Portal Prelude

[Raylin]

Sir.
You and me are going to have a serious discussing about this physics engine you are flaunting in our faces.

>:C

Prophet is not amused.

[Builderboy]

Lol, ok then, here is the physics engine The portal engine will be released with the game


(I had to remove about 1700 bytes of code to remove the portal support )

[meishe91]

If you wouldn't mind going into more details that would be great, you definitely don't have to though

[ztrumpet]

That is pure awesome!  It's kinda mean that you took the portal section out, but it's something to look forward to.

That's an awesome engine!  I really need to study this code and learn how you made it sooooo awesome.

I can't wait for Portal X!

[DJ Omnimaga]

What I have always been amazed the most in this Portal 2D clone, and I stated this many times so far on IRC: the fact when you enter a portal, you won't immediately warp to the other one. You stand there and see the other part of you from outside the other portal, and can even jump and stuff! Just that makes the game look even more professional and advanced. Nice job on this.

[Builderboy]

Hmmmmm I'll consider making this an open source project as it is developed, especially since Axe is a developing language and im sure we all could learn by sharing of code.  Portal could be a learning experience for us all!

And Dj, thats the very first thing i knew i needed when i decided to make a Portal game I actually originally had this idea a looong while back directly after the original Portal came out.  I was going to try to make it using Omnicalc, but then i realized that there just wasn't enough speed or control to make an effective game with it.  Once i realized that i could do it with Axe, i jumped at the chance!  The code to find the position of the alternate sprite, so that your character can be in two places at one, was one of the most difficult coding challenges i have faced in a long while.  That coupled with momentum transfer left me exhausted after a whole day of coding   I am really happy with the way it is turning out though, already I'm flying around with Portals!

(And did anybody notice I am still using 5x5 sprites, just like in the original? )

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah I saw, nice

Btw for open source always wait until final release, though, in case someone would steal the code, release game modified as their own then you have no more power when uploading to ticalc, as ppl would think they're the real author, since he uploaded first.

[AaroneusTheGreat]

If that happens we will all stand behind you because we know the real story. Good thinking though Kev.

[DJ Omnimaga]

(btw you might want to refer to me as DJ or DJ Omnimaga now because I think there are some other forum members who has Kevin as first name now )

[Quigibo]

I looked at the code for the physics engine and there are A LOT of optimizations you can do.  Most of them you can find in the "Optimization Tips" file and some of them are just program flow stuff.  Let me know if you want me to point some out for you   This is a very cool project so far.

[Builderboy]

Yeah i'm not surprised.  I haven't done any optimizing, and i have been putting a lot of things in subs when they are not needed to preserve readability right now.  That and i havnt been using Axe for very long This is one of the reasons i am thinking releasing code would be a good idea, I don't think i have anything to worry about, and we could always give it to select members only if we thought there might be a problem.

[ztrumpet]

Quigibo, can you compare the code side by side so we can see how to optimize with Axe?  Thanks!
(The Optimization Tricks file is nice, but it can help to see it more. )

[DJ Omnimaga]

I looked at the code for the physics engine and there are A LOT of optimizations you can do.  Most of them you can find in the "Optimization Tips" file and some of them are just program flow stuff.  Let me know if you want me to point some out for you   This is a very cool project so far.

When I release my first game or demo of game, could you take a look at my code for some optimizing? Unfortunately, I am so used to BASIC syntax that it will take me a while to get used to some of the funky Axe optimizations and I tend to learn better to optimize if I look at my very own code, then look at the changes I could have made.

[Builderboy]

Alrighty, I have finished the first version of my tilemapper.  It fully supports RLEncoding, and also 16 different types of tiles (which should be plenty, i might even lower the number to increase compression rates).  Here is a demo screenie that shows a Beta of a possible game level.  The funky looking walls are walls the don't support Portals



For those of you curious I will attach the source so you can take a look at it in a bit.  It basicaly runs in 2 parts.  Durring the first part it uncompresses the data into SaveScreen RAM.  This is where the tilemap 'matrix' is stored.  After that it moves onto display, where it renders all the tiles.  Note that it needs to be done in 2 parts because some tiles (like the non portal-able tiles) need to know what the tiles around it are before it can be rendered correctly.  The screenshot above only uses 3 tiles, blank, solid, and non-portal-able.

[SirCmpwn]

Very nice!  [SirCmpwn claps]
When I looked at the source code for your physics engine, I saw you used this syntax for your map:
[11111111
[10000001
And so on.  If data is in hex, how on earth did this work?