I did movement a little bit differently, as someone helped me figure out. Instead of setting the scroll factor to 0, I added the velocity of my camera object to the velocity of my player, since effectively when you want control within the screen you do because it means your ship is faster when your moving it than the camera, and you just keep it in the screen.
Unfortunately this also adds some shuddering. Which is mainly due to the fact the camera “follow” moves, and then the actual object you’re following moves… so it means it’s sort of out of sync with each other. I’m hoping though at least this allows us to use flixel’s collision functions.
Here’s the current version, ignore the small grid of tiles at the beginning. RZoneFlixel_03
Well I wasn’t going to upload this until I got the rest of the maps “carved out” but I am trying to figure something out. If you notice it doesn’t seem like you can move in the y direction at all, however you are moving, just on the map, and because there’s no frame of reference it doesn’t look right. It’s unlikely that I will have a completely blank screen in the finished game, but I’d like to add the functionality to be able to move vertically without moving the camera up or down until you hit the window edges. Also The player position remains and doesn’t reset in this version… Several changes were made “under the hood” so-to-speak.
Update #1: fixed the vertical movement problem but now have a camera/camera object problem. It loads all levels correctly, but the camera doesn’t seem to appear at the beginning of the new level.
Update #2: Solution was to make sure and reset the camera’s x position to the beginning of the level and make sure it loads when it gets to the end really. I needed to keep the camera persistent for the y position though so you wouldn’t be reset back to the middle of the map. Please keep in mind that the clear tiles are wider (if you move up to the top or down to the bottom you’ll notice some tiles after about 3 screens) — this means that it takes longer to actually see level tiles — this is just basic blocking, and no backdrop yet, when i get there you’ll get some sense of movement.
Here it is folks. Now with boss level maps (well temporary) and a moveable ship. This is now how it will look at all. I’m just getting acquainted with flixel. Still a long way to go. Please note, this takes around 20 minutes to go through the whole thing. Also the player ship will reset position once it switches maps, this is because of how I’m doing the map loading now. Someone suggested I add a bit of the previous map to the next so that it would appear seemless and for the most part it works. I will fix the player jumping in the next iteration. After that I “carve” out the area the player will be allowed to fly in. Use the arrow keys or wasd to move. Please note before you can actually use the keyboard, you need to click on the movie first.
Actually it was a bit more work to get this up and running, not that flixel is harder, but just you have to do things differently. I think the shearing and what not is still present though.
Okay decided to now do a full 18 minute scroller. So as a note if you look at this, beware it runs around 18-19 minutes, and you can stop it any time. Or maybe you don’t care to run it, as all I did was change what tiles there were and lengthend it. Hopefully you will want to run it though and tell me if it stutters for you.
I’ve just started a shoot’em up in flash with flashpunk. Right now all it does is scroll about 20 screens worth of tiles, but in the future I plan on adding each iteration to this blog. So here’s the first, a scrolling tilemap!
Well, here we go, UhfEdit map/level editor to date. I had to work on a list box for selecting different tilesets. Which are basically different images that when I select the tiles, it stores their source location on the map. Anyways the first version of the list box. It had a few little bugs.
So I gutted it and reworked it and it works great now. You can select, or scroll up or down (with the mouse). I decided to only use mouse support at the time, I still have yet to add keys to the list box.
So here’s a full vid with Tileset (notice not tile selection, but tileset, in other words the image itself). At this point in time you could just select a new set and it would switch automagically.
By this time I needed a “file browser” of sorts so you could load up different maps and save different maps. So I added code to bring up the Guide (in xna, for windows it’s windows live, for xbox 360 it’s essentially the dashboard). Anyways before I did that I decided I couldn’t just have it automatically try to load a map so I needed some sort of “ok” button. So I implemented it on the tileset list box first. You can see it in action in here I believe. But as the title of this video is error, there was an error. Not in the listbox but sort of a defect rather than an error. See if you got a different sized tileset image say bigger than the others, then when you switched to another tileset that was smaller, the map would become sort of garbled. I had an image that was twice as wide as the others. As a result it extracted tiles from every other line because the previous image was twice as wide. I figured the only way to fix the problem is to make sure all my images are the same size (in resolution) per map. The ability to switch images on a map means I could change the look of a level by simply substituting a different image. Let’s say we’re showing the four seasons, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. All I need to do is make 4 tileset images that represent that. Say for summer everything is dry and bright, but for winter, it looks like it has snow and everything is blue. Anyways here’s the vid.
This brings us to our final vid, the usage to date. It shows you the message/confirmation box when you load a level, and a list box showing you the map files. I’m about to make a major change in the look though, so stay tuned for the next few videos.
Please note with the exception of the first 2 videos most of these can be seen in HD on youtube, since I’m usikng xna and eventually targeting the xbox360 the videos are 1280×720 or 720p.
Well the past few days has seen a lot of coding effort for what seems to be little to show for. However, I have now changed how I’m going to do tiles, and editing and all of that. Essentially you can copy groups of tiles by holding shift (in the map area, upper left corner), and dragging a box around the tiles you want. Then you simply left click to “draw” that group of tiles. To erase it’s the right mouse button. There’s only a little catch. It only erases if there’s a tile in the tile group you copied. If the tile was empty, it won’t do anything. In any case it was rather straight-forward once I figured it out.
I’ve also changed it so that the map is only in the upper left corner (as I mentioned above) via viewports. It was kind of screwy dealing with at first, but I finally got it. Next you’ll be able to use a tileset that’s preloaded, and copy tiles from it to the map. It’s got to be preloaded because of the way xna treats data. It will compile your image/sound files into it’s own format. In the level/map editor, you’ll be able to choose from various tilesets that are pre-loaded. The point will be in the future allowing user created content on the xbox 360. Of course this doesn’t mean you can make a game with my system on the xbox, but rather making levels for an existing game (and hence existing graphics). In any case here’s a quick look.
Click on the image to enlarge, the red area is a “brush” (or group of tiles). That little small bright red square is the cursor, which doesn’t have graphics right now. On the right you’ll be able to check different things, maybe set map properties, etc.
With a little help from my friends… (cue Beatles music) — I’ve figured out how to handle tile stuff. Basically you’re going to have the tileset panel, that you are able to select tiles by dragging a selection box. Then a “brush” is automatically created, then you simply “stamp” or draw it onto the map. On the map you have to hit shift and click-drag, to select, otherwise it will draw on the map… to erase you’ll use the right mouse button to erase where there were tiles in the brush. I’ve seen this in action and it seems quite simple, and easy to use.
