On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 6:47 PM, B W <stabbingfin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 11:44 AM, Kris Schnee <ksch...@xepher.net> wrote: >> >> On 3/5/2010 10:40 AM, René Dudfield wrote: >>> >>> However, sometimes we would like to operate on a whole bunch of >>> smaller surfaces stuck together. >> >> I've done several projects using a full-screen scrolling tilemap. That is, >> sprites walking around on a blanket of 2D tiles drawn from an array as big >> as 1000x1000 referencing a set of 50x50 tiles. That wasn't practical to do >> using a Pygame Surface, due to the size, so each frame the system figured >> out the range of all visible tiles (based on the POV character's location) >> and drew those. It wasn't very efficient, but it did work, and it's an >> example of a surface built from many actual Surface objects. (Will link to >> code if you want.) >> > I did something very similar with Gummworld. The supersurface was not a > single Pygame surface, rather a virtual surface made of a 2D array of > sprites each with its own image. The Pygame drawing surface was the visible > display; only I found that Group.draw()-ing all the terrain sprites and > allowing Pygame to automatically crop them was in larger cases more > efficient than cropping the drawing scope in Python. Still, it did indeed > waste memory having all those sprites, each with their own image, outside > the display area. The level design was rectangular, and if the map is > irregular then large portions of the supersurface could possibly have many > unused sprites; which led to a crude sparse map implementation, where an > array cell with a None value would be ignored. It's a simple paradigm in > which the special cases tend to center around conserving memory and CPU. >
cool, that sounds good. > That initial attempt got me thinking about a room paradigm. A level is > analogous to a building or a floor with rooms connected by exits. Rooms > don't necessarily have walls, and exits are not necessarily visible. They > are just internal geographic and navigational elements, respectively. An > exit links two rooms. Exits can be visible objects such as a door or portal > or an invisible line on the ground. Using an exit changes the interactive > context from room A to room B. If you choose so, your room could scroll. > With some drawing savvy neighboring rooms could scroll seamlessly. The > player might not even notice that an exit was used and there was a room > change. > > Though the room paradigm seems elegant to me and potentially > memory-efficient, it presents its own significant challenges: resource > management (real-time loading and garbage cleanup); game hiccups from > resource management; spacial relationship of rooms and exit "hot spots"; > interacting with objects through an exit; room linkage errors. > This sounds like 'portals' used in some 3d engines... and called rooms in engines like the old duke nukem engine. > So on the one hand we have a level structure that is easy on the programmer > and harder on the machine; on the other a structure that's easy on the > machine and harder on the programmer. I know others have solved such issues, > and there are game engines that provide a display/resource/world/etc. > management framework so you can focus on game intelligence, content, and > world design. But they are systems and languages unto themselves, and if I > don't like an aspect I can't always change it. That is why I was happy to > find Pygame. > > But not for the first time I am thinking it would be awesome to have some > higher level toolkits, somewhere comfortably between Pygame and a full-blown > game engine. It seems many of us have put a lot of time and effort into such > toolkits, with varying degrees of success. I am wondering if the > supersurface would fit better as an "official-like" Pygame add-on. It might > even trigger a series of integratable toolkits that offer standard ways of > solving higher level problems like I've seen suggested: scenes, tiling, > transitions, map scrolling, path-finding. =) *cough* Me and my grand > schemes... > That would be grand... I think :) Super surfaces might need to be done at the C level so that various routines can work with either a super surface or a surface efficiently. Can probably prototype a pretty good version in python first... then move it to C if needed. An official addon project could be good too. There's a number of various add on libraries around, perhaps having an official one will work better. I'm not sure. > But if your thoughts go in another direction, René, I would love to hear > more. > > Gumm >