Sprite overload

Anything related to Keen Modding.
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Fleexy
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Sprite overload

Post by Fleexy »

Some mods are incompletable because of it. Y'know, when things start glitching, code is overwritten because of so much sprite data, doors go weird, stuff like that. I classify it into a few categories:

Class 1: Some ugly tiles appear in wrong places.
Class 2: Special actions fail (doors 'poof', sound messes up)
Class 3: Crashes on special actions (opening doors, teleports)
Class 4: Some sprites fail to spawn
Class 5: Some keyboard settings change
Class 6: All settings change (joystick, sounds...)
Class 7: XXX (Crash)

The worst class I've seen in a mod was Class 4.
Draik
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Post by Draik »

Then how do you know the others exist?
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Tulip
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Post by Tulip »

I must honestly say I've seen none of the classes yet. I've seen a mod crash yes, but most of the time it could be worked out till final release, or it just happened once, and is most likely not the mod's fault but the system's.
I've seen misplaced tiles, but not to the extent a mod wasn't solvable anymore.

I've encountered other bugs due to lax mod making and insufficient beta testing that made a mod impossible.
My classes here are:

-Door bugs: Wrong keycolor for the door, no key, or key not accessible.
-Tileinfo bug: There is an error in the tile info and one tile doesn't act as supposed (most recently in Patchwork Mod III, where a tile has "killing" property an thus making at least one level incompletable, I'll fix that when I upload it to KeenWiki)
-Jump bug: A bug often found: One crucial jump can not be made because it's too far or too high.

And two specific I have yet only found in Levellord Mods:
-Exit hazard bug: LL managed to put hazard tiles right behind the exit, so when Keen walks into the exit door, he'll inevitably die.
-Scrub bug: Keen can not ride a Scrub that walks through a hazard tile! Quit putting that into your levels!

Edit: Wait a minute, I now get what you were saying: They are incompletable as in you couldn't finish making the mod. Well, haven't had most of these classes either. Only the ending/endtext keep bugging me with crashes and misplaced/not displayed text.
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Fleexy
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Post by Fleexy »

Draik wrote:Then how do you know the others exist?
In my unfinished mods.
levellass
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Post by levellass »

In summary he's describing what happens when he (And most likely only him.) places too many sprites into a mod's level.

The first effect is that the game does not have enough memory to handle all the sprites, so some don't spawn or disappear. (This includes Keen exiting and door opening 'sprites') if many more are added, the game will crash.

The other effects occur when sprite data gets corrupted, I am not sure how this happens. I do know however that it can occur over all the Keens and often can annoyingly reconfigure the configuration files of the games so that indeed, the keyboard keys change.


The solution to all these problems is to simply have less sprites in your levels!
lemm
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Post by lemm »

I believe you are limited to 80 sprites per level in Keen 1.
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Post by levellass »

Place 20 ice cannons. Then play the level, see how much memory it needs. Sprite limits in Keen 1-3 are like those in Keen 4-6, dependent on how much memory each sprite uses.
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