Your Map Design Thoughts

[Doc4]

I am wondering what people think about the best method to design a map. Not software or perspective, but rather how to handle the obstacles.

I am making a top-down, dungeon romp. Some maps will be long twisting corridors with occasional rooms. Should I make it in Photoshop as a background (let's assume white corridors and black solid earth around) and then slide thin wall obstacles against the sides so the engine knows how to block an active?

Or, should I just have a white background and tons of variations of huge tetris-like solids to piece together to make the earth/solid? I can see pros and cons to either method and am sure there's another one or two methodologies out there.

The tricky part is that I cannot just have a white board and then slide thin walls around to make a dungeon, because I must also have the area beyond those walls filled in with black as well.

Any thoughts?


Tom / Doc4

[DavidN]

If filling in the area with black is a requirement, you could just set the frame background to black in its Properties and build the rooms up in white (as presumably there will be fewer of them). You'd then only need the wall obstacles.

What would be even better is just doing the whole room layout however you need without putting any obstacles in, and if white and black are the only colours, detect the colour of the pixels around your player object to decide whether there's an obstacle there or not.

[Doc4]

Thanks for the input again.

So far, I've photoshopped my backdrop with black solid and white corridors/rooms. Then I created a wall thats 8x64 pixels that makes the player bounce off of it when collided. Then I align the wall with the grid and then Duplicate 5-7 copies based on how long the particular wall needs to be.

Any game issues with this? Massive slow down with so many wall pieces duplicated or file size?

Duplication is so easy right now in this early stage. The only other option is to create custom graphics for each wall length (8x64, 128, 192, 256, etc) so that the texture retains its shape. And that seems so cumbersome. Or is it the only way to go really?


Tom

[DavidN]

I don't think there's much of an issue with duplication of backdrops like that - I usually have a couple that are 32, 64, 128 pixels wide, and you won't notice an issue with slowdown due to duplication of backdrop objects unless you're using a truly massive number of them.

[Doc4]

Using my wall object as a Backdrop I ran into the old "Player Gets Stuck Inside Backdrop How Do You Push Him Out" issue. I changed the wall piece into an Active and told it to Bounce the player if a collision was detected and it works just fine.

Short story long, my wall pieces are all actives. Does this change the CPU demand dramatically?


Tom

[Random]

I think it should make an impact..

[DavidN]

Use detectors or fastloops, or both, to prevent the player becoming stuck in the backdrop if you're not using the default 8-directional movement.

[Doc4]

Ok, I've tossed aside my working Active walls. It seemed to be fine in my test level, but I'm taking everyone's word that it's not going to work in the long run CPU wise.

I cannot get my head around detectors, so I am now using Move It to have my point&click movement happen combined with Move Safely 2. Unfortunately, Move Safely 2 isn't doing anything as my player goes right through the backdrop wall. I have my backdrop wall object selected as an Obstacle with the following code:

http://img410.imageshack.us/my.php?image=movesafelyxm0.jpg


Any suggestions out there? Should I toss aside Move It, and deal with incrementing my pieces +1 pixels by hand? It really seems that there should be a simple way for point&click to work without getting stuck in this software.


Tom


Edited:

I tossed aside Move Safely 3 and got it to work. I did this by always saving the X&Y position to the player if he was not over an obstacle. When he WAS over an obstacle I stopped his movement and sent him back to the last saved position. Worked perfectly, but I have a feeling this is also taking a ton of CPU work?

[thewreck]

Dont worry about that procedure taking up cpu. Even if it did, its not like you are going to add 400 players all with a mouse each.

Also, here is a suggestion for how you could solve the background issue:

make tree layers.

in the top layer, you place the cosmetic level, all the dandy effects and wooshing gfx.

in the middle layer, you place the siluette collision data of that nice level, just black and white. When pasting this into mmf, the black part should become transparent, otherwise just fill it with transparent. Make that backdrop object an obstacle

Make the bottom layer your floor textures.

Now make sure to place everything that should collide in the middle layer.

If you want the collision mask not to be visible, its easy just to change the ink effect to semi transparent and set it to max, so that is disappears.

here is an example:

http://www.dawnofdaria.com/stuff/collisionlayers.zip

[Random]

Aren't the layers really expensive? When I added an empty layer to a game, the fps went down by 1/3. Maybe that was dependent on something else. Did anyone have the same problem?