Huge project, few questions

[Nathan4102]

Hey guys! I've been planning a huge project lately, it's a huge strategy game that will probably take me a couple months to make. I've got a question though. So in my game you'll be able to walk around a 2d town. How do you guys suggest I do this? I was thinking I could photoshop a huge map image, load it at the beginning, and then scroll it around when the character walks, with programmed obstructions and stuff, but is there a better way?

Thanks!
Nathn

[Insectoid]

You could use an ASCII map, which is basically a text file representing, well, the map. Each character corresponds to a different object type- grass, roads, bushes, walls, doors, etc. All your movement, collisions, etc. take place on this map. You can then draw the world either with a photoshopped image, or by assigning a sprite to each character in the ASCII map and drawing the map based on that. Many old (and some new) games use this method.

[Raknarg]

Personally I would make tile images for the whole game. That way you could have customizable maps and you could just draw a few small pictures instead of one huge one, which is a lot slower. Not only that, but it would be much easier to program obstructed areas, by far.

If you do go the way you're planning, split the map into a bunch of smaller maps so you can just draw whats visible rather the always the whole thing.

edit: Instectoid got there first. Mix text files with tiles, and it becomes a lot easier.

[Nathan4102]

Wow, I never thought about using tiles... That would make everything A LOT easier. I like your idea about an ASCII map Insectoid, I'll probably use that!

I've got a decent idea on how to draw this, so we'll see how it goes!

Thanks!

[Raknarg]

I started an RPG a while ago, and it had a cool tile system... basically it was a text file, and each tile had two parts. The first part in lowercase would indicate what tile it was by name of the jpg, and the second part would indicate what directions it was inaccessible from. Thats how I could easily include objects with obstruction.

For instance, lets say you had a tile with a cliff that was high on top and low on bottom. The text for that could be clftB

That means cliff tile, top high, inaccessible from the bottom.

Just an idea

[Nathan4102]

I'll use that too! xD Thanks!

I got another questions now. So I'm making my map in a txt file, but I don't want it to be easily editable. In turing, I don't think you can add files to your .exe without including it in the .t file, so I came up with another way.

I'd like to make the map in plain text, and then convert every character to binary. The binary would look like gibberish to anyone who isn't really tech savy. Now is there a way in turing to quickly convert a character to its binary form, and back? Sure, I could do a huge case statement, but I have a feeling theres a better way! :p

Thanks!

[Raknarg]

Turing:

fcn toBinary (x : int) : string     var total := ""     var newX := x     var n := 0     loop         if newX - 2 ** n < 0 then             n -= 1             exit         else             n += 1         end if     end loop     for decreasing i : n .. 0         if newX - 2 ** i < 0 then             total += "0"         else             total += "1"             newX -= 2 ** i         end if     end for     result total end toBinary fcn toDec (x : string) : int     var total := 0     var len := length (x)     for decreasing i : length (x) .. 1         total += strint (x (i)) * 2 ** (len - i)     end for     result total end toDec put chr (toDec (toBinary (ord ("H"))))

make functions to convert from decimal to binary and from binary to decimal. I would encourage you to try it yourself.

[Nathan4102]

O.o I'd need to read up on how to convert decimal to binary, I've never really looked into that stuff. For now, I'll use your function, but I'll make my own soon! Thanks!

I think I'm done for tonight, I can already tell this is going to be a lot of fun!

[Raknarg]

It always is. Just make sure you set your priorities right, plan out how you're going to build this project before you throw yourself into it.

[Nathan4102]

I've got a 4 page layout of what the game is gonna contain and stuff, but as for how I'm building it, I'm just build it, no plans, just keep adding to it and watch it grow. It seemed to work for my other projects, So....

[Raknarg]

Haha well you might run into issues. I did the same thing a while ago, I started working on a big game in grade 10. Ended at well past 2000 lines, and it was hard to make any changes because there was just so much to change. For smaller projects its easy to change things on the fly, but for larger ones it's not always quite as easy

[Nathan4102]

Jesus, a 2000 line project in grade 10? What on earth were you making? xD My summative was 400 lines, and I got 105%. This game will be around 3-5k lines when I'm done, I'm assuming, so HOPEFULLY I don't run into too many problems. If I do, at least its just a project for fun, and not a final!

[Raknarg]

I was busy making this space shooting game, but if I remember correctly 1200 lines are dedicating to all the enemy drawings... I hard coded them so I could manipulate them.

It's also written like garbage haha I've rewritten it a couple times in the past

You wont be able to run it without removing all the picture stuff in the program though.

[Dreadnought]

If you're going to do any work at all in binary it would be good to learn bitwise operators. In Turing these are |, &. shl, shr, xor, and ~.
You can also look into storing the characters in hexadecimal, your text file will be about 8 times smaller and should be just as incomprehensible as the binary version.

Also Turing already has functions to convert to and from binary representation:

Turing:

intstr(10, 0, 2) >> "1010" % indentical to Raknarg's toBinary function strint("1010", 2) >> 10 % identical to Raknarg's toDec function

[Raknarg]

haha wow I had no idea