Revelations from 40 hours.. REST + SLOW Collection Proxies

#1

40 hours at a game jam making a game, pretty hardcore late nights & very little sleep.

I worked a little bit in a hotel which helped flow development. I used Trello with (TODO/MVP/Stretch).

Personal Revelations:

  1. REST is good, some kind of game_world.script
    with requests to get and set core gameplay values

  2. I now want to develop some kind of subscribe/unsubscribe protocol via messaging for core game data (on value change, all subscribers are notified of that change)

  3. Collection proxies have performance issues with loading/enabling etc, async_loading audio stutters

  4. Audio stutters can be solved with 3rd party audio technology (please let me know more on this one)

  5. Naturally you can cover some stutters during a collection proxy starting by using transitions like a white background going alpha = 0.0 quickly,
    smoothing rough edges in particular because I used it in a text GUI life simulator

  6. Lua tables are like objects, and they are sent very easily through messages so USE them

  7. I think it wise to use collection proxy changes judiciously and drive core gameplay without regular proxy collection swaps… unless someone has a good way to do this, I encountered stutters and delays even with async_load prior to enabling them

Please post your own opinion/ideas and if you have any solutions to my issues :slight_smile:

1 Like
#2

So for 5, do you get white flashes with collection proxies?

#3

The background of the game is white so that the white sprite alpha ‘tint’ animation makes the game appear as if it is fading in, not a flash in my case… kind of smooth :slight_smile:

I will add another issue I had was in scripts for newly enabled collection proxies. At first they would not have the data needed for some player information. The transition helped provide the frames needed to request the data from the ‘game_world.script’.