Rotated Bitmaps
Today is a bit of a relaxed day.
Though I did plan plenty of videos to watch today.
I didn’t watch them all, but you will read below why.
At least the car is rendering again.
As rotated and sheared bitmaps have been implemented into the OpenGL renderer.
I didn’t test the shearing to be honest.
But at least the rotating works 🙂
Sparse Entity
Four videos I had planned to watch were about a sparse entity system.
I quickly remembered that I already had watched the first video about this.
However back then I didn’t fully understood it.
This time I could follow the video way better and basically understood everything.
Last time I wasn’t agreeing too much with Casey. I didn’t think the sparse system he was envisioning was worth it for me to try. Basically too many uncertainties and features I wouldn’t need. Today I came to the same conclusion. I looked at how many entities I would need in my game. Well it would basically boil down to 4 entity types. Cars, static objects without collision, borders that do have collision and maybe particle systems. So having a very flexible and dynamic entities system is just not necessary. I will try to just let the entity system form itself during development. Right now I am fine with doing a switch and running some logic that way.
Saving & Loading
After deciding not to have to watch anymore videos for today, I went back to the tilemap.
I thought it would be nice to at least implement the loading of the tilemap.
You would think this would be a quicky.
As most of the work was done during relative short train rides.
However during those train rides I made some small errors which I discovered today.
Besides that, writing the loading code was indeed pretty simple and quick.
It just took a while before I found all the issues, since multiple were throwing me off.
Luckily it all seems to work now 🙂
Being able to save and load a tilemap to and from a file, that is. Not an asset file yet, that would be the next task. Together with improving the editing tools. For example having differently sized brushes to draw tiles more easily and quickly. Or actually being able to load GPS data from Google Earth to easily create new tracks. Yes I mean Google Earth and not Google Maps. I downloaded the application and it seems to offer just a bit of extra features which may come in handy. Though Google Maps is also fine of course.
If I had unlimited time for this project, then I would probably use open source maps to create a standalone tool. That tool would use map data directly to create tracks, instead of using an intermediate program like Google Earth. But yeah, I think I save myself some time to just use a third party application to quickly sketch out a track. Then modifying it in-engine to make it worthy to put into the game. But still based on real world locations.
