Dev time!
OK, so this is where it’s all at. The ingame menus for troops, defence, research and mining are almost complete. Zone’s now have object plotting so that buildings, trees, mines and rocks can be drawn. A.I. is still ongoing, but going well :D
All of this is being coded from scratch. Sitting back and looking at it all I realised I’ve created quite a nice AS2 Blitting solution which I’m sure I’ll use in other pet projects. Blitting really has its benifits but I’m finding that creating menu’s in blitting is very time consuming. Each element needs to be defined and plotted onto the game screen every cycle.
Anyway, hopefully it will all be worth it! Back to the code …
Big update. Works begun on the actual game interface and menus.
The original game’s menu was thought out so well that it makes no sense to fix what’s not broken. A lot more work has gone into the behind the scenes of displaying sprites etc, but as you can see from this visual things are coming along nicely. The inventory section is working and also a ‘researched ground troops’ page which let’s you send out your troops.
Daily update, before you get excited about the sprites in the screen grab above I’m using the old Mega-lo-mania sprites at the moment to speed along the dev. So full credit must be given to the Sens guys :D
WARNING - SOME GEEKY STUFF …
If you have ever done any Bitmap.copyPixels in AS2, you may have noticed that if your doing loads of it sometimes weird overlapping happens with alpha channels. It’s almost like flash is corrupting the alpha channel.
After some googling and messing around I’ve found the solution! Something that I’ve never realised is that in the command you can target another bitmap object that contains an Alpha mask.
bitmap.copyPixels(spriteSheet, new Rectangle(0, 0, 16, 16), new Point(targetX, targetY), spriteSheetAlpha, new Point(0, 0), true);
That last ‘true’ option is what does the Alpha blending. Yes big air punch…
So the new blitter drawing function can push over 10,000 objects around on the screen, animated, which is proper handy.
