BTW: ETA on tile support is around Wednesdayish, might push it off until next Tuesday when I get back from Iowa but I’d like to have a box full of bug reports to deal with when I return so prolly Wednesday-Thursday of this week. I will be posting a comprehensive list of non-item tags on tuesday I think to give a little time to get things ready hehehe. Sorry for the late notice, but things are progressing as fast as I had hoped. Probably doesn’t hurt that I’m putting in almost as much time writing notes for the following day’s programming as I spend programming >.> Yeah… I have 3 things left to do and then tilesets will be open for testing. Might actually get those done tomorrow if I spend an hour or two logicking them on paper first…
[me=GalenEvil]cracks whip[/me]
Sprite ye spriters of awesomeness!! GO GO GO GO GO!!!
The ETA on the tile support sounds great! But i have two questions. How do we deal with things that are larger than one tile, but use the same symbol? I’m thinking of the pool table, sofa, large bed and so on. And will individual items also need art?
[EDIT] I’ve made some manhole covers. Hopefully one of them looks good enough. http://imgur.com/DmELAcP
Hmm, if that’s the case then this is tricky. The gallon jug of ammonia and a can of cola share the same symbol. That’s going to look weird, if they are sharing. There may be others that are worse, but that’s the first i found in game.
[EDIT] And what about tiles that don’t have a direction. I’m going to use the bench(#) as an example. Right now it doesn’t face a specific way in game, But if we make a tile it will. Will tiles face the right direction?
I don’t think i explained myself very well, but having it face the player might work. Although i would personally find it disorienting having tiles rotate when i move.
The idea of just making the general symbols more informative than ascii characters seems appealing. It looks like color is separate from the sprite itself, so the current coloring scheme can be applied and extended independently of the sprite. A generic container sprite could be red when it’s a can of cola, white for a glass bottle, and gray for a jerrycan (not proposing colors, just giving an idea). That approach may help with the “many items have the same symbol” problem. It could also dramatically reduce the number of sprites we need (e.g. lava, swamp, and goo could be the same with just different coloring.) Looks like brogue is using SDL too, which might make it easy to learn from.
In the fonts I believe where you set the colour there would be a way to bind different pictures to each colour, so beige # is desk and white # looks like a web. Im not a coder, but it should be possible. How would this have worked before otherwise? http://whalesdev.com/forums/index.php?topic=1336.0
Tiles are a per-item thing and are referenced in the JSON file for that tileset as {“id”:“item_name”}, and not on a per symbol or symbol-color pairing. Multi-tile objects (beds, among others) will need to have a few different tiles available to make up a sample of configurations. Most important are: tile by itself with no neighboring tiles, a corner piece, and an edge piece. Others may be need as other configurations become apparent.
I haven’t finalized all of the syntax, but should have it done by tonight to give a raw template for all of the hardcoded items. Items reference a specific tile in the tileset with a background and foreground value, so multiple items can share the same tile.
Once things get closer to being finalized I will be trying to cache some of the referenced tile data in a rolling array so that as little static data as possible needs to be recomputed each frame. If a static location (terrains, furniture, traps, fields) is touched by a dynamic item (monster, npc, pc, item) moving then it will recompute as necessary. If there are framerate issues stemming from my implementation, I am guessing it will be on the orientation computations and data fetching end and can be optimized from there.
Lots of stuff left to do to get things finalized though, so I best get back to work.
@phaethon: I will open up that link and take a look at it later tonight when I get done for the day. If it looks good I’ll probably draw up implementation plans to get it merged into the tilesets system.
Yay a dedicated crew for tilesets, the creator of DDA said that if we get the tileset done they will work harder toward getting one implemented, that is he said this on the other forum about tilesets that seemed to just die off, i have been scanning the game site to see if they have yet added a tileset but still nothing, its really nice to see this finally coming around. Hopefully you get it done and they accept it
Having your tileset used as the default one in cdda is a big motivation for people working on these projects. Of course the team that does it will be credited for it in the game im sure.
Still working on JSON tags so won’t be releasing them tonight. Getting those finalized and uploaded will be the first thing I deal with when I start work again in the morning. There are about 470 hardcoded tags, then there are all of the jsonized items which are going to have to be added manually by the tileset makers for now. I will see about making an updater sometime later, as well as altering the json format to include defaults for the different item groups to catch items not covered by other entries. Thankfully, the item JSONs are standardized, so using a regex to select all of the tags in a file and copying them elsewhere is pretty easy
I have to test everything still and work out whatever bugs crop up so that will probably be most of the rest of tomorrow’s work before I post everything. Gah, hope I can get this all done by quitting time tomorrow so I can have a day of semi-relaxation before hopping on an airplane.
It seems like Im the only one who has been actively working on stuff for a while. Nobody seems to be uploading anything more to the tileset. It sort of died after it was moved. It wasnt clear that it had been moved and not deleted. I have Pmed everyone who was involved, but I dont know when we will get back to it. If push comes to shove I will work on a tileset alone, but it will take much longer as I still have school work and exams to deal with. Along with finding a job. Plus Im not the greatest spriter in the world, but I’ll do my best. Im still trying to power through all the terrain types. Is there anyway you could send me a list of every terrain type GalenEvil? (I mean like grass and dirt and metal floor and stuff)
