Jerky Movement In Games

[paulsteven]

Hi all

Its day 1 of my making games with Flash and I have just made a start on Pacman. Presently all I have done is have a pacman movie clip controllable by the user with the arrow keys. But it is extremely jerky - I have tried changing the movie fps and the distance pacman moves every frame loop and it seems to make no difference.

Has anyone else experiienced jerky movement in their games and found a solution. If its this jerky before I have added any serious coding goodness knows what it will be like then.

Btw I am running it on a PIII 256 Ram Win 98

Here it is if you fancy checking out the jerkiness!

http://www.themediakitchen.co.uk

Cheers

Paul

[Mad-Sci]

Hi and welcome to the Games Section.
What do you mean by jerk movement it was prety good on my comp. I see you use step of 1 to move the Pac why dont you try to increase let say up to 5 see how it moves.
Im impressed how you redo the Chuckie Egg. ZX fann?
Mad_sci

[jobemjobem]

hi

thats not too jerky in my opinion. but try increacing the frame rate to 50 (i usually use 50 fps for games). things will probably go more smoothly then.

[Ray Beez]

The bottom line is that Flash just is not suited to action games. For a pacman game, I'd recommend using Shockwave. It has highly optimized graphics routines best suited to sprite based games.

There are other options, like The Game Factory, but it needs users to download a plugin called "Vitalize". Again Shockwave is the better choice just because of the installed base of plugins.

[paulsteven]

Hi there

Glad you liked the Chuckie Egg Mad Sci

Ray Beez said "For a pacman game, I'd recommend using Shockwave"

I wish I could - it would be alot easier - but the client has insisted on it being done in Flash - they have seen the following Pacman game so it can obviously be done.

http://www.pccs-design.co.uk/games/P1.html

Anyway it is a good exercise for me to learn Flash and its fun!

Next problem I face is making the Pacman stay within the boundaries of the game screen - it doesn't appear to be a regular grid pattern so I am a bit unsure how to go about this - if I was able to use lists I could just have a list of every possible position with properties of the allowable movement directions but as far as I can see I would have to create a shed loads of variables i.e one for each possible position on the grid - I guess this would really slow down the game.

Any suggestions most welcome - please

Cheers

Paul

[K.A.R.L. 2000]

It might not be as slow as you think, test it out.
One trick is to base the names of the variables on the character's x and y coords so you'll know exactly what variable to look up.
That's the basick idea, but it gets a little more involved, check out the following threads on Tile Based Worlds:

http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...?threadid=7427
http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...threadid=10833

And check out this site for general game programming info. It's got a section for Tile Based Worlds:
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/.../gameprog.html

[Ray Beez]

I tried that pacman you posted the URL for...
Looks very nice. But it's SOOOO slow and choppy, it's no fun to play. If a game is no fun to play, no one will play it. Does your client realize this?

Sorry to be annoying.

[paulsteven]

Thanks for your reply Raz Beez - of course the client doesn't realise its not going to be the most amazing arcade game ever but "the client is always right" - Not! I think their justification for using Flash is that the number of people with the flash plugin is considerably more than those with the director plugin.

Just out of interest what spec of machine did you try that pacman game on - it seemed ok on my pc (Dell PIII 256 RAM - GeForce Pro)

Perhaps I should try playing it on my mac - thats always good for a laugh.

Hopefully Flash 5 will bring improved speed for these types of games with its new action scripting abilities.

Cheers

Paul

[Ray Beez]

I have a P2 300 Celeron, 64 megs ram, 8 meg ATI AGP card.

I think my system is pretty "average". Yours sounds like a gamer's system ;-)