Big Update is finished.

I have finally finished the overhaul I was talking about couple of days ago. And I think I managed to create some good stuff, albeit messy and hard to understand. 


Part 1: The Problem


The problem I had was the arrays. At first I wanted to be able to store them in a class, or a structure or even inside a text file that I would load. I rejected the first two, because making a class directly for a single array would be contrary to Object Oriented Programming and text files were useless since placing them outside my program was just as bad as bluntly dropping them in the middle of my main form, which was what I wanted to change. 


At first, I had arrays. My procedures would activate themselves with the arrays I needed by parameter and would fix the matrix accordingly. The problem with this approach, is that I need to know exactly what arrays to load when executing my procedures. This is chaotic because of transitions, going from map to map, as my game is not linear. I know not if the player will take a turn right or left. How can I decide what tile array to load in my functions ? This could have been hell...


Part 2  The Solution


 Instead I made a Terrain class. This class would have several parameters to hold the various arrays such as the tile and sprites arrays. As well as track which map is to its right, left, bottom or top. So instead of giving my sub several arrays. I would give him an instance of the clsTerrain class that represented a map. For example BasicRoad. I can them access its parameter inside the matrix such as BasicRoad.Spritemap or BasicRoad.TilesMap.  I would have a block of code on top that job would be to instantiate each map and give them the geographical location in relation to the other maps. 

The clsTerrain class:

So now that all our maps are there, we need to make our player able to switch maps. This is called a transition, it is triggered by stepping in a tile and pressing the according button. If you are at the top tile and you press the top arrow you get to the map that is right on top of the current one.But then we need to identify which tile is a transition, I could just leave it like if you are standing a tile in the border and you press the according button you get thrown to the next map. But then what would I do with doors and such ? I chose to make transition recognition  as early as I can. For this I had a couple of choices: I could just programmatically make them by telling him which tile to mark as such by hand. That is tedious and stupid. Instead I choose to add a third array and in there marking the transitions myself once and let him do the work. But how can a tile remember that it is a transition ? By adding a property, so I created a Tile class that inherits from picturebox and I added a couple of properties like IsTransition, a boolean value that marks a tile as one used as transition.

The clsTile class

This being done, I only need to configure the movement sub of each direction to respond if they are on a transition.  So the procedure is now ( in two parts ):

The moveRIGHT subroutine

Pretty big procedure. Theres 4 possible choices:

• You are NOT on the border and NOT on a transition tile: You walk normally
• You are are ON the border and ON a transition tile: Switch to next map
• You are ON the border and NOT on a transition: Walk as long as the direction you're going is not out of bounds
• You are NOT on the border and ON a transition: This is a "Door-transition", this will teleport you somewhere else. Not yet implemented

There IS a lot cleaner way to do it, but this is just a project to "make it work". The really big thinking process will be done in the final version of the project. Until then I just hack my way through my game and I will optimize later on. This is to keep me from falling out of morale. Since this is my first project that has a slightly bigger scale than normal ( for me ), I think that If I was to take 3 weeks to think out a single perfect function I would drop the project after 3 days. Now I can see my progress clearly, establish goals and accomplish them with relative ease, giving me the satisfaction needed to go forward.

Part 3: What's next ?

Right now, I have no idea. I'd like to take some time to create some more tiles to make rather more complex maps to bring me to the next features. The next logical course of action would be to make "Doors transitions", basically when I am walking on a door transition I get "inside" the building. Which is a map by itself. To do that I first need to create some kind of house tiles and that means a lot of work since all I did yet was some crappy grass and patches of road. And I was lucky with those, I just happened to arrive at a really good result on my 2nd try. I tried to make some mountainside tile a few days ago and it was really crappy. So lots of studies and practice incoming. I'd welcome any kind of suggestion, I understand that since this is not my final product I could just go to some website, rip some sprites and use them like some of my colleagues are doing. But what would be the point ??? I'm going to end up doing all the work anyway, might as well do it now and gloat the power of my magnificent tiles for a while. I would agree with the person that tells me that since they're nowhere near done yet that my tiles are "un-gloatable" but its a work in progress ! At least I can be happy in the fact that I don't need to steal all my shit. Anyway. I should also start thinking about the music and the game-atmosphere like the story and characters, in short the non-VB stuff. I'll be sure to keep you posted with updates. I still have a couple posts about problems that needs some explaining. I would like to explain in details how the transitions work because I think my system is pretty damn well though ( without wanting me to give myself too much credit ). 

