1000 objects

[Shari]

>It seems unlikely that a player is going to be able to interact with 142
>separate objects at one time on their screen, much less 1000.  I wonder if
>they would even fit on the screen, if your game contains environmental art
>(card table, other players, etc).  But assuming there was space, I would say
>it's up to you to effectively manage what players have access to, and to use
>representations of groups of chips when appropriate.  If a players stacks 10
>chips, you replace the stack of 10 objects with a single "chip stack"
>object.  If the player wants to play with the chips separately, maybe they
>have to place the "stack" on the table (or whatever is appropriate).  This
>requires some efficiency planning on your part.
>
>Just because you *can* have access to 1000 objects/chips doesn't mean you
>*have* to make them separate objects.
>
>Regards,
>
>Scott Rossi

Actually it fits very well :-)  I had the same issue when I changed 
how I approached the cards.  I had to have 416 objects for the cards, 
representing 8 decks times 52 cards.  The original version didn't do 
it that way, but a recent upgrade did.  You don't believe one could 
use that many cards at once?  Well, seven players times multiple 
hands per player times multiple cards per hand... plus the dealer... 
can add up to a lot of cards.

And it isn't up to me, this particular version upgrade is about 
beating out the competitors.  There are quite a few competitors that 
have come into this, and from a marketing perspective, if I don't 
compete, I am dead in the water.

 From a marketing perspective there are two ways to approach it:

1.  You give them more bang for the buck.  If there are 10 programs 
each selling for the same price, yours better have more goodies than 
the other 9.

2.  You drop the price and hope they don't want those goodies bad 
enough to pay your competitors the extra bucks.

I'm competing with not only other shareware authors and retail games, 
but now the casinos have jumped into it and have put out freebie 
versions.  As this game is my bread and butter of software sales, 
either it grows or dies.  Man, the graphics of one of the competitors 
just blows me out of the water.  So I'm stuffing this version with 
every danged possible option anybody could want, and one last tweak 
of the graphics... the chips.  And even then it will be missing 
things others have.  Geez, there are so many things I can put into 
this thing.  The list never runs out.  But even so it will have 
things others are missing.  So I guess it's all about what's most 
important to those spending their money.

If you've ever gambled, it's pretty big watching those chips either 
stack up or dwindle away.  The visual aspect of it ... pretty big. 
So visually the chips are going to be just as if it were a real 
casino... chips stacking up, if the stack gets a certain height the 
chips will color up...

The game itself doesn't slow down for the additional overhead, just 
Metacard itself when the Control Browser is open.  Actually I take 
that back, I haven't finished the coding to play the game in its 
newest incarnation :-)  But I don't think it will slow the game down.

I have a memory card I've never installed, maybe it's time to go from 
128 MB RAM to 256... (yup, I'm in the dark ages as usual....)

Shari
-- 
Mac and Windows shareware games
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