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Topic: Working with rapidly changing numbers of objects? (Read 529 times) |
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Elrick
 
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Working with rapidly changing numbers of objects?
« on: Apr 29th, 2003, 5:13am » |
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Okay, here's the plan: I'm going to be placing circular objects randomly on the screen. Each frame, these need to call a function, so I'll be storing them in an array, and looping through to update them. Howver, the circles will also be randomly disappearing, after which they no longer need to update.
Now, two problems: Is there an uber-efficient way to 'skip over' the ones that have disappeared (such as deleting them and reconstructing them when needed again?), and, because I don't know how many there will be total, how do I create the array to store them?
I have a few ideas I'm going to toy with, but I'd love some input. 
EDIT: Well, I found a post on dynamically enlarging arrays.. Still trying methods of the skipping. This is what I'm doing for now:
Each circle object has a property, active, and it only runs it's updating instructions if active is true. When a new circle is being created, a loop runs through all the created circles, takes the first one that is inactive, and modifies it to suit the purpose. If none are inactive, it creates a new one. Phew! 
Still open to suggestions.
EDIT: Okay, that worked great.. so, never mind!
~Graham
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| « Last Edit: Apr 30th, 2003, 4:23am by Elrick » |
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fry
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Re: Working with rapidly changing numbers of objec
« Reply #1 on: May 1st, 2003, 5:09am » |
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for maximum speed, use that growable array code posted elsewhere on the board, and keep two arrays. one of the 'in-use' objects to iterate over, and the other with the 'dead' objects.
sometimes--for instance in an n-squared loop where everything in the list is compared against everything else--it will be inefficient to check if each is 'inactive', since the largest time cost will be traversing the array. that make sense? (sorry, end of the day)
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