Save the World!

I can now save the worlds and load them back, mostly in the format that the game reads. However the editor has grown much more powerful than the game and many things the editor has aren't supported yet.

Objects can rotate and move from one place to another; most can be scripted on some events, and I've also added the ability to read keyframe animations from the texture and the editor will animate those as well.

These images show a couple of test levels that were just read back from file. I also moved the add-object palette up to the toolbar.

Rockets, 1-Ups and Blackholes!

I've added a number of objects to the palette! These were all in my plans, but now I've sort of committed to letting the editor set the scene AND the game level script - when each object shows up, where the little space guys want to go, where the objects move to and at what speed; that sort of thing. The drawings on the world editor are vector drawn in code using NSBezierPath; that was a fun - if time consuming - exercise involving pen and square paper. 

Here's the object palette and what the objects look like on the map if we don't assign any textures to them:

    

The inspectors have also grown quite a bit. There's a ScriptableSpaceObject base class now which holds the common stuff in most of these objects, then particular implementations on top of that. There's also a view controller for each of these inspectors. Here's "Planet":

    

On this screenshot, two objects - a power-up and a blackhole - are showing some planned scripted movement. And there's an image layer on the back, which is being tinted blue. Any object can be tinted with a colour; I'm not sure what I'll use this for, but it seemed cool. Maybe there will be teams, or different races one day.

    

     

Inspecting objects

I have wired up the inspector panels for the objects, meaning I can now edit their dimensions precisely, tint them, pick textures and whatever other properties are needed! It almost-almost only needs saving and loading now, in fact, that's the next step! Before that, though, I'll need to break up the level loading in the game from two separate files: the static scene composition, and the character scripting, because I think this editor will only be able to create the static scenes.

I've also done away with the green wireframes!

Playing God

I can now create 3 types of objects: Planets, Coins and Stars. I'm not sure what the coins and stars will be used for, but the general pattern is there are 3 stars per level which are difficult to get to but don't stop you from finishing any level; and you collect coins to buy stuff like power-ups or rockets.

Objects can be dragged or resized using the handles on them, but they don't yet snap to the grid.

I added an object management table in the Objects side bar, but the objects don't yet belong to any layer nor can they be turned ON/OFF.

NSBezierPath is cool to work with to programmatically draw vector graphics. I drew the stars and the coins in Excel art and picked the coordinates visually - that reminded me of how I used square paper to draw graphics for the ZX Spectrum.

The Level inspector also has working World dimensions:

Building up a Game Editor

Starting to get the hang of Cocoa. The grid options window works great and I've added tabs on the sidebar for different purposes. Objects is where you instantiate game objects from; Layers is for creating and selecting Sprite and Image layers; Inspector is where you go to change the game object's properties; and Level has some general level properties. Doesn't do much yet, though!...

Cocoa is tough

I'm finding it hard to understand what all the Ctrl+links and delegates are for, which windows need controllers, how they talk to each other, notifications, bindings...

I have a grid and a zoomable canvas now. Next: worlds!

Game on hold for a while

Bad news: I started learning OS X app development and kicked off a level editor project for SpaceTaxi. This will take a while. 

Editing game level text files was fine until I thought of dropping hundreds of power-ups and coins in space. I need a visual editor and a grid to snap to.

I'm taking some code from Apple's Sketch sample project. This is how it looks after a few hours:

Mo' Buttons!

I can now place working buttons on the HUD layer - the HUD layer is the same resolution as the screen, so things will look more spaced out on a tablet than on a phone, that's why I had to allow anchoring the buttons to any corner or centre of the screen.

Also, the countdown timer down at the bottom gives more a sense of a game, but so far nothing happens when it reaches 0:00.

Parallax background images

Got parallax background layers working. Everything set up from the game level script. In this image there's one "space" 1000x1000 distance units (light-seconds?) backdrop image with a parallax factor of 0.9, meaning it pans at x0.9 the speed of the foreground.

Also there's fire, smoke and sparks coming out of that engine... :-)

I'll soon have to stop adding more stuff in and look at optimising the rendering performance as it's all very raw at the moment and I know there's lots to optimise away.

Now with 100% more text!

Ported text rendering in! This uses bitmap fonts generated by BMFont and applies a colour and alpha to it and any transformation. The text below is being rendered to the HUD layer - a top layer that's always there to have UI controls like the joystick, buttons, text.

Fire!!

I ported the Objective C particle emitter sample code by 71 Squared onto C++, used libxml2 to read .pex files and let ParticleEmitter objects be Sprites. So now the Rocket game object has one of those and it works beautifully!

The grey circles that look like lens flares are actually the virtual joystick.

Scale, Translate, Rotate...

I fixed all the scaling and translating issues I had in the old GL ES1.1 SpaceCab. Everything works perfectly now according to whatever is in the game level script. Also, I'm detecting and working with the retina x2 displays.

In this image:

- the small planets forming a square are 200 distance units apart.

- the square (1000x1000) is the defined game level area.

- zoom level is set to a fixed 1.0 everywhere.

- the viewport is set at 800 distance units wide.

Playing...

Aiming for the Moon...

Fixed the alpha, textures and some of the scaling issues. Rocket is still not centred on the screen and I have to do whatever I did to sprites to image layers and the text renderer.

Got textures working

After much fiddling, I disabled all objects (text, image layers) but the sprites and I can now see the virtual joystick and an animating rocket. Next problems to fix:
- the alpha is not being applied
- the rocket image is sheared at 45º
- it seems to think the resolution is still 320x480