Hey all again,
Sorry for all the posts recently but i really appreciate the help you’ve all been giving.
This time I was wondering about the pro’s/cons of using Timers, Events, and MainLoops.
In older Actionscript 2 games that I’ve built, I had a main loop than ran onEnterFrame to update certain things (movement, etc).
Since I don’t want to be a slave to the end user’s framerate, I was thinking of using a Timer, where lets say 10 times a second, it will update all the things that need updating.
But in OO AS3.0 World, this still seems like a wrong approach.
A couple of ideas were to use Events and Timers. So every NPC in the gameworld has their own personal Timer or a ProcessTimer, and at each interval, the NPC takes action on whatever needs to have action taken.
For example, a BadGuy is standing all alone in a field. His individual timer is running and every interval we make a random choice to change direction, if we change direction, we animate that and then check his field of view to see if he sees anything. If not, we just keep the timer running and let him continue his sentry duty.
If the player runs into the field of view, we should broadcast an event that the BadGuy is listening for and will then take action at his next Timer interval.
It seems to me that this way, every object in the gameworld is responsible for itself and it’s own processes and does them when necessary. My worry is that when i have 20 NPCs all running their own Timer’s and listening to events etc that I’m going to get a huge performance hit.
I also want to be able to quickly pause the game, so with this approach I would have to loop through all my actors and turn off their individual timers too… or does a simple Stop(); actually stop everything thats going on?
Any ideas, thoughts, comments?
Thanks!
