Digging games
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I'm a huge fan of games like Mr Do!, Dig Dug etc. The way I'd "attempt"to go about it is probably stupid but hey I'm going to say it anyway.
I would basically try to cheat and use several boxes to draw the solid coloured 'background and the dirt I'd have sprites (say 16x16 or 32x32) and I'd place the sprites under or behind you as you walk around. That way it would have the illusion of having dug a path into the coloured background? -
@SteveZX81 Thats actually really smart, I've never thought of placing sprites. Just remember to adjust the speed of the player based on if they're digging or walking on predug ground
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Oh! Well, I'm not 100% following that because in, for example, Mr Do! you can dig anywhere can't you? But you have got me thinking now though. After the benchmarks the other day where we proved that Fuze can happily cope with 1024 to 2048 sprites on the screen at once, the screen could surely be entirely made of sprites!
I'm 100% sure that's not the way it's normally done but that's largely down to the fact that hardware of the time might had topped out at like 8 or 16 sprites and the rest would have been tiles.
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@Martin could use small 4x4 tiles, but I don't think you can write to tilemaps on the fly in Fuze
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@Retrocade_media that depends on how you do the tilemaps. If you have an array of tile numbers (or 2 dimensional array of tiles) then you can. But you have to be careful because array performance suffers with multiple dimensions. I did a proof of concept with a similar thing before but I got completely stuck on how to make the tiles be eaten away rather than vanishing tile by tile. Well, the proof of concept was for something different but it was essentially the same wall that I hit.
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Ohhh, the proverbial penny has just dropped about how to do this! I wonder how quickly I can knock up a proof of concept.
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@Martin said in Digging games:
Ohhh, the proverbial penny has just dropped about how to do this! I wonder how quickly I can knock up a proof of concept.
Well don't keep it to yourself. do tell!
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Well I want to test it first! But my sticking point has always been the eating away of the tile pixel by pixel. Whether that tile is a sprite or an image. But just for once, if instead of a transparent background you give the player a black background with an alpha of 1 then you'll naturally appear to be eating away at the tile as you move and once they are over a certain threshold you remove the tile. Simplz
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OK, my idea isn't going to work because as you travel along the dirt is removed with jagged edges and rounded corners:
[EDIT] Oops, that's a bit large!
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Use two layers back layer totally filled dirt
Overlay a transparent screen and draw your tunnel on that screen. Looking at the edge pixels of the tunnel they repeat every 8 pixels each direction so if you want to remove dirt one pixel layer at a time you'd need eight images on the x and eight on the y or two pixels half that. Just keep track using mod to find which image to draw.
Haven't played Mr do ? For a long time looks like it's set on a grid with the fruit .so keep track of the grid in an array - uses four bits to denote open or closed directions so you can program the enemies.
Overlay your sprites over that.
Oh yeah almost forgot give you tunnel image rounded corners. -
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Just looked at a short video on how Mr Do does this. It appears it just draws the background black where you walked (not really collision detection on the grass needed?) In that case you could probably just draw the grass of the level on an image, then draw black over that image where you have walked (not sure if you can erase part of a picture to become transparent, otherwise I'd go with that in stead of black, so the digging could reveal things that are drawn behind the image if that would be necessary).
Eventually you just draw the updated grass image to the framebuffer that gets cleared every now and again (since you don't want to 'clear()' the grass image)
#EDIT: You could almost certainly draw the grass image to the framebuffer using
renderEffect(..)to use a specific mask color on the grass image as transparent (and use a render effect not to draw that coulor [I'm not brittish] to the framebuffer) -
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🇳🇱 well I wasn't thinking on how my typo would sound 😋
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Right, I need to put some of these ideas together and do some digging (ouch!).
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@xevdev are you not clearing the screen or just creating sprites?
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@PB____ You can actually draw in transparent or partially translucent colors, but you have to change the blend mode to
0usingsetBlend(0). With the default blend mode the colors will blend because of the transparency. So, you can have a background layer that is gradually revealed by writing transparent color to the foreground layer using render targets and blend modes. -
@Retrocade_media no I'm not the background is a solid green and stays that way no need to alter it.
The tunnel screen is transparent and I draw image one movement at a time and don't clear so you can see the trail .
The actual game you'd draw your sprites straight over the top .
When your making a game you have your map in memory and what you display is on the screen is a representation of that.
In the case of this game it's set up on a grid that you cant get off so you can only turn every 16 pixels
Left right back forward
But you can go half way through a square the enemy needs to know that so the data for each square will need to allow it to only go so far .
So your data square will need to have more than a binary state
Open or closed
It will need to have both those and four directions with a number saying how far it's going in .
Or
You could Chuck the whole tunnel screen in an array for every pixel that's displayed there is a corresponding non zero number . write a getpixel that accesses that array
Only let the enemy move on the non zero area
I know which one I'd chose .
