So lets say i'm making a board game. i've got a game board array, my logic needs to check for position and collision detection, thats all fine.
Traditionally using something like directX you would have a game loop, test some logic, update the game board array and finally draw the screen,
but with cocos2dx we don't directly draw to the screen we add sprite to layers, and cocos does the rest!
For instance..
Initialise a game array that represents the game board
Initialise a game object
add objects to the array
update the screen (render the array to the screen)
start game loop
Test for some logic condition
remove object from array
more Test for some logic condition, update object position
add objects to the array
update the screen again
loop
The previous would work fine but i don't need to remove the object from the layer only to update its position and re-render to the screen,
with cocos2d/cocos2dx if i keep a reference to that object i could just move it, and update the array.
I can continue with this approach, but i want to know if i'm missing something.
The game array helps with the game logic and mimics the actual playable area, but i can't help feeling its a bit stone-age.
Can anybody help with this, am i completely missing the plot?
All game engines use an update loop. Without it, you wouldn't be rendering anything.
That said, if your game is entirely user-input driven, you can react to user input events (touches) and only then perform game logic (moving or removing pieces, checking win conditions, update score, next turn).
If you want "new-school" then you'll be looking at a game design tool, not a game engine.
This looks fine to me. The thing to keep in mind is during your game loop you will be able to handle animations that keep the board game interesting. I think that is not overkill, you can always find things to animate.
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I’m looking to create a a simple 2D RPG game using SDL2.
I’m kind of stuck in terms of using something like a pause screen I’ll give you a quick example of what I’m wanting to do:
-If the character collects a skill point and they press F1 to open the skill tree, after they have chosen the skill tree they return to the game.
How do I return to the game? I’m guessing that to get to another screen I would need to render clear. Would I need to do anything before I render clear to save everything that has rendered and then re-render it kind of thing? Or would I have to constantly update the position of the player in a variable and everything and then just render everything back in?
I am trying to develop an 2D game using cocos2d library. I am still learning the framework.
Please understand that I am new to game development but not new to programming using objective c.
Here is the issue I am facing when it comes to my game development effort - I feel that I am missing the theoretical understanding of how to develop an infinite scrolling game. Is it possible for any of you to provide me some guidance on that ?
Here is my understanding of achieving infinite scrolling using cocos2d framework:
Cocos2d has a singleton director class which handles the current scene and scene transitions
In the current scene, I feel like I have to create an platform object consisting of several images and add them as a child to the current layer. And constantly run a move action to the platform sprite. So as and when I detect a particular image is off screen I have to replace it with another image. That way I will be able to create an infinite scrolling.
I am sorry if point 2 is not coherent. I just attempted to put my understanding of how to infinite scrolling.
Can you please help me with this ?
Thanks
I dissected how to implement scrolling with cocos2d-iphone in this article. What you probably want is the "fake scrolling" approach where two background images are moved and switch position after one completely left the screen.
You want to do this for the background layer only, not individual sprites. Your world isn't really moving, it's just the background panning that creates the illusion of movement. All sprites etc (player, enemies) movement is still relative to screen coordinates.
You'll find a working implementation in the code for my Learn Cocos2D 2 book in the Shoot'em Up project.
If you don't want to bother implementing this yourself, KoboldTouch supports endless/infinite scrolling for tilemaps. Here the game objects actually move along with the background infinitely (up to the maximum coordinates supported by float which is around +/- 16 million points).
I've been developing a 2d RPG based on the LWJGL alongside with Java 1.6 for 3 months now. My next goal is to write all of the non-game-ish stuff. This includes menus, text input boxes, buttons and things like the inventory and character information screens. As I am a Computer Engineering student, I'm trying to write everything on my own (except, of course, for the OpenGL part of the LWJGL) so that I "test" myself on the writing of a simple 2d game engine.
I know that making such things from scratch requires basically mapping textures to quads (like the buttons), writing stuff on them and testing mouse/keyboard events which trigger other events inside the code.
The doubt I have is: should I use VBO's (as I'm using for the actual game rendering) or Immediate Mode when rendering such elements? I don't really know if Immediate Mode would be such a drop on performance. Another point is: do the interface elements have to be updated as fast as the game itself? I don't think so, because nothing is actually moving... Are actual games made like that?
