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/hexagon_framework_effects_demo/ http://blog.hexagonstar.com/hexagon_framework_effects_demo/#comments Mon, 28 May 2007 07:47:13 +0000 sascha http://blog.hexagonstar.com/hexagon-framework-effects-demo/ 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.

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.