[gameprogrammer] Re: The Next Step (2D Side-Scroller)

Well it depends on what you want to do. If making maps easily moddable,
characters would be the way to go, but with bytes you can pack more complex
information than just a tile easier. For example if I want some tiles to be
"ghost tiles" instead of making a new type of tile I just define one bit to
be a flag for ghost or real tile.
With the triggered events, the only way to not use a scripting system would
be to make simple/predictable events, or make a click and/or drag system,
like Game Maker or RPG Maker, which would be nothing but a scripting system
hidden as an interfase, XML could work for scripts, if you are into that.
For multiple background layers, do just that, layers. Now my recomendation
is make diferent kind of layer definitions in your file: tile layers (with
tiles), BMP layers (with images) etc. you can also attach them properties
such as horizontal movement (as compared to that of the player) so far away
layers move little compared to the player.
For diferent sized tiles, you can make the definition at the beggining of
each layer also, but all the tiles in each layer have to be the same.
Multiple tilesets depends on your resource managing, but it's just making
the pallete bigger, this included with tinting I would reccomend you
strongly to use a byte level saving method, to get the most out of this,
plus if you made it into characters it would become big, slow to parse (if
the level is big enough) and not as easy to read as you'd think.
Another recomendation is to make a strong object system. You can use this to
make strange size tiles, also you can use this for more interesting effects
by putting them in strange places, such as BMP layers, for a Yoshi's Island
effect (when the cannon balls jump from the background into the foreground).
What's more, areas and such could be objects, and you could have the ability
to include the objects in the map (case they are unique), make "quick"
standard objects (like the square area) and save objects in another file
(for enemies or items that appear in other levels)
Final thing, on the using one polygon, on another thread someone recommended
once the using of fragment shaders to tile using the video card
acceleration, but you'd have to look for that.
I don't know if any of this helps you, but hopefully it will.

On 3/5/07, Scott Harper <lareon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Well, I have my framework working pretty well thus far, and have made
significant progress on getting some pieces together that feel almost
like a game (more like a pseudo-game-sandbox, I suppose).  Now I
think it comes down to where I need some way to make levels for my
game, or at least design areas to place monsters and make goals and
such.  Graphical level editing seems like the best idea thus far to
me, as I'm not terribly good with a text editor ( ^_^ ), and even
using characters, it hardly seems professional, so while I get
started on the workings of a 2D level editor, I have some more
questions for discussion regarding file format/information in a game
map file! ^_^

So, what are some recommendations/techniques used already for storing
information about what tiles go where?  For instance, does one use
bytes (or smaller?) or characters (I know they're basically the same,
but the conception is a bit different, in that a 'character' is
something which can be visually "read" if the file were opened in a
text editor)?

How has the issue with triggered game events at certain locations
been handled?  What are some thoughts about how this COULD be handled
without implementing a full-fledged scripting system?

I also intend to have multiple background layers (because parallax
scrolling, to coin a phrase used by a friend of mine, "makes me happy
in my pants"!); any thoughts on handling multiple layers?

What about multiple tile sets in the same map?  Color changes
(tinting, since it comes free with opengl) on tiles?  Non-standard
tile sizes?  Repeated texture areas rather than dozens of tiles
(since I'm using opengl, it seems proper that a single area covering
multiple tile-sizes could be done more efficiently with a single
polygon)?

I have some ideas on how to handle these, but as this is my first
time getting to this stage, I would like to hear ideas from others
first!

Also, feel free to hijack this thread for whatever related questions
YOU may have, so we can all learn something if possible! ^_^

-- Scott

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