Archive: 18 posts

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http://i266.photobucket.com/albums/ii271/Yamatori/LBP%20pics/7modeattackselector2.jpg 11 logic components, a little more then triple that in nodes. On the plus side, at least my circuitry is always nice and tidy. Anyone else have this problem, or do you just let your chips route the wires however they want? For those interested, the chip is designed to select 1 of 7 different attack modes depending on how many power ups you have and how accurate you want to be, by activating certain tags that your 'guns' track to. It's for a Touhou inspired bullet hell game I'm creating. I'm not sure if its the most efficient way to do what I want, but it works quite well. And no, it isn't complete enough for a beta tester yet, I'm still getting the mechanics for the player working (still need an "oh sh--!" attack, a lives counter, and a method to gather the powerups/points. Then I'll have to work on basic enemy mechanics, and I have some special stuff planned for bosses).

2011-02-14 19:27:00 Author: Unknown User

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Those nodes are only used for the pretty right?

2011-02-14 19:34:00 Author: RangerZero Posts: 3901

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Those nodes are only used for the pretty right? Not necessarily, they're useful for a couple of things, like controlled buffers as demonstrated in this chip, swapping out the sources of an input during testing, if you want a randomizer to output to several things at once (for example, an emitter, a sound effect, and a light) you can use a node to split the signal otherwise they'd all be randomly selected, etc. I never used them for organizational purposes though, I always laid out the components so the automatic wire routing was neat on its own. There's plenty of redundancy in the nodes in the image though, most of the last nodes in your chain can be done away with and the wire would probably look the same.

2011-02-14 19:44:00 Author: Foofles Posts: 2278

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Those nodes are only used for the pretty right? What Foofles said. 8 of the nodes do serve a good function beyond just pretty. 4 are placed on each of the 2 additional micro chips I have on that main one. When the player isnt holding down R1, the NOT gate activates one microchip allowing the signals to pass through for Normal Attack modes, while the second chip remains inactive. When the player does hold down R1, the microchips flip, and the "Accurate Attack mode" is activated, bringing the 'guns' closer to the character to get a tighter spread. The same mechanism (holding down R1) also slows the characters movement speed for more precise movement, along with activating some holo material to show the player the actual hit box (tag sensors trigger radius for detecting when a bullet hits the character). @Foofles I'll play around with deleting some of them then. I had a feeling that many nodes was overkill xD *edit* You were right. I was able to reduce the node count from 28 to 9 while still keeping a clean and tidy flow of the wires. Not counting the nodes used for the... "controlled buffers" you called them?

2011-02-14 20:06:00 Author: Unknown User

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Yeah, I use them a bit, not extensively as this mind you. They are quite handy sometimes.

2011-02-14 21:10:00 Author: midnight_heist Posts: 2513

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Before now i've been using NOT gates.

2011-02-14 22:04:00 Author: ThisDudeRufus Posts: 170

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I tend to use nodes for intermediate orginization. Especially when assembling repetitive structures that need things hooked together. While the only way to create them is to drag a wire onto a circuit board, once you have one you can copy it, including out into the rest of the level. They also have one great feature I use them for quite often; when you take them out of a wire, the connections remain. I recently took advantage of this in a level I created for Conway's Game of Life. I created a unit piece with a bunch of half connected nodes. Then I pasted another unit piece next to it and connected one end to the other and deleted both. After that I repeated but copied the combined structure. By doing this, rather than having to connect every single resulting wire in the chips, I could just connect one for each new paste, and all the combined components were connected. Then I just delete the nodes and the wires remain connected.

2011-02-14 22:20:00 Author: Tygers Posts: 114

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Ha I rarely used nodes, I didn't even know they existed until a few days ago, and I went oooohhhhh, well that's nice. My logic might be just the most disorganized jumble of mumbo jumbo anyway, I don't think any number of nodes and planning could fix the messes I conjure.

