The overflow point in bgt is 10000 calls. I was pretty much having functions call each other without ever using returns, so odds are I would have hit that limit before completing the game. I'm planning to do some restructuring, and hopefully I'll be
able to at least heavily reduce the size of the stack. As a reference point, by the time the player would have finished approximately what I expect to be the first seen of the game, the call stack is around 400 function calls. This is also running on
an early early setup of the game; so for all I know there's going to be a lot more functions added, which would have driven that number up even further.
----- Original Message -----
From: Thomas Ward <thomasward1...@gmail.com
To: Gamers Discussion list <gamers@audyssey.org
Date sent: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 22:17:18 -0400
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] clear call stack in bgt
Hi John,
I will answer your questions as best I can but I think you have some
confusion over what the call stack is, how it works, and therefore may
be worrying about nothing.
First, as to your question there is no way to kill the stack with out
killing the entire program. If your function that clears the stack
returns there would essentially be nothing left in memory to return to
resulting in a crash. Quite frankly put since the stack holds the
memory address of every function and variable in your program if you
kill the stack you might as well kill the entire program since there
are essentially no functions and variables in memory to access.
Second, as for creating the size of the call stack don't worry about
it too much. If you are paranoid about this all you have to do is some
very memory efficient coding such as instead of using a lot of global
variables pass information by reference to functions and use local
variables as often as possible. Every time a function returns the
function itself is released from the stack, and any variables etc
contained there in are also removed freeing up more memory on the
stack for more functions and variables.
I don't honestly see you having a serious stack overflow here, because
BGT seems to have a reasonably large enough call stack for any game
you can conceive of. Its not about how many functions you have in the
program or how many times you call them. As I said every time a
function returns the function is removed from the stack along with any
pointers, objects, and variables it may contain in the local scope so
its not like that stuff remains in memory forever. Sooner or later it
will get removed from the stack making room for something else.
That said, using loops like a while loop is more memory efficient than
using recursion. In other words if you need to perform the same action
multiple times instead of simply calling the same function over and
over again, (recursion,) put it in a loop so that the function only
gets called when a certain state is true, and if not the loop exits
and the function can be removed from the stack.
Cheers!
On 8/29/14, john <jpcarnemo...@gmail.com> wrote:
HI all,
As the subject suggests, I'm wondering if its possible to clear (or
increase the size of) the call stack in bgt (or any programming language,
for that matter). I'm having difficulty from keeping my projects from
continually increasing the size
of the stack, and while this would be just fine for a small program, I'm
pretty sure my major project is going to go over 10000 eventually, possibly
regardless of how perfectly the player performs. If there's no way to do
this, are there any tips I
can get as to how to make a program continue running without increasing the
call stack, as I'm going to have to be constantly switching between
functions, that need to be able to call each other a theoretically infinite
number of times.
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