Another progress report

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Chema
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Another progress report

Post by Chema »

Greetings,

More progress.

After some tests with doors (I still have not decided how they will work...) I decided to move onto another topic that needs attention. As I got no feedback :( and noone volunteered to do it, I started to code a room editor for WHITE.

Image

It is still ugly and does not save anything yet, but it mainly works. In the near future it will hold an area to selct rooms in the World and edit them easily. Also it uses the same bitmaps as WHITE+NOISE does, so in the end it should generate files with all the graphical and room data needed by the engine.

I suppose I will first generate some kind of text files for defining graphics and rooms that will afterwards be "compiled" to .s and .h files with some stand-alone utilities, so you can change a bitmap, "recompile" and you will have it integrated in your game without the need to launch this application. This will let you automate everything with a .bat file (hopefuly).

In the end, this application and the "compilers" will be shipped with WHITE+NOISE for anyone to use in their own projects.

I am also thinking about the map format, as the one I have is in half the way between flexibility and storage efficiency, but is somewhat complicated. Maybe I could start a discussion about this, and someone of you may come up with a good solution.

All for now...
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Chema
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Location: Gijón, SPAIN
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Re: Another progress report

Post by Chema »

Sorry... I suppose this post should have gone into the Space1999 development forum...

I will continue posting progress reports there, even if it is not necessary just Space1999 related, as all this kit will be quite general for anyone making isometric games to use...

Regards,
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Dbug
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Re: Another progress report

Post by Dbug »

Chema wrote:I decided to move onto another topic that needs attention. As I got no feedback :( and noone volunteered to do it, I started to code a room editor for WHITE.
You should consider a fact: we are in summer, and many people are in holidays :)
Chema wrote:I am also thinking about the map format, as the one I have is in half the way between flexibility and storage efficiency, but is somewhat complicated. Maybe I could start a discussion about this, and someone of you may come up with a good solution.
I would personally use two different file formats, one for the editor, flexible, with large limits (number of tiles, sizes, etc...) that make it easy to load and manipulate, and one specific to the game engine, with a conversion process from the flexible format to the "optimised" game engine format.

Advantage is that many people can use your tool for different projects, adding features would be easy if you don't have to worry about the file format compatibility. After that if the format is nicely documented it's trivial to convert to anyone needs (like most probably Twilighte would code things different from you or me)
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