I'm pretty happy with my progress so far. In ONE month I went from a corpse-less form with nothing at all on it, to a corpseless form with nothing at all on it BUT at least now I can make characters pop on the screen and move around. OK OK, I admit. Some people could do that in a day and do it better. I am not one of those people, I am studying in my second year. This is some pretty heavy stuff for the amount we learned in class. And I plan on making a LOT more with increasing complexity. I am talking of course about the battle system, and inventory and menus and all. I have yet to know what and how I will do this, but it will be grand I think. 

Until then ! See you on top of the next article.

I love the smell of burning CPU in the evening, smells almost like... Victory

Oh yes ladies and gentlemen. I have now a playable version of my game, its not much. But it is the content of all I've been doing these past 2 weeks. You can browse the code here and download an executable from this page.

And I DID solve my Un-Escapable loop problem, I'm going to make a port on this one. 


Milestone 2


After hitting more walls in my previous version of the program I decided to create another form where I would put only the code I need. To make it cleaner and more manageable. It is currently at its third iteration. But while I was looking at my code ( which was muuuch easier to read in a clean environment not chuck full of properties and classes anywhere) I though of the following logistic: I have two matrices, two arrays and 3 methods to help me put those on the form. If I followed my plan to make another matrix for the game hero, I'd have even more. So why not make it only 2 methods, one to fill the matrices, and one to show them. Simple since they do pretty much the same. And to that conclustion I said, why not have a single matrix ? Why would I need 2 layers when I could easily do it with one, and actually make this a lot more simpler and easy. The final result is that I have a single matrix of pictureboxes and two arrays with two methods to fill and stamp it. 

This is the code I used. you can see this all the simpler. 


The loop problem was caused by this: from the moment I decided to use an matrix of pictureboxes instead of images I changed from a type to an object. Do when typing 


Dim tileMatrix(15, 15) as Picturebox


What it did was to create 256 pictureboxes that are actually the SAME picturebox. Because there is no New()   I will create a subsequent post explaining this particular error but for now do understand that the problem was that every picturebox in my matrix was the same picturebox. It was a single one with 256 references through the matrix. 

The "ArrayMap" technique.

The Basics
This technique is another way of representing a map created from a set of tiles. With the GridMatrix technique, I created a matrix with the exact size of my window and applied and scrolled through the matrix generation pictureboxes and applying them a specific tile ( a 32x32 picture ). 


There are a few weaknesses with this techique. First if you look my code closely I AM NOT EVEN inserting values inside the matrix, I am merely strolling through its dimensions and using this to represent rows and columns. This strikes me as the first big weakness. The second one is that: what if I need to access the tiles afterward ? Lets say my caracter is at the right edge of the screen and goes right, supposedly to make the map scroll to the right. Well because I did not store the location of the tiles and images somewhere, I have to re-scan the whole window and somehow code a way to remove the leftmost column and add one at the right. This is a would-be pain in the ass.


And here comes the ArrayMap technique:

This is an array. It signifies that the letter A represents all those numbers at once. And that we can get their values easily. 

An array is declared just like any other value:

Dim tileset as array

And to populate this array:

tileset = { 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3 }

Tileset will now have those values stores inside him. To retrieve them we can make a For Each loop and write each in a console

For Each x as Integer in tileset

        writeline(x)

Next

The Method I use

So I made a couple of arrays and planned to make picturebox images from the value contained in the array. Say the first value in the array would be 0 so the tile at (0, 0) is going to be say, grass. The 14's value would be the code for (14, 0) and the 16'th would be (0, 1)  (because we are scrolling left to right and then go to next line after the 15'th element ). 

Those are my arrays

The code I used to turn values into tiles:

And the result of using the BasicRoad tileset is: 

This is pretty much like the GridMatrix technique but instead of looping through a matrix we are using a For Each to cycle through the values of the array and using a Select Case to decide which tile to use as the image.