Finally decided to learn 2d (for now) java game programming. Am working on a game that has a central object that the user will guide with the directional keys. I have that working perfectly, cobbled together from examples and tutorials I've found.
I'm using this method of generating colored background tiles but I'd like to scroll (move) the background as the primary object the user is moving reaches the window edges. I'm fairly sure I can make that work, I have the basics in place, but I can't find a good tutorial or actual demonstration of a way to continue to generate additional tiles to fill in the space the user is moving too.
At this point, this is purely background and I have no need to save the exact tiles generated - but eventually I would like this ability. I'm sure I'll have to find a way to divide the areas into "chunks" like minecraft does.
But for now - how can I continually fill in the area with the same pattern? Or is there a better way to create the tiles that's better for this?
Instead of a solid color you can use a TexturePaint, as shown here. Let your model contain a reference to the desired texture for each grid cell. Let your view use a flyweight pattern for rendering, as illustrated here.
Related
Similar to the game Factorio im trying to create "3D" terrain but of course in 2D Factorio seems to do this very well, creating terrain that looks like this
Where you can see edges of terrain and its very clearly curved. In my own 2D game Ive been trying to think of how to do the same thing, but all the ways I can think of seem to be slow or CPU intensive. Currently my terrain looks like this:
Simply 2D quads textured and drawn on screen, each quad is 16x16 (except the water thats technically a background but its not important now), How could I even begin to change my terrain to look more like a Factorio or other "2.5D" games, do they simply use different textures and check where the tile would be relative to other tiles? Or do they take a different approach?
Thanks in advance for your help!
I am a Factorio dev but I have not done this, so I can only tell you what I know generally.
There is a basic way to do it and then there are optional improvements.
Either way you will need two things
Set of textures for every situation you want to handle
Set of rules "local topology -> texture"
So you have your 2d tile map, and you move a window across it and whenever it matches a pattern, you apply an appropriate texture.
You probably wouldn't want to do that on the run in every tick, but rather calculate it all when you generate the map (or map segment - Factorio generates new areas when needed).
I will be using your picture and my imba ms paint skills to demonstrate.
This is an example of such rule. Green is land, blue is water, grey is "I don't care".
In reality you will need a lot of such rules to cover all cases (100+ I believe).
In your case, this rule would apply at the two highlighted spots.
This is all you need to have a working generator.
There is one decision that you need to make here. As you can see, the shoreline runs inside the tile, not between tiles. So you need to chose whether it will run through the last land tile, or the last water tile. The picture can therefore be a result of these two maps (my template example would be from the left one):
Both choices are ok. In fact, Factorio switched from the "shoreline on land" on the left to the "shoreline on water" on the right quite recently. Just keep in mind that you will need to adjust the walking/pathfinding to account for this.
Now note that the two areas matched by the one pattern in the example look different. This can be a result of two possible improvements that make the result nicer.
First is that for one case you can have more different textures and pick a random one. You will need to keep that choice in the game save so that it looks the same after load.
Another one is more advanced. While the basic algorithm can already give you pretty good results, there are things it can't do.
You can use larger templates and larger textures that span over several tiles. That way you can draw larger compact pieces of the terrain without being limited by the fact that all the tiles need to be connectable to all (valid) others.
The example you provided are still 2D textures (technically). But since the textures themselves are 'fancy 3D', they appear to be 3D/2D angled.
So your best bet would be to upgrade your textures. (and add shadow to entities for extra depth).
Edit:
The edges you asked about are probably layed-out by checking if a 'tile' is an edge, and if so it adds an edge-texture on top the background. While the actual tile itself is also a flat image (just like the water). Add some shadow afterwards and the 3D illusion is complete.
I hope this answers your question, otherwise feel free to ask clarification.
I am making a game similar to Risk and struggling to find a way to implement the interaction with countries.
The basic idea is to create custom objects that are not rectangular and be able to change their colour by clicking them, highlight them with mouseover, or as the game progresses.
How would I go about having highlight-able countries that can be selected? The problem with sprites is their bounding boxes are rectangular, and if I define Box2D vertices and make polygons it gets really messy. Also, there are a lot of countries so a lot of the platformer style solutions don't fit.
How should I also change the colours of what is selected? Would it be best to have an individual sprite for every country and keep switching between them or is there a better way?
One way is to use polygons like you tried but I wonder why and what you mean it got messy. There are tools out there that let you draw vertices over a image and let you export that. You probably need to clean up the data a bit and import it into your app. It's also not very hard to make such an app yourself, have it import your image and start drawing and export to your favorite format. The more detailed you draw your polygons the more detail you get in your.
