Posts Tagged ‘scroller’

Editor looks a bit different now.

Monday, September 21st, 2009

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.

UhfEditSS06

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.

Figured out what I’m going to do.

Friday, September 18th, 2009

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.

Progress of Hypno-Joe and editor

Monday, September 14th, 2009

I’ve been working on the editor for some time now.  And in fact have got moving platforms, and tile collisions, and basic platform physics working in the actual game part of the program.  But right now I’m going to talk about the editor.  It’s got map saving and loading (currently only one map can be saved or loaded).  It’s got tile placement (if you look in the first screenshot below you will see a little green square and a purple one, these are tiles for the moment).  You can scroll around the grid too.  You can also erase tiles by right clicking anywhere.

UhfEditSS05

Notice the “scroll down” button… It doesn’t do much right now other than highlight if hovering over it or shaded if you press the left mouse button.  In any case I’m trying to figure out how to organize my tiles, and indeed about tile creation.  I figure that you will be able to create tile chunks, which are composed of those 16×16 tiles, this way you can get kind of detailed and as long as the tiles are multiples of 16 then you can stack them up on top of each other.  Let’s say a window is 64×32 pixels… that’s 4 tiles across 2 tiles down.  Let’s say you want a flower in a pot on top of the window ledge.  And the ledge itself is 64×16.  which is 4 tiles across 1 down.  and let’s say your flower pot with flower is 2 tiles high and 1 across (16×32).  You want the flower pot to sit right on top of the ledge so you place it in the position starting with the bottom of the window but on top of the window ledge.  Because these are all multiples of 16 the flower pot sits neatly on the ledge in front of the window.  That was the purpose to these tiny tiles instead of big ones.  You create a big one (ie the window) from individual tiles in an image (corners, frame, glass).  So now I’m trying to think of how to organize the tile panel there on the sidebar.  Do I just keep adding them making sure they’re spaced out the size of 1 tile.  Do I create a specific size for the tile panel so it scrolls off screen as well.  Do I create separate pages for each size of tile chunk.  I have a lot to decide.  To help me figure it out I created a little mock up.  It’s not much different than the screen above except it has what would look like other sized tiles.

mockUhfEditSS06

Well there you have it.  Any idea folks?

Keith