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I’m releasing some base code here for haXe which I’m planning to use during the competition. This might also be useful for anyone who wants to start creating Flash games in haXe. Basically, the code is pretty much the same as the scroll demo I made earlier, but now ported to AS3 (for Flash player 9), which is a lot faster. The main thing the code does is make it easy to use graphics and maps created in Tile Studio together with haXe.

(click and use arrow keys)

This is a little demo, included in the package to show how to use the library. There is a readme.txt file which has step-by-step instructions on how to install everything (haXe, swfmill, Tile Studio, FlashDevelop) and get it working.

• Download HaxeBaseCode-1.3.zip (67 kb)

After that, I often installed a new version of Linux, which I usually got from a computer magazine cover disk. The distribution I most often had was SUSE, and every time I installed it, the process was better than before. The last time I installed it (probably two years ago), everything went smoothly and almost all my hardware was automatically recognized without problems.

Other than playing around with Linux a bit, I never used it much. But now I’m using BlitzMax for creating games and it has a Linux version as well, so now I should be able to make a Linux version of my next game.

Lately, I kept hearing and reading about Ubuntu so I decided to try it. I downloaded an iso, burnt it to a cd and booted from it. The loader looked really nice and it just started up Ubuntu directly from the cd so you could try it right away. On the desktop, there was also an installation program. After trying it out for a while, I decided to install Ubuntu. All went well until the partitioning had to be set up. Scanning my existing disks took a very long time, and finally I got a list of /dev/hda, /dev/hdd and all the partitions inside of those, named hda1, hda2, hdd1, hdd2, etc. It didn’t show any volume labels, which made it kind of confusing. I selected the free space at the end of my second disk and tried to make a new partition there, but got the error message: Unusable free space. In the end I decided to install it over an old Linux installation that I had already forgotten about.

The remaining part of the installation went well and pretty fast, and soon I had Ubuntu running. The automatic updates went more smoothly than I’d ever seen before in Linux. But Ubuntu only has a limited set of packages that are supported. Things like FireFox and OpenOffice work great. But there is very little stuff for developers.

Unfortunately, BlitzMax programs wouldn’t run, because my nVidia GeForce MX420 graphics card hadn’t been set up properly. I found various websites about setting up the nVidia drivers in Ubuntu, and I figured it wasn’t going to be easy. I followed all the instructions and finally I had to restart X to start using the new drivers and all I got was a black screen. I’d hope to get the old one back after a while if I did nothing, but that didn’t happen. So I just pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del and started the recovery mode, where I could restore my xorg.conf file to get the old mode back. I tried instructions from other sites too, but after getting the same black screen six more times and restarting in recovery mode, I decided Ubuntu is probably not really ready yet.
Finally I downloaded openSUSE 10.2, installed it and that went very well. It even installed drivers for my graphics card so I can run BlitzMax programs!

At first, the difference in speed appeared to be huge, but those were rather the result of other optimizations I did in the meantime. All these methods work at roughly the same speed if you’re using large tiles. But when you have small tiles (which I normally use for games) and you have hundreds of them on screen all the time, handling all those tiles seems to become far slower than rendering them.

Here are three methods I tried:

1. The first is the method used in the scroll demo. Every tile is represented by a separate MovieClip, the total number of MovieClips stays constant, when a tile goes off-screen, its MovieClip is reused for the tile that appears on the other side. Using this method makes it very easy to add animated tiles, since they are handled by flash.
2. The second method is the same method as above, but with only one MovieClip with a BitmapData attached to it (as the screen surface) and just “blitting” all the tiles to it using copyPixels. Here you need to implement tile animations yourself.
3. For the third method (demonstrated below), each layer has its own BitmapData object as a surface (size of the screen + 2 tiles), which scrolls along with the layer. That way, you only need to redraw the tiles that actually change (at the edges and animating tiles). When you start to scroll, you’ll run out of space on the surface, but it wraps around to the other side. So normally, the screen will be divided in to sections horizontally and vertically. To get all those back together, there are 4 MovieClips per layer and the BitmapData is attached to all 4 of them. By placing them next to each other, you get the entire screen in the middle. The Mario example only scrolls horizontally, so it only uses 2 of those surfaces.

Wiering Software has just released Charlie II version 3.10, which now includes two free training levels, meant for first-time players and young kids who have trouble getting through the first regular level. In fact, the first level can be completed by only holding down the right arrow key (be sure to set the difficulty to easy if you try that, or you won’t survive!).

To download, visit to the Charlie II website.

Coltris is a small casual game I wrote a long time ago. It’s a match-3 game in which you must try to line up at least three blocks of the same color to remove them. During the game, more and more colors appear, making it harder. This game was originally for DOS, but I recently ported it to Windows / DirectX. This game is freeware.
Download: DOS version | Windows version

You might be thinking: why in the world use 256-color palettes now that everyone has RGBA / true-color display? Well, it might seem like going a step back, but using palettes does have a huge advantage: you can use the same graphics with various color palettes. If you choose your palettes well, you can save yourself a lot of work by making drawings that work with different palettes. For example, take a look at the graphics of Charlie II, the same blocks are used many times in different shades or colors.

Here, I’ve divided the palette into 32 rows of 8 colors (dark to light). So by shifting the colors by +1, +2 or -1, -2, your graphics become lighter or darker. And by using values like +8, +$11 or -$1F, for example, you (also) get a different row of colors. This makes it easy to add some more variation to your maps.

Another example is if you have a game that takes place in 4 different settings (like daytime, sunset, night, morning), you could divide the palette into 4 sections of 64 colors. Or if half of your game takes place under water, you might divide your entire palette into two 128-color sections.

In the old days, when every game used 256-color modes, palettes were also used for animations. The advantage was that you could make graphics all over the screen change without actually drawing them (which was very slow), but simply by changing palette values (fast!). See my PC Mario clone for example, the waterfalls in the first level are done with palette animation and so are the background bricks in level 2!

There is still a lot of work to do (map editing, exporting, etc.), so it will take some time before the next version is available.

]]> http://www.wieringsoftware.eu/2006/12/tile-studio-to-support-256-color-palettes/feed/ 0 http://www.wieringsoftware.eu/2006/12/welcome/ http://www.wieringsoftware.eu/2006/12/welcome/#comments Wed, 06 Dec 2006 13:45:43 +0000 Mike Wiering Welcome to the Wiering Software blog! I’ve just registered WieringSoftware.eu and I’m setting things up now. If you are interested in game development, be sure to bookmark this site and come back later, there will be lots of interesting articles here!
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