the zombies counts to die down.

the second thing was the headshots. instead of using the head object as a marker and then deleting it, i just simply had the bullet track its position to the zombie and if it touches the zombie in a box coordinates around the zombies head, it changes animation. while this sometime causes a split second jump in the zombies animations, i felt it was necessarry to be rid of the extra object for every zombie, and sets up a rough system for allowing the player to shoot out the zombies legs.

so that means that all the zombies are down to 3 actives a piece, a sprite, a collision detector and a PMO. im thinking of a way to possibly make the collision detectors internal with the zombies, thus elimating another object (but alas most of the variables and actions are set to the collision detector, so it would mean alot of re-working)

although alot of the objects have been cut down, the game still slows down at about 15 zombies. it is my goal to have the engine run at a steady 50 fps on my machine with about 75 zombies or so, and keep the zombie count at about 40-50. i reworked alot of the code to make it more efficiant aswell, but there really isnt much difference, and i need to figure out what it is that is killing the framerate so much (it is most likely a combination of the binoculars, the paralaxing, and the overlays, unfortunatly there really isnt much work around that i know of and i feel that these are very necessary features) pretty soon im going to be in the market for someone who knows click and will be willing to go over the code with me to make it more efficiant, so if anyone reads this and would like to give it a shot, feel free to let me know (and trust me, there are incentives that ill fill you in on if i believe you qualify)

im thinking that i want to have the player hold the gun down until the player holds a key and starts aiming the gun, and using the mouse wheel, the player can move the screen back and fourth based on the current range of the gun, to give it more of an aim feel. i also feel that im going leave the target out of the game completly and make it a little more difficult to aim the gun, rather than letting the player rely on a cursor telling the player where to aim. if i decide to go with the difficulty settings, maybe on hard there arent any sights, on medium a cursor and on easy a lazersight (the lazer sight would point exactly to where the player is aiming with the bobbing and stuff, whearas the curosor would just be about where the mouse is.)

i wanted to do so much more today, but unfortunatly my mouse is getting so bad that it takes about 10 clicks or so to click on one thing, and you can forget about dragging stuff. so ill just take a break today and get a new mouse tomorrow and we'll go from there.

i want to thank everyone who has been helping me with their suggestions for this game so far! this has been a very enjoyable expirience and with everyones great attitudes it certainly makes it that much better! keep me posted on your thoughts and ideas!

*QUICK UPDATE*
i read some of pixeltheifs articles and for the last test, at 38 zombies the game slowed to about 16 fps with 222 objects. thats alot better that 1 fps with 24 zombies. i also fixed it so the bullet picks one zombie to hit, and wont hurt entire groups anymore, and worse, for headshots kill one zombie and just destroy the head of the other overlapping zombie.

Posted by Eternal Man [EE]

18th March, 2009