05-20-2020, 10:32 AM
I have made some progress on my platformer engine and have been learning a lot, mostly through trial and error.
Some discoveries that are worth noting:
-populating tiles/tile groups can be done very quickly. I discovered that animations for a sprite are easier for me to manage by populating the associated tiles with updated images when I need a new frame. In this way I don't have to take up a ton of tiles storing all possible frames of animation.
-anything that is assigned to a given tile (sprite or scroll plane) will update as soon as the tile is updated. In this way it is possible to have animated tiles within a level. For example, I have some blowing grass tiles, and I can place however many of these tiles on a level, and all of them animate with a quick update to the single respective tile/tileset.
-I have changed my approach for sprite chain flipping. I have found it is easier to reassign tiles for each sprite in the chain than it is to reorganize all chained tiles according to the flip. I am still taking advantage of the built in sprite flipping functionality, so only one direction of each sprite frame is needed.
Some discoveries that are worth noting:
-populating tiles/tile groups can be done very quickly. I discovered that animations for a sprite are easier for me to manage by populating the associated tiles with updated images when I need a new frame. In this way I don't have to take up a ton of tiles storing all possible frames of animation.
-anything that is assigned to a given tile (sprite or scroll plane) will update as soon as the tile is updated. In this way it is possible to have animated tiles within a level. For example, I have some blowing grass tiles, and I can place however many of these tiles on a level, and all of them animate with a quick update to the single respective tile/tileset.
-I have changed my approach for sprite chain flipping. I have found it is easier to reassign tiles for each sprite in the chain than it is to reorganize all chained tiles according to the flip. I am still taking advantage of the built in sprite flipping functionality, so only one direction of each sprite frame is needed.