PGDmC: Knight Fever

[Winwardo]

Thanks for the kind comments so far, guys
Once I've got the collision system properly working I'll throw up a copy of it so far to Dropbox for you guys to try out if you want, although other than art and adding menus I wouldn't expect it to change dramatically over the next week.

Looking forwards to everyone else's entries too

[code_glitch]

There is an ftp for this... But I must myself admit to using the dropbox method all too often

Anyway, looking great so far, I'm doing an architectural re-write so I look forward to trying this one out, or at least seeing more of it ovver the last 8 days of the compo

[Ingemar]

A knight chopping up green no-good-whatevers? Yes, why not? I like 2D games, they are so easy to grasp, you can focus on gameplay instead of messy 3D geometry.

How do you represent the ground? Are you testing background pixels, do you use a mask image or something else?

[Winwardo]

There's two images, the drawn background image, and another which is transparent with black pixels over it which is the collision mask. The game loads up the mask, extracts every fourth pixel for the alpha value, and then the player and other game objects use that array of values to check whether it's solid or not.

Since OpenGL can't hold textures larger than 1024x1024 (or so I've heard), I've had to split each level into multiple collision masks. Having a little trouble getting collision to flow seamlessly from one mask to the adjacent ones, but It's coming together.

Edit: I only decided to use (what I assume is) a needlessly complex way of doing it because a) I wanted my artist and myself to have freedom making the levels however we wanted, which when using a tile system can be limiting, and b) I may as well learn how to do something new if I get the chance

[WILL]

Since OpenGL can't hold textures larger than 1024x1024 (or so I've heard), I've had to split each level into multiple collision masks. Having a little trouble getting collision to flow seamlessly from one mask to the adjacent ones, but It's coming together.

On this... the 1024x1024 texture size limit depends on your computer's hardware. Newer more powerful cards can go higher than this, just be sure to choose a texture size that will match those generation of systems which you want your game to run on. 1024x1024 is a good size for most systems there days, however many would be able to do higher such as 2048 and even 4096 for the higher end video cards.

[Winwardo]

Considering that the computers at my school where I want this to be able to play can barely run OpenGL and require all textures to be a power of 2 in size, I thought I'd put it down to 512x512 just incase. It would be using practically the same amount of memory either way, but this way I can be definite that it will run on older machines.
(We're talking horrible beige clacky keyboards and towers here in some cases, not a pretty sight)

Thanks for the info though, was not aware of 4096^2 textures being supported at all

[Ingemar]

Considering that the computers at my school where I want this to be able to play can barely run OpenGL and require all textures to be a power of 2 in size, I thought I'd put it down to 512x512 just incase. It would be using practically the same amount of memory either way, but this way I can be definite that it will run on older machines.
(We're talking horrible beige clacky keyboards and towers here in some cases, not a pretty sight)

You mean really old computers? Sounds like 10+ years old. Not that an old computer is useless but it is getting a bit hard to accept computers without at least half-decent GPUs.

[Jimmy Valavanis]

Considering that the computers at my school where I want this to be able to play can barely run OpenGL and require all textures to be a power of 2 in size, I thought I'd put it down to 512x512 just incase. It would be using practically the same amount of memory either way, but this way I can be definite that it will run on older machines.
(We're talking horrible beige clacky keyboards and towers here in some cases, not a pretty sight)

Thanks for the info though, was not aware of 4096^2 textures being supported at all

TIP:
you can determine at runtime the maximum texture size that is allowed using the following code:

var
max_texturesize: integer;

....

....
glGetIntegerv(GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE, @max_texturesize);

if max_texturesize >= 1024 then
(code to load 1024X1024 texture)
else
(code to handle lower texture sizes)

[code_glitch]

Wait, theres a limit on tex size? I have a practice of loading everything to textures etc and Ive done 12 megapixels on my Radeon 4330 and GMA 4500MHD no problems at all (the gma was a little sluggish) but other than that no hitches... I would say 2048x2048 is pretty clean nowadays - most screens exceed at least one dimension of that 1024x1024 limit after all

Now, that is an elegant solution there jimmy - noted for prometheus