⚂ Remember videogames?
Fairly big, fairly maze-y, has some rooms, and takes little time to generate
This is a small update to my 2010 dungeon generator example.
The main change is that it now treats high values of "cut dead end" parameters correctly, no longer placing unconnected rooms even if there's enough space to allow that.
Also there's now a small demo on how to use the resulting data, placing some walls and a player to wander around as.
Update: Also see this post about this approach to dungeon generation.
In some cases, a moment comes when you need to display specific content in a area smaller than itself, thus requiring scrolling.
GameMaker does not support 'clip rectangle' type of command for its reasons, however it is easy to 'clip' area to be drawn by using an 'buffer' surface to draw content in, before drawing that to screen.
Attached example illustrates sample implementation of such.
Most often, content of such would be text. And maybe an image. Or two.
Since images would require a bit more code, example does simple and efficient - long long text is rendered into a surface, which is later drawn into an other 'buffer' surface to display it as part of window on screen.
Also there is a scrollbar, which obviously can be improved, if it needs to serve purposes other than displaying position of 'window'.
Not much of informative demonstration, but is cross-platform and shows performance.
Common solution to this problem is to create a 'cache' image that would hold a tiled version of image to be drawn easily.
That means drawing image W*H times only once in a while.
However, actually you can do even better than this.
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Possible future candidate for an adventure map
From my point of view, creating a tool, that would perform your desired action efficiently, is often better than just doing mentioned thing.
In last few days I've developed a small tool that translates given commands into series of WorldEdit plugin commands, and provides simple interface for writing dynamic scripts that modify world contents, even without having access to server to be able to import JS scripts.
Since game handles input nicely, a single message can be sent every 200..300ms, meaning that subset of commands needed to change selection bounds and perform desired operation over it often takes less than a second to perform, in comparison to minute-measured time needed to do same manually.
This opens rather interesting perspectives of automating creation of typical structures, as well as making it possible to push procedurally generated content into game easily.
Yesterday I've spent some time to port part of RPG05's dungeon generator for use with this, and this is the result.
Looks nice enough, right?
In free time of last days I've been developing earlier mentioned thing in Love2d, which is platformer engine.
One provides a simple framework for games that use combination of aligned tiles and dynamic objects.
As well it adds a easily modifiable system to load levels from strings, giving freedom for implementing level editors.
You can download a compiled version here or watch discussion thread on official forum here.
Love2d only provides you with a function to check if specific key is currently down, love.keyboard.isDown(key), and no functions to check if key was pressed\released.
But there are events, which can be used to implement such functions.
Code below demonstrates sample implementation.
If you've been working with Love2d, you might have noticed that there isn't an actual debug console, and print() calls will not get displayed anywhere.
However, it's pretty easy to make your own system to display single-line output messages.
Here is an example of one.
Can be seen as a part of those block-building games
So, today comes with an example of collision between point, box, and line versus a 3d array.
3d array is presented as ds_list (z) with ds_grid's (xy).
Functions include management of this 3d array (creation, destruction, modification - no memory leaks included) and actual functions to check for different collisions.
All of these also include error handling, so attempting to check for collision outside the 'map' will threat area as 'air' (0) and not crash the game.
Also note that no optimization was applied to process of block rendering - you'd likely have to change that if basing game with large level on this example.
As you might have noticed, process of making nice-looking isometric games can be tricky.
Especially that part when you want your terrain look like actual terrain rather than arrangement of isometric images.
Common approach to this is to use alpha channel mask(s) to smooth edges of tiles.
Here I've made a script that applies such mask to given sprite, handling all additional actions needed.
While working with GameMaker, you might have noticed that all collision_ functions return only first instance to intersect given collision shape, while in some cases you'd want to get all instances that collide with one.
This set of simple scripts adds such missing functionality...