Hello everyone!
I’m proud to announce I’m now on Tutorial 6c. I haven’t post guides for the other tutorials because I felt it was not really needed. You spend most of Episode 5 correcting bugs and fixing annnoying stuff. I didn’t like them very much.. but I guess it’s necessary progress. I have a few comments though about the tutorials.
Problems scaling
The main problem I see is that we’re waiting a bit too much before switching to a Tile-Map instead of the individual layers. This should have been done much sooner. What will happen to all our maps when all the layers are splits in single files? Don’t forget that the characters events, the cutscenes and dialogues should also be stored in it. Using layers individually was easy at first but, we should really think about migrating.
I peeked on the few last episode and saw they were coding some map files using the Content Pipeline… so I guess we’ll get it done one day. I just hope it’ll be easily scalable to add scripted tiles and things like that…
TileSize
Another comment I have is the tile-size. Currently, the tile-size is hard-coded in the tile-engine. I find this quite sad because it require you to only use 1 tile size for all your layers. What if you want to add layers of different size? The collision layer for example. Soon, we will have to code a collision layer that will block our character’s movement. It will also be our main resource for a path-finding algorithm (if we want our character to walk from one place to another without going through walls). If we use tiles of the same dimension for it, this mean we won’t be able to add tiles that could be partially blocked. You don’t want your character to be blocked 10 feet away of a signpost right? Or even.. a fence. A way to do that would be to have, for example, 16 (4×4) square per tile for the collision layer. It would make it a lot more precise. Right now, you would have to hardcode everything.
If you want a 3D effect, you could also make tiles that are closer (up in a mountain) bigger than the tiles down in the bottom of a ravine. But still use the same tile-engine and the same tiles. Right now, that would have to be hardcoded.
I’ll continue the tutorials and see how it goes. As soon as I’m done with them, be sure I’ll look into these topics.
Some articles planned
I plan on making an article on how to use a Finite-State-Machine to do some AI in our game. It will also use a Path-Finding algorithm. It will take some time to do though since I have school and work right now, adding to everything.
For now, if you need help on any of these topics, just drop a comment and I’ll gladly help you out.
