[Adonthell-devel] Map engine Tech Preview 2 ;p

[Alexandre Courbot]

Here's some map stuff!

As usual, update your CVS source copy, and get
http://www.gnurou.org/adonthell-stuff/alextest.tgz, that you unpack into
your src directory. Then run alextest. For the Unix-less or the
impatient, I've also put a few screenshots:

http://www.gnurou.org/adonthell-stuff/shot1.png
http://www.gnurou.org/adonthell-stuff/shot2.png

As you can see, I've dropped my nice houses for some scaled gfxs from
Waste's Edge. The most noticeable thing is that flat objects are handled
correctly: no more base tile trick to be able to walk on things. It is
also finally to have several layers of flat objects (see the rug). Also,
you'll notice that the trees are placed with some offset parameters
(when you look at their position from the grid). Such placement luxury
fortunately doesn't cost more than non-offset placements. So eventually
the fact that the map is a "grid" will be totally transparent to the
player, as both objects and characters can be placed/moved on a pixel
basis.

The naked guy (NG from now) can be controlled with the j, u, k and h
keys. Of course, his moves will only make sense if you walk/stand south,
as they are the only moves he has so far. When a requested state (or
move) is not found, the engine policy is to use the last used one,
instead of crashing badly ;) NG also go slightly faster than Chrono -
try making them start together from the top, or give a few advance to
Chrono, and see who arrives first at bottom! But on the other hand,
Chrono can run, while NG can't :) The good thing is that the speed
difference renders very well - I'm really glad the way it turned out.

NG doesn't have a shadow for now, as they must be handled by the engine.
had no time to worry about that ;) Also, there is still no collision
handling. It will be much more difficult to handle, this time.

Well, I guess that now I will stabilize the stuff and clean up a little
bit. Then maybe I'll start some editors (yeah! you have correctly
read!). Problem is, that Jol's new GUI won't be ready. Instead of using
the old one, I suggest handling input/output from the console until I
can do better (like in the old Genescroll days, remember James? ;)). Is
it allright? Adding the GUI support will be much easier than switching
from one to another.

Last thing: I managed to cross-compile surface.cc for Windows with
mingw32 for Linux. So as the current map engine tests doesn't require
Python at all, I'll attempt to produce alextest's Windows binaries as
soon as possible (that is, this weekend). That way Ben could see the new
map engine and his character in action, and it will be a first step to
Windows support.

Have fun! :)
Alex.
-- 
http://www.gnurou.org