After more thinking & playing around, I think I'm going to demo Wang 2-corner (called Marching Squares in the blog post above). It seems like a generally useful format, as good for grass/rock terrain textures as it is for Pac-Man mazes.
Now I just need to find (or make) a nice collection of tilesets in this format!
Can you expand on how to use this? I gather you calculate an index number by assigning bits to the 8 surrounding tiles. But that would result in 256 different tiles; this has only 64 (and many of those are duplicates). So I'm confused.
Thanks, will do. MiniScript is a lot easier to embed (and lighter-weight) than Python, and a lot nicer to use (in my opinion of course) than Lua. So I'll send him a note! Thanks for the assist.
I haven't tried flare, but it looks to me like its modding is currently limited to data: adding item/unit types, and changing configuration parameters. That's always a good start for a modding API, but either your modders are limited in how much they can change actual behavior/logic, or you end up with some abomination like Wesnoth Markup Language [1].
What would really help in cases like this would be to embed a real scripting language. MiniScript [2] was designed for just such embedding. There is a C++ implementation of MiniScript [3] that would be very easy to integrate with flare, and then modders could use a simple, elegant, Unicode-savvy, fully-featured programming language to script the game.
Who should I contact to explore this possibility further?
Oops, I thought I had selected the same license but you're right, I missed. I've corrected that now and also copied the attribution instructions. Thanks!
After more thinking & playing around, I think I'm going to demo Wang 2-corner (called Marching Squares in the blog post above). It seems like a generally useful format, as good for grass/rock terrain textures as it is for Pac-Man mazes.
Now I just need to find (or make) a nice collection of tilesets in this format!
Nice work! And thanks for including the helpful link to Guy Walker's explanation.
Can you expand on how to use this? I gather you calculate an index number by assigning bits to the 8 surrounding tiles. But that would result in 256 different tiles; this has only 64 (and many of those are duplicates). So I'm confused.
I used Adobe Graphic (another vector drawing app).
And thanks for the words of encouragement. I think you're right.
Oops, just sent you a PM before seeing this. Well, if you ever change your mind, you know where to find me! :)
Thanks, will do. MiniScript is a lot easier to embed (and lighter-weight) than Python, and a lot nicer to use (in my opinion of course) than Lua. So I'll send him a note! Thanks for the assist.
I haven't tried flare, but it looks to me like its modding is currently limited to data: adding item/unit types, and changing configuration parameters. That's always a good start for a modding API, but either your modders are limited in how much they can change actual behavior/logic, or you end up with some abomination like Wesnoth Markup Language [1].
What would really help in cases like this would be to embed a real scripting language. MiniScript [2] was designed for just such embedding. There is a C++ implementation of MiniScript [3] that would be very easy to integrate with flare, and then modders could use a simple, elegant, Unicode-savvy, fully-featured programming language to script the game.
Who should I contact to explore this possibility further?
[1] https://wiki.wesnoth.org/AdvancedConditionalWML
[2] https://miniscript.org
[3] https://github.com/JoeStrout/miniscript/tree/master/MiniScript-cpp
These are really well done!
Oops, I thought I had selected the same license but you're right, I missed. I've corrected that now and also copied the attribution instructions. Thanks!
Awesome! I'm going to remix these for a "treasure hunt" game in my upcoming book, Learn to Code in 30 Days!
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