James, Unfortunately, it all depends. :-) It depends on the complexity of your game and your AI - on how big your play area is and on how much optimisation you want to do.
I've seen the following approaches or combinations of these approaches: i) AI (and pixel-perfect x/y positioning) is maintained for every object all of the time (slowest and most memory intensive) ii) AI (pathfinding etc.) is maintained while offscreen, and 'grid location' for each object, but not pixel location. That's only turned on when an object gets 'close' to the screen. iii) AI (pathfinding etc.) is only maintained for objects close to the screen - anything too far away from the screen essentially 'freezes'. This sort of approach is often dealt with using sectors or regions, for speed - each region has a list of objects/enemies that are currently inside it, and only the regions in the vicinity of the player are turned on; the rest just aren't processed during a game-update loop. iv) AI _is_ maintained while objects are offscreen, but their AI update is run on a slower update rate than the AI for objects near to/on the screen. But in reality, there are as many approaches as there are programmers! Of the above, I favour number iii) for a grid-based running-around-sort-of-a-game - but as I said, it depends on the game and circumstances. Hope that's of some help. Ian On 4/27/07, James Marsden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello all, When building a game where collision detection for enemies is important (such as a scrolling tile game), how do you create persistent AI for an enemy when it's off-screen? For example, walking away from the enemy causes it to be removed from the game area, but the enemy needs to keep wandering around the world in virtual terms, so the player can't easily tell where the enemy is going to be when returning to the same area. How do you maintain that interaction for the enemy, or is it not done like that because it's too processor intensive? Any tips or pointers to resources would be much appreciated. Thanks! James _______________________________________________ Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com
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