martes, 29 de septiembre de 2009

MindShake schema

The composition of this engine is focused on the ease of use. We had seen others 2D engines and we decided to design MindShake with all the features we think are essential.
In this way we decided to have one main object called "Device", this element can provide access to all managers of low level elements, so we have them organized and they can be quickly accessed.
The object "Device" can give us access to:


  • Renderer (internal element, in charge of rendering)
  • Window Manager (responsible of size and position of the visual window)
  • Texture Manager (internal element to ease load and manage textures)
  • Scene Manager (manager of all objects that will be shown and his containers, layers, sprites, texts...)
  • Behavior Manager (element to control the behaviors added on our games)
  • Camera Manager (manager of all the camera objects)
  • Font Manager (manager of fonts, this fonts must be created with AngelCode Bitmat Font Generator and are loaded as textures)
  • Kinematic Manager (manager of kinematics objects)

Some of these objects will never be used by the user, like the renderer, the window manager or the texture manager that are only necessary for set some options or get information from the system. But others will be intensely used, like the Scene Manager that defines all the elements present in the world, or the Behavior Manager that handles the behaviors of the diferent details of our world.

jueves, 17 de septiembre de 2009

Layer & Camera System

MindShake includes support to add layers and cameras, with no limits, you can create as many objects as you want.
MindShake includes managers for layers and cameras who handle this data, so you can easily add new objects. Later to easy access to these objects, you can store the reference or give them a name, so you can ask the managers to recover one object with that name.

By default all layers created are configured to adjust to camera renders. If the user want to have a serie of static sprites on the screen, the common way is to put them on a layer that is ignored by camera transformations.

To create a usable sprite layer you need one instance of the scene manager and then invoke the method AddSpriteLayer.
That is done in this way:
//Obtain an instance of scene manager
pSceneManager = IDevice::GetInstance()->GetSceneManager();

//Add and modify a new layer
pLayer = pSceneManager->AddSpriteLayer();
pLayer->EnableCameraTransformations(false);
With this example you see how to create a new sprite layer and modify it to ignore the cameras, so any sprite created into this layer will be shown relative to the upper left corner of the screen.

With the layer created you can now add one or more cameras to view diferent parts of our world.
When we add a new camera it is important to tell it the size and position of the viewport (the region where the camera content will be seen) and the dimensions of the world (the region where this camera can move).
Now you can see one example of scroll.
//Obtain an instance of camera manager
pCameraManager = IDevice::GetInstance()->GetCameraManager();
    
//Add and modify a new camera
pCamera = pCameraManager->AddCamera2D();
pCamera->SetViewPort(0, 0, 320, 240);
pCamera->SetWorld(0, 0, 640, 480);
If our window have a 320x240 size, with this example you will see a scroll effect when move the camera around the world, because it have double size than camera viewport.

It is easy to create more cameras, you only meed to set the viewports in order to view them correctly, for example you can split the screen with three cameras, two of them at the top and one at the bottom.
//Add and modify a new camera (top left)
pCameraTopLeft = pCameraManager->AddCamera2D();
pCameraTopLeft->SetViewPort(0, 0, 160, 120);
pCameraTopLeft->SetWorld(0, 0, 640, 480);

//Add and modify a new camera (top right)
pCameraTopRight = pCameraManager->AddCamera2D();
pCameraTopRight->SetViewPort(160, 0, 160, 120);
pCameraTopRight->SetWorld(0, 0, 640, 480);

//Add and modify a new camera (bottom)
pCameraBottom = pCameraManager->AddCamera2D();
pCameraBottom->SetViewPort(0, 120, 320, 120);
pCameraBottom->SetWorld(0, 0, 640, 480);
Now you can move the cameras with the SetPosition method and every viewport will automatically show the camera content.

sábado, 12 de septiembre de 2009

Behaviors

MindShake includes a behavior engine that allows the users to easily create custom 'event driven' logic, per full game or per sprite, that can be reused in various games.

In this way the user can split logic into several behaviors, defining initialization code (BeginSprite), defining simple actions for events like mouse clicks, per frame process 'EnterFrame' for single sprite or whole game, etc. Furthermore, the user can reuse the same behavior into multiple sprites.

For example, in a platform game, the user can define a behavior to control where a sprite can walk, fall down in case of having no ground under their feet, rising stairs, etc. Then the user can attach this behavior to all the sprites that are able to walk on the platforms.

martes, 8 de septiembre de 2009

MindShake layer system

MindShake has a great layer system. The user can add and shuffle Sprite Layers, Text Layers, Tile Layers and in a future version 3D Layers (like new StarCraft II from blizzard).


The user can apply some transformations directly over the layer or over its content.

lunes, 7 de septiembre de 2009

Bitmap Font Generator

Bitmap Font Generator will allow you to generate bitmap fonts from TrueType fonts. The application generates both image files and character descriptions that can be read by a game for easy rendering of fonts.

MindShake can load bitmap fonts generated with this tool.

Thanks AngelCode!

viernes, 4 de septiembre de 2009

What is MindShake?

MindShake is a lightweight multiplattform 2.5D game engine.
 
In it's first alpha version it will run on several operating systems including Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Linux, some others *nix, MacOS X and iPhoneOS and it will work on several compilers including GNU GCC 3.x - 4.4 and Microsoft Visual C/C++ 6.0 - 2008.

miércoles, 2 de septiembre de 2009