In a recent comment posted here I was asked about the slopes in the current platformer, and I promised I'd go over it, so here it is ( Albiet slightly rushed and with no nice diagrams, deadlines and all that ).

In a tile based engine it's fairly simple to work out where the position of the sprite is in relation to the tile he's standing on. So as you move over a tile you're updating the x position which is obvious enough.
Also usually with map data you have an attribute value / byte for each tile, again if you've worked with tiles you're with me so far.

To simulate a slope easily you have an array of y positions for the sprite. In my case I have 8 values for every sloping tile, as the player moves at 4 pixels per frame, and the tiles are 32px wide, so it's 32/4 = 8 possible positions for every tile on the horizontal.

Let's say our slope looks like this ( In array form )

[0,2,4,6,8,12,14,16];

If we're at position 0 on the x of the tile, ie the left hand side, we read the first value in the slope array, in this case 0, and we decrease the sprites._y by that amount ( Decrease 'cause we're moving him up ), so the next step will make the sprite 2 pixels higher up the screen than he was last move and so on.

Above I mentioned using attributes, this is how I get an offset into the array of slopes ( They're just stored as a 2 dimensional array ). If you didn't use an attribute in the map data, just used the tile number, then you'd need to have an array for every single tile ( Where the vast majority would be flat ), which is a hell of a lot of work for no reason, and a waste of resources.

So again we're stepping on our tile, and it's attribute is 1. We know to look into the slope array at attribute-1 ( Arrays start at 0 ), which gives us our first saved slope value, and from there we can get the correct y position for each step of the way.

Simple as you like, hardly any real cpu overhead, and so far with what I've been working on it seems to cope with any angle I've thrown at it. If you wanted to add more realistic movement ( So the sprite stuggles up a hill, sprints down it ) you could store another array with the players max moving speed for each position and add that to the overal speed.

Squize.

The next Phantom Mansion chapter has just gone live.

Worked on Orbs over the w/end, and had to re-organise a ton of stuff ( I'm still finding my feet with this as3 lark ).

The particles worked by using copyPixel to plot them into a bitmap ( Blitting, like the good ol' days ) and then using colorMatrixFilter to fade them down every couple of frames.
I've really been wanting trails on the baddies too ( I want to use the add blendmode, but I think that's going to be too much. That may just be reserved for the Orbs themselves ) so this major reshuffle saw the baddies being changed from sprites to bobs ( Blitter OBjects ) again using copyPixel.

Seems to be running a lot faster for the change, and looks a lot better. Also 'cause I'm fading down the whole bitmap that they're being blitted to I don't have to worry about any kind of clearing up or damage maps. Cool.

I'd been meaning to try blitting sooner, but I was concerned about losing things like hitTest and rotation, but at the moment it's performing nice and fast and I'm hoping I can come up with a good way to cope with the silly amount of collisions I've got planned ( At present I'm looking at doing it sector based using circle to circle checks ).

Next step is to drop the collisions back in and see how the engine copes with that, and then some animation ( So it'll be an animated rotate ).

It's all looking pretty good right now, I'm really happy with it.

Squize.

PS. Next post, something on slopes.

A little update is well over due, so here's a couple of grabs of two current projects.

BACK!

After quite a long absence, I finally found the time to do a (small) post. What happened so far is that I had a lot of very tight deadlines for the last couple of weeks (mainly because I was pactically forced to go on vacation for two weeks) and all of the things needed to be done during the time I planned to lay flat on the beach and do nothing.

Three of these deadlines fall under the term "NDA", so I can't go into detail there, only that these projects where some niffty flash/zinc apps.

So ther's only one left, which is finished AND a game, too. I wrote about it earlier, I think: "Logimotion".


Basically it's a quite easy game: just guide the robots from point A to B. All you have to do is to switch junctions/intersections and make sure your robots don't crash. It may become a bit tricky, though. For the current levels, there may be up to 20 of them running at the same time (but you really have to delay delivery for that to happen).

If you want to give it a quick bash, you can play it here: www.gardeur.com (either chose English or German).

After all that 18h shifts I'm doing a bit of 3D at the moment and hopefully start working on a new game in a couple of days.

nGFX

ps: want to see my current workspace? 'course you do ...

After a overly long gestation, "Phantom Mansion - The Red Chamber", is live.


Seems like forever since I've been able to pimp a live game on here ( Only now waiting for "Signs of Life", "Game of Life", "Goldenballs" and "Think 'n Drive"... ).

Anyway, click here and try out the first chapter is this pretty damn good puzzle style game.

Squize.

But I found a sweet article about making a textured tunnel, and before I knew it this bad boy was up and running...

Tunnel.swf (16.1 KB)

( No displacement maps, just pure pixel plotting. as3, I'm loving you )

I've really got an urge to do a full blown demo. I know I've got far too much on, but it's gnawing away at me.

Squize.

I imagine the vast majority of the whole world has seen the stunning Halo 3 believe ad.

This clip , from a much more innocent time, when the term "Arcade perfect" was the dream we all had, just shows how far we've come. And how old I am.

Squize.

That's how long it took me to play through Resident Evil 4, wii version. I also got some extra milage from the "second" mission, and the other bits and bobs they give you..
It's one of the best games I've ever played. When I first started playing it, I remember thinking how much the wii graphics suck in comparison to the 360 ( Gears of War has spoilt me ).
Sticking with it, you don't even notice it. In fact the fire and water effects are just stunning, and the whole atmosphere just drags you into that world.

In terms of levels, the game just keeps giving and giving. It's vast, and you never feel like you're just walking down the same corridor. Just when you think you've seen everything the game could possibly have, there's more. And more again.

One of the most stunning games I've ever enjoyed, just brilliant.

Wednesday, like I imagine one or two other people, I picked up Halo3. It's everything you'd imagine it to be. It's nice and familiar, but a million times larger and wider in terms of visuals and depth. So I had a couple of days hitting it hard after closing Flash. Picture how much it sucked that by Saturday, I've finished it.
Like sex, it's a lot of wow, a lot of enjoyment and... oh, it's finished. At least with sex it's my fault it's over before it needs to be.

It felt like the campaign mode is just there to supplement the multiplayer modes, rather than the other way around. That they've given you these huge ( And perfectly formed ) vistas to mess around with, a handful of new toys, and then sold it all a bit short.
I guess it just shows how much effort a game of this scale really is. I don't think Bungie have been lazy, I just think that if they tried to double the length of the game ( I'm sure I did it in 10/12 hours. Now I'm not the most anal gamer, I didn't go exploring every where, I just wanted to get in there and beat the game. Finding every hidden area has never appealed to me. So yes, perhaps if I'd gone exploring I could quite easily add a couple of hours to that ), then they'd still be developing it in 3 years times.

Maybe it's a symptom of the huge graphical advances that have come with the current generation of boxes, that we all expect every image to look like a photo of some alien world, that to actually finish developing a game the number of levels have to be cut down to balance it all out.
I mean the Halo3 world is really big, it's just that I didn't think I'd tear through it quite so quickly.

If nothing else, it's made me realise I do need to get a gold membership to Xbox Live so I can get a lot more milage out of that 40 quid I've spent.

Oh, and at the end, don't skip the credits, there's a little extra at the end.

Squize.