Item Cleanup

[Soaponarope]

I'm looking for a way to completely remove any item from the game,though I can't seem to find any such way.

I have just been using teleporters to send items to inaccessible locations, but between spells that create new items, and monsters dropping them, I'm thinking there will just be a ridiculous amount of inactive items floating around and it may cause issues. My dungeon is already huge and very mechanics heavy which causes my concern.

Is this feasible? Will it even be an issue anyway?

[Ameena]

Well as far as I remember, there's the "DESTROY_ITEM" thing you can use which is what happens when, for example, you use a key on a lock and the key disappears...

[Chaos-Shaman]

hi soaponarope, heheheheheh, i like your avatar

i'm not sure, i have also wondered about that and will have a look into it. you may be able to swap the item to a cloud

[Ameena]

I did have the thought of converting a used, unwanted item into a Ful Bomb whilst at the same time teleporting it away and basically having that teleporter chuck it at a wall, if that's possible - then it'd explode and the item would be gone .
Then I remembered about the whole "DESTROY_ITEM" thing, lol.

[Gambit37]

You can use SWAP actions to change items to NULL -- this destroys them.
You can use relays with a destroy option to remove items.
These are the only ways of removing things.

[beowuuf]

If you edit the text file in a text editor, you have all the find/replace options to delete any items you wish relatively swiftly. Just wastch out for crashes if you delete items opr mechanics that are pointed to by another mechanic

[Soaponarope]

Sorry, I just reread my post and realized I was quite unclear. I know about swapping and destroy item functions; use them all the time. I was hoping for a way to quickly delete all items on a tile.

Destroy item is just for "key" or triggering items and swapping must be done with each item type thus involves me making hundreds of triggers. I was just hoping there was an easier way to mass delete as I have a puzzle which ends up making a ton of items behind the scenes.

I guess what I will do is just send everything to a single space that has a bunch of triggers on it, each one swapping the most of common items.

Though with a old game like this, I was curious if it even mattered. If there are 1000 items on a tile somewhere you can't reach, would the engine be affected at all?

[Gambit37]

Item count shouldn't matter in RTC. It has massive limits. I'd just leave them on a hidden tile somewhere and forget about them. (Unless we're talking hundreds or thousands of objects?)

You could also assign a long lifetime to items that are only temporarily used in puzzles. They will expire to NULL, effectively vanishing after a while.

The original game was more limited and assigned an importance to objects. If too many items ended up in the dungeon, then less important items would be removed, for example if you killed hundreds of screamers, you'd start to notice that screamer slices were disappearing.

[Chaos-Shaman]

how many tiles are you thinking of soaponarope? if it's everywhere in the game, and more than one item, you're going to find it difficult. say the trolin clubs are too many, just swapglobal the item with null, or monstercloud, that should work, if there is a lot of items, i am not sure what you can do.

[beowuuf]

I think items do affect the speed, as I think everything runs in RTC.

Can you send things to -1,-1,-1 to remove them?

[Trantor]

RTC's limits may be huge, but they are reachable. I remember a place in THOM's Xarostak 2 dungeon where a LOT of items were created. As a result, the game speed eventually slowed down to a crawl, making it barely playable.

[Gambit37]

Interesting. By items, are we talking about things you can see and touch in the dungeon, or hidden mechanics? I can imagine a lot of mech causing problems, but I don't see how lots of items just sitting on the ground doing nothing would cause too many problems?

[Chaos-Shaman]

hmmm, one of my levels has oh, 5000 triggers, it plays smooth

[Soaponarope]

Yea, I don't think it will be an issue. I've dealt with the puzzle that generated a lot of items, and as far as things like monster drops, most my monster generators have a limit. I noticed in the original games they don't actually.

Yes I have tons of hidden mechanics but those are present from the start and it runs just fine. Also since a lot of them disable or destroy themselves, they should actually lessen. I was just thinking of what would be continually added over play time.

[Lord_BoNes]

If I understand you correctly, then just using SWAP_TILE triggered on the "item graveyard" tile, having the object_1 as the object in question. This way keeps other instances of the given object intact.