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Posted By

MIK
on 2014-09-23
07:15:55
 Re: Manage tons of enemies theoretically

I'm not a coder so I can't be taken seriously haha! grin

All commando clones are fixed in some way or another to the amount of AI that can be displayed at any given time. The more AI you add the more retarded some games become... which is the normal rule such as Rambo which uses random placement code to make the AI which is for the most part dumb. However this is always fixed to a maximum amount of bad guys that can be displayed at any given time.

Ikari Warriors C64 is all setpiece sequences triggered by markers in the landscape as you walk up the screen which in turn are told to fire in your direction randomly. It also uses what I would call Magnet Code... While the timing of actual shots being fired towards you from the AI is totally random and will only fire when told too, no matter where you are standing they will ways fire towards you like a magnet.
Ikari Warriors C64 uses tricks to add more to the screen that what you think is going on like a line of 6 bad guys are in fact one unit that move together so are not individual enemies until they are standing still. From the standing still mode they turn into nothing more than gun turrets that fire at random.
Don't forget Ikari Warriors C64 also makes current enemies run off the screen when it needs to trigger more setpiece sequences to come into play, limiting at any given time the amount that's really going on. When you start stripping down Ikari Warrors C64 to the bare bones it sounds cheap and very orchestrated, but because it's been so well thought out and timed to perfection type thing it actually makes an awesome game as the end result. I rate C64 Ikari Warriors as the best version ever created, best commando type game of all time ever, better than the arcade machine that goes by the same name too! wink

And as Luca said you can make the game area/window smaller to speed things up.

In a nut shell you can do all sorts of tricks to make something seam like more than what it really is while freeing up CPU cycles per second. Moving a team of bad guys as one unit is a good way to make people believe there is more going on... With that in mind, the actual firing that's really going on per second is less that you might think in a Commando clone any way. It's all clever stuff, even a Nintendo Game & Watch can catch you out when they speed up, sort of suggesting it's not how much but what you do with it that counts.

One last thought...
If you put some of the above idea's into the game Lemmings you can sort of understand how they did it, blocks of guys as one unit walking along back and forth. The CPU is then governed by how many units it can process instead of processing 30 Lemmings individually, a human can't control 30 Lemmings per second with activities on an individual bases.wink



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