Sunday, June 27, 2010

Snowfare Level 8 (Part 1): Three-way throws, smarter detection, ball catching and attacking all reds!

Things to check out: There’s 3 directions that a green guy can throw, he is way more accurate whenever there’s danger (both when red guy is loaded and when a ball is already mid-air), he can catch balls every so often, and I use Grid-Collision Checking. Yes, this Grid-Collision checking became an obsession and it will benefit me.

Yup, efficiency took preference here again, mainly because for the sole reason that I was increasing in different collision checks, and it was really taking a toll on performance. So I implemented/modified Keith Peter’s Grid Collision method, which is great since it really cuts down on number of collisions.

Basically the concept here is that two objects far away shouldn’t be checked for collisions. You create a grid and plot every element in an area, so that you only check the grid spots around each element, and perform collision-checking on those. It’s a fairly interesting concept, I cut down the checks (the bottom left number was used for testing purposes - ignore it) and thus optimized the game. Grant Skinner also has a great article and full source code of his implementation that you should also check out.

COMING UP: This is part 1, I wanted to include some dodge-jumping tactics, onfloor danger detection/dodging, and more importantly, explosions.

Posted via email from VG Games

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

This site has over 600 views and post views are increasing everyday!

Thanks to those who are taking a look at what I put up, it means a lot! At the time of writing, most of the posts on posterous have achieved over 300 views, although I don't understand why the "website count" is just over 600, whereas the post views combined is a lot more. Maybe its one guy viewing my posts 300 times each. If so, thanks buddy, you're my number one fan!

I've been working heavily on level 8, I keep getting caught up in optimization, but sometimes I end up finding better ways to code to make future updates a lot more plausible. Expect a snowball to the face soon.

Posted via web from VG Games