Beginner Advice / Platform Examples?

[toon_mad]

Hello, I have heard of DelphiX for some time but never decided to make games using it in Delphi, until now :)

I have installed the latest unDelphiX and looked through the samples provided...

What is confusing me first of all though is how do you edit the levels for the games? All i see in the demos is the draw surface. If for example I want to make a simple platform game how do i place the monsters, characters, items etc for the levels. Is there some kind of visual level editor I am supposed to be using but cannot find or something ???

I would like some help please, and also any basic platform game demos I could look at.

Thanks in advance

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Hi toon_mad,

I'm not sure there are ready made editors as I've always written one that is specifically for the engine I was working on at the time. Typically, I think most people will do this... develop the engine and the editor in parallel so that the editor fits the engine perfectly. I don't have any example code unfortunately, but there are a number of tutorials available online about how to do this sort of thing in relation to platform games.


Regards

[WILL]

What is confusing me first of all though is how do you edit the levels for the games? All i see in the demos is the draw surface. If for example I want to make a simple platform game how do i place the monsters, characters, items etc for the levels. Is there some kind of visual level editor I am supposed to be using but cannot find or something ???

Well how you edit your levels all depends on how you represent it. For example, if your "map" is a grid of tiles in a platform game that you can run and jump onto, like the old Super Mario Bros. games for example, then you would need an array of tiles values to represent what tiles fit into your entire game's play area. I recommend checking out Alexander Rosendal aka Travelers' game tutorials on his site. They make use of DelphiX though this is far from the standard these days. First check out the Tiles (http://www.gameprogrammer.net/index.php?fuseaction=item.list&project_id=c4e44ef9a5024347f2b3f495eb381edc) tutorial then How to create a platform game (http://www.gameprogrammer.net/index.php?fuseaction=tutorials.list).

It's pretty good and gives you all the basics of how to program your own tiling system and then incorporate a player that can move about your created world and run into walls and jump up onto other platforms.

After that, if you want to read a bit more on 2D tiled game 'collision' you can check out the first issue (http://www.pascalgamer.com/issue_details.php?i=1) of Pascal Gamer Magazine (free online magazine) in the Coder's Block section where Paul Nichols has an article on working with 2D tiled systems and collision detection. But don't read this first. First learn the basics by reading Alex's tutorials then you can learn the other tricks. :)

[toon_mad]

Hi, sorry for late reply.

When i first started messing around with delphix i saw the draw surface component which i assume is where the graphics are drawn. i thought there might be a editor for the draw surface to add and move around things like enemies, platforms etc, similar to delphi form designer.

i looked through the tutorials but cannot see download links for the platform game: http://www.gameprogrammer.net/index.php?fuseaction=item.preview&item_id=82950e4b28a422689928bced3b96b139&project_id=abb3911ce261878220c16d458d0014b9

i cannot copy paste this as it will have the images on the dfm.

is there any other sample i can look at?

Thanks :)