Re: [pygame] Tile Size

[Farai Aschwanden <fash@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Inside...

Am 17.12.2006 um 01:32 schrieb Kris Schnee:

> I think that a 2D, flat scrolling tile system in Pygame would be a  
> decent compromise between graphical quality and ease of  
> programming, for my project. I can live with the game's islands  
> being a constant height, for simplicity. One question I could use  
> input on is about tile size.
=> What blocks you to put higher tiles on the existing tiles?

> Right now the game world has 100x100 "zones" representing chunks of  
> terrain I imagine as 1 Km^2, ie. each data point represents a 10m^2  
> area. I'd like to show human-sized figures, meaning you can see  
> maybe ten times the player's width at a time -- maybe 10 meters  
> across. For an 800x600 screen, that would mean tiles maybe 80  
> pixels wide for each data point. Pre-drawing a whole zone then  
> would mean blitting from a picture 8000x8000 pixels in size! Is  
> that impractical?
=> 8k x 8k is probably not that big but why creating the whole area  
as image? Why not adding tiles when the player is moving to a certain  
direction. Lets say the player is moving left, so you should add  
tiles on the right side while removing tiles on the left side. This  
would allow you to create big worlds and not limited on huge images.

> I'd like to use square tiles of some reasonable size, erring on the  
> side of using a few big tiles. Maybe I should treat a zone as being  
> just 100x100m? The level of detail on the terrain itself doesn't  
> need to be high, because objects like trees can be added separately  
> at any exact coordinates. (That is, I could describe an island's  
> shape with a small number of data points saying "water here, sand  
> here, grass here" and then a list of exact positions for objects.)
=> Same way you could add areas at higher positiones. They are  
rectange oriented you can check that the player cant pass them (maybe  
way up to them?)

> Since the game has an island theme I would also like to draw water  
> translucently, which would mean blitting a water texture (or at  
> least translucent blue/cyan) over parts of the terrain, rather than  
> just using blue tiles as I once did (
=> Sure would like nice! Instead of this you could use animated water/ 
land combo areas

> http://kschnee.xepher.net/pics/niss-051111.jpg ). That also means  
> having some way to draw water "in front of" or "behind" sprites or  
> even some of both depending on their vertical position, right? Even  
> if the landscape is a constant height for drawing purposes, I'd  
> still like to have a character able to go underwater, being drawn  
> "behind" the water, but also able to be above it or at the surface.
=> How about you can add the type of water like: 1 = low, 2 = deep
low: cut a part of the charaker off (would also work for monsters  
following the characters or any NPC standing in the water)
deep: The character is painted in deep blue or anim turns into  
swimming animation.

> Drawing water could be done on the fly each frame, or given its own  
> drawing plane -- doubling the RAM needed for the pre-drawing -- or  
> even given a much smaller drawing plane and then somehow scaled up  
> each frame. What method makes sense?
=> Huh? Doubling RAM? I, personally, recommend you completly try to  
build the visual world in the tile size you planned. Many things to  
mention about this but all over: easier to program than handling  
different tyle size types and mechnisms.

Just my 2 cents
Farai


> Kris