How to destory/delete objects?

[tyuo9980]

How would you delete a variable after there is a collision made with it?

eg) if you shoot an enemy the enemy dies and disappears, how would you delete the enemy's x and y coords?

[Raknarg]

You can't. The most common solution to use is a dead/alive boolean variable.

[tyuo9980]

and then i can resort the true/false ones and then reduce the size of the flex array to save memory!

that was what i was thinking as well. hoped for another way tho. thanks.

[Raknarg]

Why bother with a flexible array? It's a waste of memory.

[Insectoid]

Better to not reduce the size of the array, since doing so will cause a lot of lag. Turing doesn't actually resize the array; it makes a new one with the new size, copies everything from the old one into the new one, and deletes the old one. Might as well just use a large array (which also allows you to not increase the size of the array when adding new bullets/enemies).

[tyuo9980]

Insectoid @ Thu May 12, 2011 8:44 pm wrote:

Better to not reduce the size of the array, since doing so will cause a lot of lag. Turing doesn't actually resize the array; it makes a new one with the new size, copies everything from the old one into the new one, and deletes the old one. Might as well just use a large array (which also allows you to not increase the size of the array when adding new bullets/enemies).

im making a geo wars pacifism clone. take a look in the new thread that i made in this forum just now. youll see what i mean. i might possibly have over hundreds of objects.

[Tony]

You could keep a statically allocated array, and an index variable that specifies where the content ends. Then just increment/decrement it when you need more/less space.

[tyuo9980]

Tony @ Thu May 12, 2011 9:04 pm wrote:

You could keep a statically allocated array, and an index variable that specifies where the content ends. Then just increment/decrement it when you need more/less space.

so like for x : array 1 .. endx of int?

would that work? since the array declaration isnt in the loop. and wouldnt that also make it slower?

[Tony]

something like

code:

var my_array : array 1 .. 10 of int var end_of_array : int := 5 for i : 1 .. end_of_array   ...

you are working with an array of 5 elements, but allocated enough space for 10 items.

[Insectoid]

More like;

code:

var foo : array 1..1000 of int var endx : int := 1 for x : 1..endx     %do stuff end for

Having hundreds of objects is precisely why you do NOT want to use a flexible array. Multiple objects will be created/destroyed every frame, so you'd be creating/destroying the entire array several times per frame. This would slow down incredibly fast.

[tyuo9980]

ok i see. just one huge array then.

i think 500 elements is enough since ill be sorting.

[Insectoid]

Sorting is also resource intensive. Might wanna limit how often you sort everything.

[Tony]

why would you need to sort that array?

[tyuo9980]

Tony @ Thu May 12, 2011 9:33 pm wrote:

why would you need to sort that array?

well i wouldnt want to waste any more cpu power by drawing unneeded things on the screen so i would have an array of boolean to see how many enemies are still alive and then draw the minimum number of enemies.

[Tony]

it sounds like you'll be using a lot more CPU resources doing the sorting.

Also, it wouldn't be necessary to sort anything, if your array contains only the elements that are alive.