2011-02-14 22:31:00 Author: Jayhawk_er Posts: 403

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Does anyone know how much nodes and chips effect the thermometer? It seems like in a lot of cases they are just decoration, so it shouldn't effect it much, but on the other hand, you can replace some logic gates with just a combination of nodes and chips. Would it be better to use the nodes and chips combo over logic gates? What about two AND gates with a common input, would that be better off for the thermometer as two nodes in a chip?

2011-02-14 22:42:00 Author: Tygers Posts: 114

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There's a way to control wire paths? That would've been nice to know earlier. http://i51.tinypic.com/2mcxd8m.jpg

2011-02-14 23:38:00 Author: Starchy Posts: 353

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I lay out logic so the wires are as neat as possible, and then use a couple of nodes to really clean it up and make it so I can actually remember what my logic does later

2011-02-14 23:40:00 Author: alexbull_uk Posts: 1287

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I forgot about one place I almost always use nodes... Any inputs on a circuit where it doesn't go directly into a logic cate, so I can keep the inputs in the order and spacing I want. There's a way to control wire paths? That would've been nice to know earlier. http://i51.tinypic.com/2mcxd8m.jpg Woah... Talk about a mess! That reminded me of my use though, with how the inputs are all stacked up on the left.

2011-02-14 23:54:00 Author: Tygers Posts: 114

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http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc390/booXely/nodes.jpg Mine can get pretty messy if I don't plan it out first and have to make a lot of revisions to it. This logic is for a very basic menu.

2011-02-15 00:14:00 Author: booXely Posts: 654

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Nodes probably don't have much overhead on the thermometer but microchips do, eventually. Even if you don't see it at first, if you start putting lots of them down the thermometer will stack up a lot. They take up more when they're unfolded/showing and/or active so be sure to hide circuitboards you aren't working on. The reason I called it a controlled buffer is that it guarantees one analog signal source, with the basic logic gates you may not extract the exact value you expect. eg. AND gates will pass the minimum of the values passed, OR will pass the maximum, etc. But a node through an activated microchip will always be either that node source or 0 if deactivated.

2011-02-15 04:50:00 Author: Foofles Posts: 2278

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you can use a node to split the signal otherwise they'd all be randomly selected, etc. whaaaaa? I swear I tried to do that and I couldn't get multiple wires out of one node. So that's possible to do!?

2011-02-15 05:08:00 Author: RangerZero Posts: 3901

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Well I just did a few checks, and while nodes are cheaper than circuit boards, they aren't free. To test I nested circuit boards inside circuit boards until I had 1024 of the item under test. This means there were 2047 circuit boards. With nothing on them, the thermometer was at around 2.8 small bars. I then added 8 unconnectd nodes to the innermost circuit boards. That mens in addition to the 2047 circuit boards, there were 8192 unconnected nodes. With that the thermometer read around 7.5, a difference of 4.7. That means 1 circuit board has the same thermo cost as something like 3-4 nodes. For comparison, 1024 magnetic keys cost 0.8 bars over baseline. 1024 AND gates wired up to the microchip (Adding two inputs, also wired up through the cascade in pairs) was 1.2 over baseline. Using relays (Circuit boards with a node and the enable as a form of AND gate) cost 3.2 over baseline. I decided to see if multi-relays would be more efficient, but even 2 AND gates with a common input was only 2.0 over baseline, while a 2 node relay was 4.2 over baseline. The takeaway from this for me, is for circuits that will be replicated a lot, use nodes sparingly, circuit boards more sparingly, and avoid relays unless you specifically need the special aspects of one (IE pass through a signal unmolested by the control signal).

2011-02-15 05:22:00 Author: Tygers Posts: 114

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I just used to find them annoying and a way of saying "Ha, you didn't wire it up well enough, rewind and try again" >.<

2011-02-15 17:09:00 Author: kirbyman62 Posts: 1893

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There's a way to control wire paths? That would've been nice to know earlier. http://i51.tinypic.com/2mcxd8m.jpg That circuitboard is just FABULOUS!

2011-02-16 16:37:00 Author: Ayneh Posts: 2454

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