TinyCraft [Axe]

[saintrunner]

what character sprite are you using? I know I gave some a long while ago, and then they got changed but if I recall they looked a lot different then!? just wondering, are these still based off my originals? Anyways, this is looking really good and I am so proud to be apart of a community of such talented coders (and musicians )!

[Stefan Bauwens]

This is indeed coming along pretty nicely. I, on the otherhand, haven't even started on the 89 version and I'm starting to doubt if I will soon. I might start ever with it, but I'm having momentarily an other idea.
But that's just in idea-stages.

[DJ Omnimaga]

A 89 version would indeed be nice, although I wonder if in BASIC it would be fast enough? Does BASIC allow decent scrolling?

Also Zippydee it looks nice, although it would be nice if there was some sort of texture inside the mountain outlines, kinda like in The Reign of Legends 3 world maps:

[ZippyDee]

Well if you look at the original MiniCraft, the "mountains" really just look like elevated terrain, not actual mountains. That's all I was really capturing there.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Ah ok. I just thought it might look a bit too bland if there was no texture, though (at least in 4 level grayscale)

[ZippyDee]

Something like this?

Note that the two blue pixels would be black on the outline, but would be changed to dark gray when the outline is removed, and the green pixel will stay dark gray when the outline is removed. I just colored them to show where the pattern would be on the default tile.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah maybe,  although maybe the bottom outlin e should be made a bit thicker, otherwise it kinda looks like the light part is grass and the darker part trees.

[ZippyDee]

But then you'd have to be walking on trees in order to get to it...So it wouldn't look like that.

[squidgetx]

I know it'd slow down the tilemapping quite a bit, but maybe there's a way to make the mountains look at lot better by giving them contiguous outlined edges...

The idea would be to check the 8 surrounding tiles to test if they are mountains as well. For each surrounding tile, there would be a sprite to XOR onto a default mountain tile sprite, removing that wall/corner outline from the sprite. How plausible is this?

Here's an example:

(The bottom 8 sprites are supposed to be inverted like that so the XOR removes them)

The top sprite is the default mountain sprite. Before drawing the tile, that would be copied to a temporary memory area. The other tiles would be XOR'd onto the temporary sprite to remove that outline based on surrounding mountain (in order: top-left, top, top-right, left, right, bottom-left, bottom, bottom, bottom-right). The result would look something more like the example I threw together below the sprites.

Obviously it would make it slower, but the question is how much slower?

Hm, you could achieve that by putting it into the map-generation portion of the program, right? Have tiles for every possible mountain edge/corner and place them accordingly with your routine. (Then I guess if the terrain changed you would have to re-run the routine..but that could be coded separately as it is a special case event, right? )

Anyway I'd love to help you guys but I have a few coding habits that would not work well in a group environment. But give me a shout if you guys ever need some help with anything

[leafy]

What I was thinking is that we could do a second pass during map generation to differentiate all the tiles, then differentiate each set of 9 tiles (each tile and the 8 surrounding) when a tile is altered in-game to avoid all those nasty on-the-fly calculations

[DJ Omnimaga]

This reminds me a bit of ROL3 tilemapping in some dungeons actually. Shmibs did something like that before in Axe. However I was worried about the amount of tiles required if it checks all sides and the amount of calculations required to generate each tilemaps. X.x

[ZippyDee]

Well I was just thinking that if we could keep the number of tiles for each map type (air, top, underground) to at most 16 different tiles, we could cut the sizes of the maps in half for storage.

[Builderboy]

You could store the map using the basic grass/stone/sand terrain, and then when you loaded the level you could do the conversion required to update all the different sprites.  That or you just change the tilemapper to look at nearby tiles when displaying a sprite

[willrandship]

That should be plenty if you're keeping it faithful to minicraft:

Grass
Dirt
Mountain
Desert
Hole
Water
Stairs

I think that's all minicraft uses. Then, for easier program handling, you'll probably want:

Furnace
Workbench
Lantern
Chest

That brings it to 11. Not bad.

Edit: Also, as builderboy said, storing can be simpler than rendering, with semi-on the fly calculations.

[ZippyDee]

You could store the map using the basic grass/stone/sand terrain, and then when you loaded the level you could do the conversion required to update all the different sprites.

Yeah, I was just thinking about that, too. As long as we keep the number of "root" tiles to less than 17, we can still have as many sprite variations as we want for when it's loaded.

That or you just change the tilemapper to look at nearby tiles when displaying a sprite

That was kind of my first suggestion there...And it would only have to look at nearby tiles if it were drawing a mountain tile anyway.



EDIT: willrandship, there's more than that.

Wheat
Water
Tree
Stone
Stairs
Sapling
Sand
Rock
Ore
Lava
InfiniteFall
Hole
HardRock
Grass
Flower
Farm
Dirt
Cloud
CloudCactus
Cactus