Perhaps an easier solution would be to use the opacity of each image of a country. Each country gets it's own image and you need to overlap the bounding rectangles to line them all up. When your mouse is hovering over one or more of these bounding boxes you check if the mouse is over a transparent pixel. If it is transparent you are obviously not hovering over the actual country. Some things to consider:
I would create the game in a pixel perfect manner so each pixel of your images is translated to a single pixel of the screen your outputting to.
To align your whole map I would create one big world map in your drawing application. Then save each country but remain the canvas size of the complete map. When packing these images with the LibGDX TexturePacker remove the whitespace (transparent pixels) and you will get an offset in your atlas. You can use this offset for each country to line them up and save precious texture space by removing all that whitespace.
Always check for a simple collision first before diving in deeper.
If you want to have "hover" functionality then don't do pixmap = texture.getTextureData().consumePixmap() each update since it's rather expensive. You might be better off creating your own 2D boolean array that represents the clickable area when you initialize the country object.
I would like to add this feature to my android app:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_vision_system
In short it I believe it is a terrain heightmap. I specifically need help with rendering the terrain. The rest of the display I can accomplish.
After a day of google I appear to be no closer. My research seems to point to using opengl, heightmaps and SRTM. However I have no clue how to tie it all together. None of the java examples are android specific.
Alternatively maybe using openstreetmaps and a tile overlay but I cant establish if it is possible in 3D.
The app will be a moving map based on GPS position of the aircraft. As the aircraft moves over the earth the terrain ahead will be updated.
Can someone point me in the right direction?
I can recommend you to use a vector format with few layers. For example, layer of depth, layer of landscape type and layer of objects. To build 3D from this data you need to divide the map in small tiles and load data in memory for visible area only. Your 3D builder will parse this data. E.g. a simple renderer (using OpenGL)... You create mesh as large as tile size and with enough count of vertexes. Next, you parse depth layer and move each vertex along Z-axis like it need. After you need to set color like it specified in type layer. And finally, you need create and locate objects like object layer data (it's already built-in meshes). When you build needed tiles you pass it to renderer.
I am developing a game using libgdx. Now i'd like to have a Background all over my map (Map size is not fixed yet i'll decide later). My map is tile based but i don't use TiledMaps. So i create and load the map with own code/editor.
My question now: How should i implement the background thing?
I thought about different ways:
Loading a huge Image, which covers all the map. This is not realy good cause i render things, which are not in my viewport (80 Tiles X,50 Tiles Y).
Deviding the Image in 4 or more Images and loading the one in the viewport. The Problem: At some point maybe part of all Images is in viewport so all Images are sent to GPU right?
Having 1 Image which cover the viewport (80,50) and follows the camera. Best performance i think, but it will look stupid...
Or every tile has an own Image and the Objects are drawn above them. Notice that i only render Tiles inside the viewport. But on Gamestart it would need to load Information about every tile in the level.
For Information: My Game is Topdown and the Background Shows the floor so no detailed hills etc are needed, just maybe some simple desert sand look and things like that. Is there another even better way?
What would be the best way for performance and optic?
If your game is Tile Based. It would make much more sense to have the background tiled aswell. Just use another layer for it. If your editor/loader does not support multiple layers, then I would recommend you to switch to another one, or add those features to it (if possible).
The Background Shows the floor so no detailed hills etc are needed, just maybe some simple desert sand look and things like that.
It is very easy to reuse tiles in something like a desert, because all their tiles are very similar (sand).
In a small java swing 2D game, what is the best solution for creating the board view?
Use a component for the board and custom paint it and each square of the checker at once?
Use a component for the board and create another component modelizing the square with its own paint component doing the job for the square only. Use a layout to place each Square instance in the board?
I know this is subjective and I don't want a fight about it. I just need some clues to figure myself which way I should go. I've begun a side project and I've using 1), with the feeling that there is something wrong.
Just go with one drawing panel/container for everything.
Consider a tile based game. Using your second solution each tile would be an object, memory would skyrocket and the game would slow to a crawl.
Using the first option you are flexiable. You draw what you want, you have the panel coordinates so everything is relative to this. Using the tile based example you'd know the height and width of the panel, draw your square and increment in the X and Y coordinates as appropriate.
GUI frameworks such as Swing or .NET's Winforms are expensive as they have a whole lot of other stuff that a game won't need. So to answer your question, go with option one, rather than say using a panel for every checker on your board.
One nice solution to using the second method, in combination with the first method is the Flyweight Design Pattern. You still get to use OO objects, but you'll have a fraction of the amount you normally would. Check it out.
Like Finglas, I lean toward your first approach. This tile-based game is a concrete example. In contrast, this component-based game uses a GridLayout of JToggleButton. The former is somewhat more complex but plays well even on large screens; the latter is simpler yet sufficient for reasonable games. You may have to experiment with your game's geometry and logic to decide which to prefer.