I'm assuming you're drawing something like face-down playing cards.
If the appearance is always the same, another way to handle something
like this would be to have one graphic instead of many, calculate
where the click occurred and then do what is appropriate based on that.
As far as really nice graphics go -- hire Scott ;-)
gc
On May 27, 2005, at 8:04 PM, Shari wrote:
It seems unlikely that a player is going to be able to interact
with 142
separate objects at one time on their screen, much less 1000. I
wonder if
they would even fit on the screen, if your game contains
environmental art
(card table, other players, etc). But assuming there was space, I
would say
it's up to you to effectively manage what players have access to,
and to use
representations of groups of chips when appropriate. If a players
stacks 10
chips, you replace the stack of 10 objects with a single "chip stack"
object. If the player wants to play with the chips separately,
maybe they
have to place the "stack" on the table (or whatever is
appropriate). This
requires some efficiency planning on your part.
Just because you *can* have access to 1000 objects/chips doesn't
mean you
*have* to make them separate objects.
Regards,
Scott Rossi
Actually it fits very well :-) I had the same issue when I changed
how I approached the cards. I had to have 416 objects for the
cards, representing 8 decks times 52 cards. The original version
didn't do it that way, but a recent upgrade did. You don't believe
one could use that many cards at once? Well, seven players times
multiple hands per player times multiple cards per hand... plus the
dealer... can add up to a lot of cards.
And it isn't up to me, this particular version upgrade is about
beating out the competitors. There are quite a few competitors
that have come into this, and from a marketing perspective, if I
don't compete, I am dead in the water.
From a marketing perspective there are two ways to approach it:
1. You give them more bang for the buck. If there are 10 programs
each selling for the same price, yours better have more goodies
than the other 9.
2. You drop the price and hope they don't want those goodies bad
enough to pay your competitors the extra bucks.
I'm competing with not only other shareware authors and retail
games, but now the casinos have jumped into it and have put out
freebie versions. As this game is my bread and butter of software
sales, either it grows or dies. Man, the graphics of one of the
competitors just blows me out of the water. So I'm stuffing this
version with every danged possible option anybody could want, and
one last tweak of the graphics... the chips. And even then it will
be missing things others have. Geez, there are so many things I
can put into this thing. The list never runs out. But even so it
will have things others are missing. So I guess it's all about
what's most important to those spending their money.
If you've ever gambled, it's pretty big watching those chips either
stack up or dwindle away. The visual aspect of it ... pretty big.
So visually the chips are going to be just as if it were a real
casino... chips stacking up, if the stack gets a certain height the
chips will color up...
The game itself doesn't slow down for the additional overhead, just
Metacard itself when the Control Browser is open. Actually I take
that back, I haven't finished the coding to play the game in its
newest incarnation :-) But I don't think it will slow the game down.
I have a memory card I've never installed, maybe it's time to go
from 128 MB RAM to 256... (yup, I'm in the dark ages as usual....)
Shari
--
Mac and Windows shareware games
http://www.gypsyware.com
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