Immediate Mode is more straightforward for the task, you would not need to take care about caching and controls composition/batching. Performance dropoff is not that big, unless you render a lot of text (thousands of letters) with each glyph in a separate glBegin..glEnd. If you don't use VBO anywhere else I would recommend trying it out for text output and doing everything else in easier Immediate Mode.
GUI elements might not change as often as game state does, but there's a catch - you could need to update them each time there's a cursor interaction (e.g. button gets OnMouseOver event and needs to be rendered with a highlight). These kind of events may happen very frequently, so thats why rendering may be needed at a full speed.
I am building a board game in SDL and here is the problem I am currently facing.
I have a pawn on square 1 and I roll the dice. Based on the value I get on the dice the pawn moves to another square. I am bale to move the pawn after i read the SDL tutorials online. But the problem I am facing is that after moving the pawn to a new location the old pawn still stays at the old location. The tutorials I found on the internet moves a dot but also refreshes the background to cover up the old dot. But I cant do that as my game board is intricate and there are pawns from other players sitting there.
Is there a way in SDL that I could really move a pawn instead of having to create a new pawn at the new location and covering up the old pawn?
The fundamental concept of sprites: Before you insert the sprite, you save a copy of the original screen content. When you need to remove the sprite, you just paste the stored old content back in.
You will have to process all your objects in the correct order (LIFO) for this to work. Since you'll usually be double-buffered, this happens on the cold buffer, so this isn't an issue.
No, your code will need to be able to redraw that board position with the pawn missing. There isn't any way for the computer to automatically reconstruct what the board should look like without the pawn.
It sounds like your render code is mixed in with your game logic. You ought to separate rendering so that you can redraw the complete game scene with a single function call, which you can then use whenever a visible change is made to the game state.
Im in the middle of creating my first iPhone game - I have a background in OOP and in particular C++ so I had some questions with regards to how best to logically setup layers while maintaining functionality.
Currently I WANT for my game to have three main layers:
HUDLayer (All static objects on the screen are here - game controls, User score, pause button etc.)
PlayLayer (The Player, the main game loop and all of the game logic here)
Level Layer (The level images and the level physics objects that the player interacts with, and the background music specific to this level)
Notice I used the word WANT here - because for the life of me im constantly having to move logical objects around just to work within what appears to be Cocos2d's and spacemanagers structure.
Below are just some of the issues that I'm facing
I would like for my PlayLayer to be the scene thats loaded by the director - but if I do that then all of the HUDLayer objects get covered behind the PlayLayer, and dont stay in place like they should, hence the HUDLayer is my scene and I have had to do that just to make it work
I would like to play the background music (via simpleAudioEngine playBackgroundMusic) in the LEVEL layer because I want different levels to have different music. So far the ONLY way I have gotten background music to work is to have it in the TOP most layer i.e. in this case the HUDLayer
Because of the fact that I have to use an instance of the SpaceManagerCocos2d object to create physics bodies - it seems like my level layer has to be killed and just incorporated within my PlayLayer otherwise im having a nightmare of a time attempting to detect collisions between the player and the level.
Am I missing something very obvious here? is there a core understanding of layers that Im just not getting? More and more I feel like im being pushed by the framework to build the whole game inside of a single class and just to use layers as scenes.
Is anyone else having these problems? Am I approaching the architecture of the game wrong? Any help would really be appreciated.
Thanks in advance guys!
Well, each game is different. There are many good discussions on the cocos2d forums about architecture, some people prefer to use an MVC approach, some like using an Actor metaphor to contain physics objects, etc.
Here's my approach:
Use two CCLayer objects (GameLayer and HUDLayer) as child nodes of one CCScene (GameScene). These are the "view" objects.
Create a GameController singleton that can make changes to the game state (also stored in GameController, or in a separate file.) You could also subclass CCScene and call that your controller.
GameLayer is in charge of rendering the graphics of the game level and all actors in it; it also handles getting game input via touch events.
HUDLayer is placed at a higher z-index than the GameLayer and obviously has all of the CCSprite objects for the HUD and buttons.
Interaction between the HUDLayer and the GameLayer is managed via the GameController.
GameController does all of the state changing and game actions.
That's just my approach because it worked for my current game, and it by no means is the definitive answer.
I'd suggest that you look into using an Actor paradigm for your physics objects -- SpaceManager does a decent job, but you don't necessarily always want physics objects to extend CCSprite.