Isometric Solid Objects – Part 2

Returning to the task of making the objects in the map semi-solid. The problem is that I want to draw the sprites as a whole, but define only certain regions as solid. This means I either have to make lots of sub-sprites and combine them, or define a list of regions that are and aren’t solid within each sprite/map object.

More text files to read in, or at least, longer ones.

Each Map Object now references another file which is the image file, this contains a link to the sprite and a list of co-ordinates which are the solid regions within the local co-ordinate system of the map object. These are then scaled to the global (screen) co-ordinates.

So far, all this is read in and the objects created, although they currently aren’t called in anyway. I haven’t gotten my head around how one decides if a given point (i.e the character) lies within a triangular region of undefined shape. Yes, it really shouldn’t be that difficult, I just haven’t got the envelope out to do it yet.

Isometric Solid Objects

Now I had succeded in making the objects solid, although this worked only so long as said object was supposed to be a rectangle (because the method used the collide() function, checking to see whether the character’s and map object’s rectangles collided). However, with an isometric map the objects are far from recatngular; they’re rather pointy.

Now my plan to solve this is to create another type of input file, for each and every image. This would contain the name of the image file, plus a list of co-ordinates that map out the solid regions of the image. When the map loads, all of these could be fed into an array of solid areas, and the character’s position checked against these whenever it moves.

The code is nearly complete, although so far unchecked. I’ve found debugging tends to scale exponentially with lines of code.

Creating Sprites (Part 2)

So I finished off the basic line drawing of the Church I was working on, and then added some simple colouring. Just to see how it would look within the program I switched off the sketch background, cropped and re-sized the image.

The additional sprites you can see below are purely for testing out the movement, drawing and event code. I will (very soon) only be using my own sprites. They were obtained from Charas Project Which is a great resource for Top-Down RPG Sprites. I believe it’s actually intended for RPG Maker, but just as useful for coded projects (NB I forget precisely from whom I took these few sprites, and I apologise. They will not be used in the completed game).

Once this image loaded I noticed some lag in the movement, and a whirly CPU fan. I suspect this is due to my usual memory intensive way of coding. I’ll go back through and stop making every single loop do so during the main While 1: loop.

On a slightly separate note, I’ve animated the main character during movement. Basically I just changed the sprite to the next in a flickbook type collection of sprites every 5th time the move() function is called.

Sprite Creation

Or Why I really wish I owned a tablet. Bring on the MacBook Touch, that’s what I say. It’s especially painful as I don’t even have my Wireless Mighty Mouse anymore, so it’s all with the trackpad until I can get to an Apple Store. Now, the process has so far gone like this:

I quickly sketched out an idea for a small town, took a photo of it and loaded it into Gimp. This forms a bottom layer over which I draw the isometric image.

I use the grid to map out the isometricness of it.

This is all the east bit. The parts I’m not sure about are the textures and colours of all the sprites. I haven’t Gimped enough to be confident in this. But, like everything else, I’ll learn as I go along. To be continued…