Re: Jury's Game Thread
Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 10:24 am
I think i now know how you are organizing the items. You seem to have one attribute per item type, like one attribute for potions, one for small swords, one for big swords... (sorry but you just did not give me any information on how you are doing it...)
Wait, i now get it. The insane amount of items is causing you to look through all items, if one is 0 it won't get displayed, so you have to look for the next... (I am doing it differently, the player has a specific amount of slots, and each slot can store one specific item, or another item...) You can try this:
You would still have to go through a loop to determine which items are visible. Well, at least you now don't have to fill your array. (Does not save much)
OR:
You use your idea of caching your items.
The thing with the 'unlimited array size' is an old problem in the programming area. You could just fake it by making an array that is EXTREMELY big (Like 500 entries or such) and covers ALL items the player has.
Then you can just use a SCROLLNUMBER and everything is fine. (And just update this giant array when you get into the inventory, it might also help if you used a flag that shows if the array is still valid like ARRAY_VALID, if you pick somthing up, it gets false and the next time you enter the inventory it gets updated)
EDIT: Ah Final Fantasy 4... it's so cool...
Wait, i now get it. The insane amount of items is causing you to look through all items, if one is 0 it won't get displayed, so you have to look for the next... (I am doing it differently, the player has a specific amount of slots, and each slot can store one specific item, or another item...) You can try this:
Code: Select all
ITEMS_DISPLAYED [0] //holds amount of items already displayed
CUR_ITEM [0] //current 'item number' (let's say your attributes are called 'item_1', 'item_2',... one for each of the item types)
ITEM_AMOUNT [0] //amount of current item
//All Item names
ITEMS_NAME
{
...
}
DisplayItem[ ()
{
ITEM_AMOUNT=GetAttribute("item_" # CUR_ITEM,"Player");
if(ITEM_AMOUNT>0)
{
//Y position is calculated with the ITEMS_DISPLAYED
DrawText(ITEMS_NAME[CUR_ITEM],64,32+ITEMS_DISPLAYED*16,...);
DrawText(,64,32+ITEMS_DISPLAYED*16,...);
ITEMS_DISPLAYED=StringCopy(ITEMS_DISPLAYED)+1;
}
CUR_ITEM=StringCopy(CUR_ITEM)+1;
} ]
OR:
You use your idea of caching your items.
The thing with the 'unlimited array size' is an old problem in the programming area. You could just fake it by making an array that is EXTREMELY big (Like 500 entries or such) and covers ALL items the player has.
Then you can just use a SCROLLNUMBER and everything is fine. (And just update this giant array when you get into the inventory, it might also help if you used a flag that shows if the array is still valid like ARRAY_VALID, if you pick somthing up, it gets false and the next time you enter the inventory it gets updated)
EDIT: Ah Final Fantasy 4... it's so cool...
Seems like I'll have to make a huge array then to cache things in it to avoid the loop. Hopefully that won't cause memory issues. I'll give it a shot though. I was also thining of making specific slots like you had that are always present (some games including FF do that, you can scroll through the menu pages even though items are not displayed at all). I guess those are the only two ways to go and both will have a big load time when the menu loads but none afterward, which is definatly preferable to many small load times every time the player scrolls. Oh well, no one will use a 6 year old laptop to play it anyway so either way it will probably be fine (and it probably won't ever come out) so I guess I should move on 
You don't know on what ideas you have just brought me, Juutis. This can be used to make a 3d inventory and menu in which the player can select the 3d items / options with the mouse. 