Is it possible to have items or spells which affect your character for a limited amount of time?
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that's really the same question as the "day or night" thing. it all boils down to: will coldstone be able to access the system clock?
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Originally posted by jmitchell:
**that's really the same question as the "day or night" thing. it all boils down to: will coldstone be able to access the system clock?
**It doesn't REALLY have to access the system clock does it. I mean, a timer is a timer. You have a dagger that is linked to an event that when first equipped (see pic of the day 8/13) will give you the ability turn your enemies into little birdies by stabbing them and start a timer for 15 minutes. When 15 minutes is over, the new event is called which takes away the ability to turn your enemies into little birdies. And I guess the item goes away.
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Originally posted by Kireck L:
**It doesn't REALLY have to access the system clock does it. I mean, a timer is a timer. You have a dagger that is linked to an event that when first equipped (see pic of the day 8/13) will give you the ability turn your enemies into little birdies by stabbing them and start a timer for 15 minutes. When 15 minutes is over, the new event is called which takes away the ability to turn your enemies into little birdies. And I guess the item goes away.
::shrugs::**
how do you think ColdStone will measure 15 minutes?
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Originally posted by jmitchell:
**how do you think ColdStone will measure 15 minutes?:)
**I suppose it's one of those things where 1=1/10 of a second or something like that. 10 for a second. 600 for one minute. 9000 for 15 minutes. I think that's right. But that's only if it's THAT kind of timer, I'm probably wrong. And if the timer is a hush-hush kind of subject, then I don't wanna be bothered.
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You all seem the assume that there will be an in game clock/time. There has been no official word on it yet. If I were you, I'd plan your games so they don't need a timer.
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Originally posted by the Necromicon:
**You all seem the assume that there will be an in game clock/time.
**see, that's what I've been saying. now why do they listen when you say it?
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Do not follow me for I may not lead. Do not lead for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. Just leave me the hell alone.
-Jedi -
(quote)Originally posted by jmitchell:
**see, that's what I've been saying. now why do they listen when you say it?
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(b)Ladies and Gentlemen, as you know we have something special for you at
Birdland this evening. A recording for Blue Note Records...**
Let's take it back to the concrete streets, original beats and real live MC's...
"We find it hard to strike a good balance between reality and fun. The reason being? Reality is often not fun." - _pipeline -
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Originally posted by ben1cohen:
**The easy way out would be to make a script which loops a specific number of times; i.e. something along the lines of (with pseudo syntax)While foo < 50
do bar
foo = foo + 1the only problem is that this might take different amounts of time depending on how fast the machine was.**
Lol, I made an accurate (to the second) clock program on my TI-83 calculator using that method once. Completely off-topic, but oh well. If I need a reason for posting, I'm validating bens remark.
Saphfire
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Originally posted by ben1cohen:
**Did it take a lot of trial and error to figure out how long it took your calculater to execute the loop?**
Not really...I basically timed it for 5 seconds and then calculated a rough estimate of the minutes from that. From there, it was trial and error, but it wasn't difficult. Besides, it was on a long trip, and I had nothing else to do ;).
Saphfire
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Originally posted by ben1cohen:
**The easy way out would be to make a script which loops a specific number of times; i.e. something along the lines of (with pseudo syntax)While foo < 50
do bar
foo = foo + 1the only problem is that this might take different amounts of time depending on how fast the machine was.**
Easy way out?
And what method are you going to use to trigger this loop?
Every mouse click? (how?)
Every key stroke? (how?)
Even if you wished to trigger the script every so often, you would still have to determine 'every so often' and you are back where you started from!
You could scatter ramdom events about the game that would trigger this event script but you wouldn't want to do this too often or the game would be very sluggish! And you would have thousands or identical events scattered about.
And then you would need another large series of events scattered about to read the value of 'foo' to determine if certain time related events should occur (since you don't have a built-in timer to trigger time related events.)
:eek:
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Originally posted by ben1cohen:
**Well the question is in terms of a spell that lasted a certain amount of time. So therefore, it would be triggered when the player activated the spell...
**Sorry 'bout that but since you didn't quote the original message I thought that you were addressing the posts immediately preceeding yours.
But your method still wouldn't work as you suggest for spell duration. Unless Coldstone is capable of producing threaded game code: multiprocessing or having background processes running. You don't want the game to come to a halt while the 'while/do' loop is running.
The timer needs to be 'running' in the background and can be a global variable whose value is periodically updated by the game engine and is either based on a linear transformation of the system clock (unless you want to use real time) or is incremented by 'player action'.
One method of 'player action' would have each movement tile possess a 'time to cross' value (different for different types of tiles) and this value would automatically be used to increment the 'timer' GV as the player landed on the tile(s).
But the timer update code needs to be in the game engine itself.
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well, further on those loop timers: besides that they would run down your own system, they'd be completely unreliable. a G4 dual 800 would wind up with a clock moving much faster than a rev A iMac, so your game would have very different play on different machines.
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Do not follow me for I may not lead. Do not lead for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. Just leave me the hell alone.
-Jedi -
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Originally posted by jmitchell:
**well, further on those loop timers: besides that they would run down your own system, they'd be completely unreliable. a G4 dual 800 would wind up with a clock moving much faster than a rev A iMac, so your game would have very different play on different machines.**
Very true, but the fact remains, this isn't new uncharted territory we're trekking, this has all been done before. And I know that it can be done without accessing the system clock. I don't even think consoles have a clock, and they're used the same technologies for years. Efficient Timers can be done. If they can't, tis a sad day for Coldstone.
Saphfire
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Originally posted by saphfire:
**Very true, but the fact remains, this isn't new uncharted territory we're trekking, this has all been done before. And I know that it can be done without accessing the system clock. I don't even think consoles have a clock, and they're used the same technologies for years. Efficient Timers can be done. If they can't, tis a sad day for Coldstone.Saphfire
**Please, ALL computers/microprocessors/consoles have a system clock. If it is digital (0's and 1's) the voltage that is applied to the circuits must be pulsed at a given frequency to create the 0's and 1's. This applied frequency forms the ticking that is the fundamental frequency of the system clock. Hardware and software (firmware) can modify this frequency and manufacture different and slower ticks for various buss's, chips, counters and program needs.
As was pointed out in another thread, consoles and their games are usually written in assembly and other higher level languages that do have commands to access the system clock or related frequency timer. Thus the sense of time in these games. Computer games written from scratch using a programming language can access the system clock.
Coldstone can access the system clock (and most certainly does). The issue is whether or not the user of Coldstone has access to the system clock.
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