Updated Tile Engine and Added Camera

In the past several weeks I have been focusing on refining the tile engine and adding some fairly simple camera functionality.  Since the last post, I discovered a slight bug in the tile engine that caused a tile grid not to wrap correctly.  The fix was rather quick and made the engine much more complete.  In addition to this, I added an additional tag to the tile grid schema that allows for any tile grid to either be behind or in front of the actual player.  This helps to add depth to the world and give a real perspective on the players position within the game world.  With this addition spawned the need for a UI/HUD entity list.  Managing HUD entities in a separate list allows them to easily be drawn on top of the entire world so they are always visible.

Also recently added is a Camera class that essentially tracks the position of a virtual camera.  Since this is strictly a 2D game, it may seem odd to have a camera.  While this may be true, it definitely helps to determine when enemies should become active while providing for zooming and rotation functionality.  In this game the camera is always moving forward, regardless of the players movement.  In order for the position of any entity on screen to be in sync with the position of the camera, the entity (once active) must be progressed each frame at the same speed of the camera.  For future games, such as a platformer, the camera will only move when the player is moving and will be more dynamic. 

Lastly I should say that the artist, Jeff Jenney, has produced some excellent background layers that really bring the game to life.  I am working on a video that demonstrates these layers in motion and hope to have it posted in the near future.  Right now I am still working on the secondary fire for the flame thrower and cleaning up as much code as possible as some of it has become rather messy.  Further down the road, once the latest version of Farseer is released, I plan to flesh out the physics system and begin coding the results of different entity collisions.

~ by gwoodj on July 29, 2007.