| SGreenslade |
Alright, I have decided to create an agi adventure called "Charlie O'Toole Student Professional Episode 1:Freshman Hijinks". It's about this freshman university student who decides to have both perfect grades and a girlfriend towards the end of the semester. Problem is he has accidently enrolled in the wrong major and the university won't allow him to change on such short notice. So he has to survive this semester before getting on to the next. Anyways, going to more technical details, I'm wondering if I'm not going over my head here. Ego's apartment building itself only has 13 rooms, university will have more and there will be other places to visit too. Since he is an electronics genius, I'm planning to give him an item that works kinda like a sentient personal assistant. This means I will be making an attempt at making an in-built hint system. Before I turn this into something of epic proportions, I'd like to know what the memory restrictions are on agi. |
| Andrew_Baker |
Well, there are the AGI specs, and the help file built into AGIStudio also lets you know a lot, but basically, think in terms of 8-bit. That is to say, every resource, flag, and variable ranges from 0-255. So, there are 256 logics, pics, views, flags, vars, and so on. Note that you can only have 255 messages per logic, though. I don't know the limit on words in the words.tok file, but VG is vocabulary robust, and I haven't hit the limit, yet. One suggestion is that if apartments or campus buildings tend to look the same, you can use one pic with views like room numbers or floor numbers add.to.pic 'ed on them. Also, if the interaction in a group of these rooms is limited, you can use Sonneveld's Pinkunz maze test as a model for using a couple logics to handle up to 256 separate rooms. One consideration that is often brought up, however, is that your game world doesn't have to include every possible room. For instance, if a room has nothing in it your character will interact with in the story, don't include it. Simply provide a logical jump from, say, your character's dorm and floor to the main lobby of his dormitory. Have the player get in the elevator and just send him to the lobby. Does the player decide to use the stairs to investigate any possible room, sorry, "Stairs are for emergency use only." That way, you'll provide all the necessary rooms without the player having to walk through a wasteland of pointless, empty locations. Plus, this saves the headache of having to draw a bunch of extraneous pics. |
| SGreenslade | Of course, but so far all the rooms I've made plan to have some interaction of course, but you're right. For the university I might have to cut back on some room space. But in terms of simultaneous processing, how can I avoid memory overloads? In the old agi processor for example on kq1, they only allowed 4 animated objects per room, so when you put the bowl down, the old man actually dissapears for a few moments. |
| sonneveld |
The maximum number of animated objects for a game is actually defined in the "objects" file. For template games it is 16 by default I believe. There's no easy to use tool to change it. - Nick |
| Joel | As far as I can tell the only thing that limits the WORDS.TOK file is the fact that the file starts with a table of two-byte offsets, none of which can be bigger than 65535. I'm not sure whether this actually limits the size of the WORDS.TOK file, though. It may just make searching big WORDS.TOK files inefficient. |