Hi all!
Lately I've been working on some alternative methods for tiles. Why? Because tiles are good for memory shortage, however when you have a LOT of tiles visible at once, that's a lot of individual drawing 'functions' for the computer, and it gives an FPS drop. Now, tiles are brilliant for some games, but for Conflict: Online, we have to find another method, because it's really making an FPS drop for many computers.So me, Scott, and Pim have been discussing various methods, and have been putting them into action in 'prototype' scripts. They've all got interesting results I'd like to show you guys. Method One: Whole Room in MemoryThis method is a pretty basic method, and follows an idea Tahnok100 had (thanks buddy) - pretty much, all objects are made invisible so only backgrounds and tiles are visible. Then, we create a surface the size of the room to capture the room, then save it to a background. The tiles are deleted, surface deleted, objects visibility restored, and then the new background is drawn at 0,0. Now, though this had perfect quality, we couldn't get the room to get very big before the game crashed from bogging up the memory. Quite obviously because you have a (say) 1500x1500 bitmap stored in the memory! So we then created a quality factor. The quality factor stretches the tiles and background into a certain resolution - 1 = no stretching/scaling, 0.5 = stretch it half the size, and so on. This way, we can halve the memory it takes up by using half the quality. The background is then drawn at 0,0, and stretched across the room. We had this result:![Image](http://img487.imageshack.us/img487/1007/method1bh8.th.jpg)
Type "…" very slowly, and you've captured my reaction.
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Hah! Now I've captured Takagi's reaction! I'ma stick it in a jar! =DI don't care, Bryan, if you can beat me when it comes to GML. I really couldn't care less - I know heaps of people that are much more intelligent than I am. What I care about is how I distribute my knowledge - I could be an uptight little shit like you and boast about how great I am and then bitch about everyone else, including whoever created the language you're using, which accomplishes nothing but hate. Or I could share my knowledge with the community and discuss techniques… makes everyone learn a bit more. Frankly, if you know a better method - great, but I don't care if you're not going to share it, because you're just a selfish bastard for one.
-RhysBecause you guys are jerks.
There is no need to do that.
You would have 2 surfaces, the terrain, and an alpha mask, then you'd multiply the terrain with the alpha mask surface.GearGOD, I have a hard time believing you can be so mean. How can you look in the mirror?