Stuff Under the Header

5/30/2014

See, I'm Talking About Birds

This month at work I did a promotion thingy and am no longer working outside, which is both good and bad. I don't get to see my birds all day, but I don't have to die of heat like I did every day last summer. I do go outside on every lunch break though and my birds are still as happy as ever to see me.

Here's a picture of one getting a bit upset that another bird was approaching. He likes being special.













I like their poofy feathers when they get upset. This one doesn't like either males or females around when he approaches.
I'll be posting again soonish with a video of a bird, but I need to cut out some useless stuff where I didn't turn off the recording and all that.

DT3 Stuff
Chapter 17 is getting somewhat close to being done. I wish I had more time this last month to work on it, but next month should change that.











In this shot, Claire is about to run face first into a laser because the turrets above her know how to lead their targets. She'll learn after the first mistake though. Oh yeah, spoilers, some enemies in DT3 can lead their shots.

3 comments:

SouleEagleDev said...

I just found your blog, and I must say that I am very impressed. You mentioned that the enemies shots can follow you. Is this done in the step event or run in a script? Because I can imagine that having the code to follow the player be in the step event would cause a bit of lag. This is assuming that you are still using Game Maker 8.1 or Studio.

ZephyrBurst said...

You can have hundreds, even a couple thousand things trying to follow an object using the step event without lag.

What I mentioned in this post though, is an enemy leading a shot instead of shooting at the player's current position when firing. The code to find where to shoot is in a script. It's run in the step event since I have it checking where to fire so the player can see where that is. I've tested with a couple hundred of them all trying to lead with no frame rate loss.

I have two of these, the one listed in the blog, and the other is really the same thing, but it's going off a parabolic arc instead.

SouleEagleDev said...

It depends on how intelligent the leading code is. For example, in the game that I am working on, the 'bullets' have AI to avoid particular objects, while bouncing, while pathfinding towards the player object even when the player is a few platforms away. If you have a very complicated bullet object, then you can only support a few hundred, which can easily be surpassed by having enough enemies that can create the object. So, I think that to keep the game at 60 fps, you should make sure that the bullet object is not overly complex. Then again, I played the earlier DT games, and I can assume that you are going to do simple pathfinding to have the bullets reach the player. In a way, we are both right.