Monday, June 20, 2011

Recent Changes - Nearing Beta

I finally got level saving and loading working, using object serialization and deserialization.  Objects now have the ability to serialize themselves into JSON, then back again which makes saving and loading a lot more robust.  I've split the 2D tile mapping demo into two parts - one with the editor and one without.  This will help with understanding how the two are related.  Additionally, I pulled comments from all of the JSON files because it was causing headaches that I didn't want to deal with.

The Level Editor has always been thought of as an add-on to a game.  It will take sprite, tile, sound, and level loaders from the game and extract the resources so you can quickly assemble levels.  It then exports level files which contain references to all of the resources needed by a level.  The level loader can be used, going forward, to load all of the required sprites, tiles, and sounds needed by a level.  The difference between the two examples is fairly dramatic during loading.  I'm pretty happy with how things are working out.

With this work being more solid, I can now focus on getting the "niceties" into the Level Editor and solidifying it so that I can get The Render Engine v2.0 completed.  No later than tomorrow, I expect the beta of v2.0 to be ready for use.  I hope to have the site back up soon so that people will learn about v2.0 and get involved.  At this point, v2.0 is basically ready for people to start beating on it and reporting problems, issues, and ideas to make it easier to work with.

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