Tech stuff and updates

Game

Avengers: United Battle Force

Douglas Baldan (O Ilusionista) @douglasbaldan

7 years ago

Kinda technical tidbits, but here we go
• I am constantly trying to improve the game, size wise and resource wise. I managed to save 3.6mb of RAM usage by changing how the bios are displayed on the screen. Instead of using an entity for each character bios (so we are talking about extra 22 entities just for that), I am using a single entity, with a big image, and shifiting its position when I summon them.

And I’ve discovered something: using “summonframe”, there is a limit of how far in Z axis an entity can be. If you try to put an entity with a Z position greater than 2000px, the entity gets killed by the engine - and “offscreenkill” doesn’t affects it at all. So, to bypass this, instead of shifting the Z axis, I’ve used the A (Y) axis. The engine doesn’t seams to care about an entity being at 7000px high, lol.

3.6mb of RAM, nowadays, is NOTHING - specially for a Windows port. For Android port, it won’t be nothing too.
It could be a life saver if this game runs in WII or PSP, but since it doesn’t works (and I have no plans to make it work, since it will grow bigger), its not the case. But a save is a save

• I’ve trimmed some fat from the game, by removing unused stuff from the folders. This trim helped the game to load a little faster (for example, the bios files were reduzed from 266 files to only 11) and reduced the game size down to 80.1mb. Just for comparsion, the previous release weights 79mb, and we have way more content now.

• Thanks to the constant support and feedback I receive, specially from Psykai, I could improved some characters and made them less subjected to be hit on air. For example, Beast’s Rolling Attack now bounces less when hitting something and won’t bounce it the target dies.

• Wolverine’s Drill Claw now doens’t makes him bounce when hit anymore. Plus, his hyper move now fails way less