Game Mechanics Size Comparison of the Universe "Game"

[VansiusProductions]

Hi guys,
We want to make an interactive game that shows the size comparison of the universe, in case you have no idea what that is about you can google it, there are tons of videos that will give you an idea of what we want.

We are fairly new to gamemaker but we think that it's a great choice of software for us to create something like it. Basically the player scrolls through a very big room where objects are being laid out from smallest to largest, from left to right. Here's an example:

But in 2D of course. However some objects may be exponentially larger than other objects and a lot of space is needed. Are all the objects still be able to fit in one room. We also want it to have the ability to zoom it and out and change the scale of the objects.

We have some knowledge of how gamemaker works but we would still like to gather some of your opinions and advices. It would be very helpful for us!

 

[Surgeon_]

Your current design is pretty simple - you can do it by laying out objects with sprites of celestial bodies they're meant to represent in an arbitrarily sized room (note that room size does not affect performance in any way). And, since you need a zoom feature, I suggest you take a look at views and the functions and global variables which are used to manipulate them.
But also, feel free to experiment.
And remember, the manual is your friend.

 

[VansiusProductions]

Your current design is pretty simple - you can do it by laying out objects with sprites of celestial bodies they're meant to represent in an arbitrarily sized room (note that room size does not affect performance in any way). And, since you need a zoom feature, I suggest you take a look at views and the functions and global variables which are used to manipulate them.
But also, feel free to experiment.
And remember, the manual is your friend.

So the room can be as big as it can be and not affect performance?

 

[Surgeon_]

So the room can be as big as it can be and not affect performance?

Yes. And mostly it does not matter, because objects and views can freely move outside the bounds of the room anyway. The only things room size affects are some functions that deal with rooms specifically and the size of the area of the room that you can edit in the room editor. What does affect performance, however, is what you put in said room and how many of it.

Also, one thing to look after in your project is the size of the graphics. As far as I know, you can't have sprites larger than 2048px x 2048px, and even if you used a (relatively small) 32x32 sprite for Earth, you'd need really a massively large sprite for, say, Jupiter (and not even to mention stars like of the stars like the Betelgeuse). I'm no expert on graphics, but I guess you'd need different sprite versions which you would use accordingly based on the current zoom level.

 

[Genetix]

The room size can be extremely big to an extent - but you will start to see performance hits if you are doing any kind of instance activation/deactivation, creating or not cleaning up instances and such forth.

The zooming in and out should be relatively simple using the view functions - if you end up designing a HUD you'll want to consider how it works with the zoom feature also.

 

[VansiusProductions]

The room size can be extremely big to an extent - but you will start to see performance hits if you are doing any kind of instance activation/deactivation, creating or not cleaning up instances and such forth.

The zooming in and out should be relatively simple using the view functions - if you end up designing a HUD you'll want to consider how it works with the zoom feature also.

Some of the other guys said that we should do a HUD but we're not sure. Here's our current zooming function using the mouse scroll wheel https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.php?threads/zooming-function-help.5798/. I would like some help cause it's not reallly working. We're new to this and would like you to help

 

[stainedofmind]

My suggestion is to not try to have all your graphics be enormou and try to fit them into a single room space, cause if you want any detail, as soon as you get to even the gas giants, Studio is going to nuke and fail to work. Instead, settle on a resolution size for ALL planets/stars/galaxies/etc, for example 512x512, and as you are moving hrough the room, use sprite scaling to shrink the smaller sized things to the correct proportion to the next biggest thing. Depending on how exactly you work things, you might have to upscale the big guys as they come on screen, but as long as its not by too much, it wont look too horrible.

 

[Yal]

Another thing that might be worth checking out is drawing the planets as textured primitives, and then basically drawing bigger and bigger (and using more and more polygons to make the edges smoother) textured circles the more you zoom in. Not sure how much it would add to visual quality, though (probably not a lot)... depends a bit on how much you can zoom in when comparing stuff, and the texture quality would be pretty obviously bad if you don't enable texture interpolation.