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 see the Flash content.)

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.

]]> http://blog.hexagonstar.com/lab-hexagon-tile-engine/feed/ 2 http://blog.hexagonstar.com/diceclass/ http://blog.hexagonstar.com/diceclass/#comments Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:29:23 +0000 sascha http://blog.hexagonstar.com/aboutrollingdice/

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.

The Dice class (and it’s supporting classes) are rather elaborated, using for example the Linear Congruential algorithm in the process of generating ‘true’ random numbers so it might not be the most speed-optimized method for calculating random numbers. For absolute performance the LCA and rounding routines can be removed to speed up calculations.

Using the Dice class is very simple! For example rolling two ten-sided dice can be done with the following call …

var result:int = Dice.tenSided(2);

… rolling the percentile die is even simpler as it does not need any arguments. It always returns a value between 1 and 100 …

var result:int = Dice.percentile();

… the class also provides the roll method with that any x-sided die could be rolled, 3 sixteen-sided dice for instance …

var result:int = Dice.roll(16, 3);

The following small Flex application uses the Dice class and can be used to test dice throw probability according to the bell curve (the more dice are used the lower the probability to roll boundary results).

(Please open the article to see the Flash content.)

Update: The Dice class is now part of the hexagonLib and can be found here.

What are the advantages over using a generic MovieClip? When writing games you might have several animated graphics (also called sprites, but not related to the AS3 Sprite class) that should run with a different framerate than the game’s global framerate. Let’s say your game runs with a global framerate of 99 and you put several animated sprites into your game that were created for playing back with a framerate of 24. With a MovieClip all those sprites would also play with a framerate of 99 which means they play way too fast. However with an AnimatedBitmap you can set every framerate individually. There are a couple of other advantages like that a Bitmap is more lightweight than a MovieClip and it has a isPlaying() method. Also it changes the way of how to embed assets. Instead of embedding many files for one animation only one image for a whole animation sequence is embedded which has positive effects on the file size. The ring sequence used in the demo has 21 frames that use 102Kb as single images but only 44Kb when they are combined to one image.

The following demonstration plays with a global framerate of 99 but all AnimatedBitmap instances play at a framerate of 24 …

(Please open the article to see the Flash content.)

You can download the class including demo source code and demo image here:

Update: The class is now part of the hexagonLib and can be found here. You want this version because it’s the one that is being maintained.

Changes in v1.1
The timer object used to time the frame animation has now been made external. For this purpose a custom FrameRateTimer class has been added. This has the advantage that AnimatedBitmap objects don’t use their own timer objects anymore. Instead you can use one timer for many animated objects if they use the same framerate. This saves memory and CPU cycles. However you are still able to use one FrameRateTimer for every animated object if it is desired.
An IAnimatedDisplayObject interface has been added so that future animated display object types can be integrated more easily.

Also included is a jsx script for Photoshop CS named HDRS- CreateImageSequence that can be used to easily create a ‘single-frames image’ with Photoshop. Simply run the script in Photoshop and choose the images in the file browser that appears. Photoshop will then generate a single image with all the frames laid out horizontally. All images should have the same size to get a correct animation sequence. Also sometimes you need to fine-tune the position of some frames, e.g. for the ring in the demo (which was rendered to single frame images from a 3D modeler) I had to adjust the horizontal alignment on some frames because otherwise the animation would glitch to left/right by some pixels.

Currently there are AlphaFade, BlurEffect, ColorFade, ModuloEffect, MoveEffect, Pixelizer and TimeDelay who act as effects. The EffectCombiner can be used to combine several of the effects into one (which means that all combined effects use the same Timer) and the EffectChainer can be used to play back effects in sequencial order (including the EffectChainer which acts as an effect on itself). The TimeDelay is a non-visual effect which simply applies a time delay.

The class from where the effects are started has to implement the INotify interface which only contains one method, notify(). The effects (as well as the EffectChainer and EffectCombiner) use this interface to notify the caller and – if necessary – give back a callID that can be used to determine which effect has returned. More detailed info on this will be available in the API docs when the framework is released … soon™.

(Please open the article to see the Flash content.)

You can focus the SWF with the Mouse and press Space to skip through the effects.

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 see the Flash content.)

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