Two Map Tricks! - VERGE, Free 2d Game Engine

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Two Map Tricks!

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mcgrue	Although this is still not the earth-shattering news we've been hinting at, it's cool nonetheless: Kildorf has created two neat little tech demos, both dealing with some features of maps we've long pined for. And both tech demos are all done in vc! First off, the Seamless Mapswitch Demo which shows off how to seamlessly conjoin two maps! The sandy area is one map, and the bricked area is another. Crystal can walk uninterrupted from one map to the next! The second map is a long-time holy grail for verge users: a completely self-wrapping map. Check out his map-wrapping demo! You can walk in any direction forever, even though this demo map is only about 2 screens big! Kudos to Kildorf forlistening to my mad requests and making them reality. Do you have any small demos worth showing off? Give me word, and a newspost is yours! Posted on 2005-06-05 00:58:29 (last edited on 2005-06-05 22:31:03)
Kildorf	Ah, yes! As you can see, I am a supernerd, and I have harnassed my powers to bend the maps to my will! Also, I am very tired. Oh god sleep now. Posted on 2005-06-05 01:08:15
mcgrue	There is no map.</keanu> Posted on 2005-06-05 01:11:52
Rysen	Those are pretty awesome, and that map wrapping demo would have come in handy for the horse mini-game in Amethyst. Perhaps I will steal it since mine is not very seamless. >:D Great work! :D Posted on 2005-06-05 02:21:14
CrazyAznGamer	The thing with the seamless map transfer would probably be very useful for building huge gigantic humongous inhumanely gargantuan worlds. Just build the gigantic map in little chunks (and watch your memory be depleted like a victim of a maliciously thirsty vampire). All in the name of speed. Mmmmm... speeeeed... Also, you can set zones for real-time battles with it. Watch your players become annoyed as they go back to a previous area (map), only to find that the monsters they destroyed came back to life! (map startup function) Which greatly influences me to consider using it. Posted on 2005-06-05 14:33:39
Overkill	Both things are very interesting, but not without their flaws. Seamless Map Transitioning could be much nicer. Currently all it does it take one segment of a huge map and when you hit a certain zone, it switches to another huge map and another small segment. The only overhead you avoid by doing this transitioning is the entity overhead at the price of multiple same-sized maps. Having many large maps also has the downside of updated segments of one map jump on the screen if you forget to update the other map which you transition from. If you improved this to take two actually small maps and combine them up to shortly beyond the transitional points, it could still be quick and consume less hard drive memory per map. The only problem is how you'd do such a thing in advance. Map wrapping VC hackery is also nice, but I'd really like it if you didn't have to modify the map to take space for the 'buffer area', or at least made it so the buffering wasn't resolution dependent. That said though, don't think I don't believe these are cool. These are definite elements of awesome, just suggesting a few improvements these two could use. More work for you, but less work in the end, if used a lot by someone. Posted on 2005-06-05 17:40:15
Kildorf	Your points are both very valid, Overkill. I would argue that if you were using larger maps (my test maps were small so it didn't take five minutes to see the transition effects) that the buffer zone wouldn't be a big deal, but you're right that having to keep two (or more) maps updated to look the same is a pain. Unfortunately, there isn't anything I can do about this. Verge simply doesn't allow the camera to scroll so that non-map bits are visible. There isn't any hack to get around this that we can do, unfortunately. :/ And the wrapmapping buffer is resolution dependent because how much buffer you need depends on how much you can see at once. Anyway, yeah. They are both very much in the 'ha ha nifty' stage. If I can figure out how to get around some of these problems, then I'll definitely let everyone know. I may also try to come up with a suggestion for some in-engine features to facilitate stuff like this. Gah. Reading over this post to check spelling and whatnot, I just thought of a possible hack to get around the camera problem. I'll have to look into that... but not right now. Right now I need to do my homework. Posted on 2005-06-05 18:11:19
Joewoof	o_o' wow.......just wow... Posted on 2005-06-06 06:26:10

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