Hey, just a quick question. Right now I am making a 2D starfox type of game where enemies come from the top of the screen down, and I am using a txt file to hold the level information, which is basically just a text file with a list of enemies, what time they should appear at, and where they should be positioned on the screen. Now, as I am currently doing it, I am reading the entire file before the level starts and storing the information in an enemy queue, sorted by the time they should appear at, then each frame I just check if it's time to add an enemy or not. I was thinking that it would be more beneficial to just read the script file as I went, and just not using an enemy queue. This way I could store extra commands in the script file, and just use a switch statement to perform the appropriate actions based on what command was given. This way I could do other things, such as storing when items should appear, when something in the level should change, or whatever. Now, I'm just wondering if this would cause any problems or if there are any downsides to this method over my original, since the txt file would either need to be kept open for the entire duration of the level (it's read-only, but I'm not sure if keeping it open would cause problems or not), so that I wouldn't lose my position within the file, or I would have to save my position within the file and open and close the txt file every frame (which could be very costly). Which method would be best to use? I just want to make sure there's not some big "no no" that I would be doing. Thanks. Dan

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
Id probably load the whole file one time, interpret the level/script, and save the interpreted commands into a big array or some other internal level structure in the program's stack. Not keep the file open for the duration; that sounds... problematic, suppose you get a read error, how do you handle it without interrupting the game?.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I'm doing now. Keeping the file open for the duration would definitely be the easiest to do though. Good point with the read error, but right now I do not have any read error handling anyways so whether the error occurred before the level started or during the level wouldn't make much of a difference. Either way I would likely just display the error in a msg window and exit the game. Anyone else have any comments or see any other problems with this method? Thanks.

I would put the whole file in a string array and read from there. That doesnt cost too much memory, does it?

Quote:Original post by tstrimp

Quote:Original post by Gagyi
I would put the whole file in a string array and read from there. That doesnt cost too much memory, does it?

That would depend entirely on the size of the file.

Hmmm, this idea is interesting. And while it would take a little bit more memory, I can't see it taking too much more than I'm using right now, since currently I am storing all of the information in a big list of structures. Does anybody see any drawbacks to this method? or can you think of any other methods that might be better? Oh, and right now my level files are around 500 - 750 words long, but that could increase once I'm able to store other things in the file besides just which enemies should appear when, but it should stay under 1000 words (by words I mostly mean 1-6 digit numbers).

I assumed that this would be a fairly common problem, as lots of games use scripts to read in game info, so I thought there would be a common, well known solution/method to this problem. Thanks for the replies so far everyone!