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From the Labs: Tetragon Tile Engine Early Preview

sascha — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:28:02 +0000

An early tech demo of the tetragonLib Tile Engine on which I restarted work on recently again. Click the image to view. There’s not much interaction yet though. You can scroll around with the cursor keys and apart from that open the Rhombus App Framework built-in debug console with F8 and the FPS monitor with SHIFT+F8. Everything is still under heavy development.

However the demo already shows some of the special features of the tile engine. It’s a blitted multi-layer engine which supports animated tiles (but it doesn’t use MovieClips or Sprites for this but animated Bitmap tiles). The demo shows two layers, one as a backdrop and the other with the maze on it. Additionally layers can use layer effects like the second layer here uses a drop shadow filter which is also defined in the tilemap file.

The engine tries to be resource friendly. If there is nothing to update it will not waste render cycles. E.g. if you move to any area without animated tiles on the screen the engine will shortly after start to consume less CPU.

(Please open the article to view the Flash media.)

Quite a list of features is still planned to be implemented, for example map-wrapping (to create endless maps), auto-scrolling and support for hexagonal as well as isometric tiles has already been started before but these implementations are going to be completely overhauled.

If you’re interested in having a look at the engine’s tileset and tilemap data files, they can be found here.

ActionScript3 Dice Class

sascha — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:29:23 +0000

In game development randomness is often necessary for certain tasks, be it the random distribution of graphic tiles, a random factor in NPC AI or random stats in a roleplaying game. Especially for the latter purpose the static Dice class provides a set of methods to roll dice as it is common in a Role-playing game, to be exact four-, six-, eight-, ten-, twelve-, twenty-sided and percentile dice.

>> Continue reading "ActionScript3 Dice Class"

Animated Bitmap Class

sascha — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 17:25:29 +0000

The AnimatedBitmap class provides functionality for Bitmap objects that are animated by using a series of still images. When creating a new AnimatedBitmap you provide a BitmapData object that contains an image that consists of the ’single-frame’ images for the animation.

>> Continue reading "Animated Bitmap Class"

Hexagon Framework Effects Demo

sascha — Mon, 28 May 2007 07:47:13 +0000

Here’s a small demo that I threw together yesterday which shows how the effects in the Hexagon Framework effects package can be used. The effects package contains classes that are used on display objects to apply an animated effect on them. That is not all however. The effects send a signal back to the calling class when they are finished and there are two more classes with that effects can be arranged, namely the EffectChainer class and the EffectCombiner class.

>> Continue reading "Hexagon Framework Effects Demo"

Flex Application: Star Wars Name Generator

sascha — Thu, 11 May 2006 05:35:24 +0000

I finally spend some time to make myself more familiar with the Flex 2 Beta and this is what came out as a result: Star Wars Name Generator! It’s a small and modest tool to generate random names (obviously). If you’re a fan of the Star Wars Pen & Paper Role-playing game (like me) you might find this tool useful!

You can generate names for planets and for characters, there are some parameters that can be chosen from before pressing the Generate button. After that it will spit out a list of more or less useful names (some of them sound very exotic). Interesting names can then be dragged and dropped onto the right side list. All names in this list are stored in local shared object on the users computer until the Clear button is pressed. The Switch button displays the saved names in a text area from where the names can be copied to the clipboard. (Small update: Works now with latest Flash Player v9).

(Please open the article to view the Flash media.)