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Late Projectiles

by Dylan Sale · in Torque Game Engine · 02/03/2003 (7:49 am) · 5 replies

For IsotopeX we need a lot of projectile to spawn at once when the trigger is pressed (I mean approx 25 - 50 projectiles).
I got the scripts working and all, but it takes a while for all of the projectiles to be displayed once they have been shot (a few appear, then the rest come 1 at a time). I removed the particles and they are each 2 polys (billboards), so it isnt the rendering.

Is this just a quirk of the engine and if so, could someone please point me in the right direction to finding out how to make it work (or can it even work?)

This is a pretty big part of IsotopeX and I would appreciate ANY help.

Dylan
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Associate Kyle Carter
#1
02/03/2003 (10:37 am)
I would guess (depending on the time frame) that the network is getting saturated, so after the first few packets describing projectiles it's lazily updating the projectiles as packets on them come in.

The best solution would probably be to make a deterministic "projectile burst" object, where you give it the type of projectiles to emit, a random number seed so that it will be in agreement with the server, and other parameters so it knows where to emit them. That way, you only send a few hundred bytes over the network, instead of a few hundred per projectile.

On the other hand, that's kind of a complicated way to do it :-/

I don't really have a better idea than that... Oh, you could preemptively send the projectiles. Extend the projectile so that it has a "launch time", and send it a little bit before that time. That gives the network time to propagate everything.

Good luck :)

Torque Owner Dylan Sale
#2
02/03/2003 (5:51 pm)
Thanks for responding.

Yeah thats pretty much the only way I can think of making these projectiles work... But the thing is, that each of them have their own patterns.. None of them are random. Oh well I'll figure out a way ;)

Torque Owner Dylan Sale
#3
02/04/2003 (5:38 am)
Does anyone else have any clue on what I should do?

Torque Owner Paul Scott
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#4
02/04/2003 (5:58 am)
I like the random number seed idea. Thing is, its a lot of work that may involve revising work already completed.
You say that the projectiles each have thier own pattern. Why not find a way to make the patterns deterministic? That way the random number seed thing would work just fine. If each projectile pattern does not have random values, but stuff that is hardcoded somehow, then perhaps just let the seed determine which projectile to use? For instance, it could be a lookup index into your table of predetermined projectile patterns.

Torque Owner Dylan Sale
#5
02/04/2003 (7:10 am)
ok. Say I do figure out a way to determine the patterns made by the projectiles (not very hard when I think about it), any hints on how I could get the client to make a whole mass of them.. I just need a point in the general direction, Like the specific class that would need to be edited for the client to make new objects.. would it be SimSet? I havent really looked into the client side of things too much.