However . . . what about the situations where spawning another enemy could negatively affect the framerate? That's where the exhaust animation comes in. Instead of spawning a new enemy, the existing shield fighters will fire up their engines and accelerate towards the player. It's easier to make an existing enemy "harder" than to draw a new enemy on the screen.
Interesting, how do you determine that? Do you just have a hard limit on the number of concurrently spawned enemies?
There's a counter variable that I use to keep track of how many times the main game loop iterates in one second. Usually it's well over 60 fps. But large graphics -- planets and capital ships -- are what really cause performance to take a hit.
To fix this, I will have some code along these lines:
IF fps > 60 THEN
SpawnNextEnemy
ELSE
IncreaseAttributeOfExistingEnemy (make enemy go faster, etc)
END IF
But like you mentioned, I have also experimented with hard limits on enemies:
IF NumberOfActiveCapitalShips > 2 THEN
IncreaseAttributeOfExistingEnemy
ELSE
SpawnAnotherCapitalShip
END IF
Both ways get the job done and they can even be combined.
Interesting, I don't know if I have seen that approach before. Theoretically then, faster hardware will tend to produce a different experience than slower hardware, because it will usually favor adding more ships over upgrading existing ones? Have you done much comparison of older vs. newer hardware?
