Game Mechanics Dynamic rooms

H

Hidde

Guest
Hello good people,

I was wondering if it was possible to have dynamic rooms, meaning that the player could change the room like place walls etc.
 

NightFrost

Member
Well, of course. That's why instance_create_layer and similar-style commands for other resources exist: to add stuff to room after it has started running.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Letting the player create things is pretty easy (once you've practiced coding menus a bit), the hard part is to save the work for later in a way that works with game updates, is efficient, and will only capture the changes you want to save. If you let the player destroy things as well as create them (e.g. mining blocks for resources) you really should take the time to think through your system before you start coding, so you don't end up with stuff like savefiles containing every block in the entire world (gets kinda slow to save and load...), procedurally generated structures suddenly materializing inside the player's base when you come back after a long journey, or the world permanently running out of enemies because you added them to the list of things the game remembers being destroyed.
 

Wainggan

Member
I hear that Minecraft uses a system like this:

It does not save every block that exists, but rather the blocks that changed.
When you are playing, and you place a block, it will:
Add the current chunk to a list of changed chunks
Add the changed block to a list under the chunk list

When saving:
It looks at the list of changed chunks and saves all the changed blocks in that list

When it is generating a chunk, it will:
Generate the chunk
Check if the chunk has been modified
If it was, it updates all the changed blocks in the chunk.

I made up most of this, so I hope that makes sense...
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Binary files let you edit random bytes in the middle, so if you want to save all data and still have things be responsive when the player does stuff, this could be one way: when you first generate the world you save X chunks around the spawn position, and whenever a new chunk is loaded, you generate a new file for its data; any changes after that just writes 1 block in the file, not the entire thing.

Would work even better in an engine with multithreading, since you could do the slow file operations (and RNGing new data, for that matter) in the background, but ah well.
 
Top