AGStrout » Blog Archive » Bold Pixel engine

Mar 04

Bold Pixel engine

I've been messing the last couple of days with the bold pixel engine by VortixGames.
You can find the library here:
Bold Pixel Engine Homepage

While using the engine in my first test project, I became acutely aware of both it's benefits and it's drawbacks. I would say what it does right is that it completely obfuscates some really terribly complex sprite management and MovieClip caching in order to make a very quickly executing game with less effort. I would say what's missing is more of a polish and some very handy options.

I'm currently working on the following options and plan to submit them to VortixGames at my earliest convenience:
- Updates to LayerEntityManager and EngineLayerManager to allow for the non-destructive removal and re-adding of layers and entities. This is important especially if you want to keep the graphical state of an entity while pausing a game for example.
- Sprite sheet support. While the engine is great, I think the one thing I found lacking for me was the support for sprite sheets (that is, large single images, usually PNGs, containing an entire animation, or the entire set of sprites for a character or object). In the current build you would have to write your own code to cull the sprite sheet into an animation stack. I've added this as another optional method to the TextureManager class.
- Special effects and filters is another big one. Currently the entire system is based on -only- blitting, so if you want an entity to be drawn with a filter, or to have it drawn using a specific blendmode, or scaled / rotated etc, you are SOL. I have not quite solidified my plan for how to implement a conditional "draw" based blit yet, and I understand why they aren't using it yet (draw is a lot slower than copypixels) but I think it would be a great addition to the engine.
- A Generic abstract game object which manages an entity. This class would create an entity, and hold a set (dictionary) of texture collection indexes (the animations available to that game object) indexed by friendly names for the animations (such as "stand" or "walk"). When set to visible=false this object would remove it's entity from the layer (while persisting a reference to the layer it belongs on), and would position the entity in real time relative to it's coordinates and a position mode. For example, in a lot of games (mario etc) it's often very useful to have the sprite positioned above and centered over the registration point. With bold pixel the sprites are currently placed down and to the right of the registration.
- Finally, I have run the code through the FDT validator and cleaned it up a lot. I would also like to re-format the code and add ASDoc comments so that clear understandable documentation is available in the form of more than just YouTube Videos (the youtube videos were VERY helpful!).

Cheers all!
-AG Strout

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 9:07 am and is filed under AS3, GameDev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Bold Pixel engine”

Vlad Says:
March 4th, 2010 at 10:01 am
Wow… I’m speechless… thanks a lot for your effort and thought. We’re always open to hear any thoughts, ideas and so on, specially when there’s so much willingness to help.

Keep in mind that much has changed in the current version (not public yet) so I’ll contact you soon so we can have a chat about it.

Again, thank you and I look forward to have a chat with you soon.
cwin5 Says:
March 4th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
Indeed. This engine needs to be further optimized.Looking forward to new version.
Bold Pixel Engine v2 Annoucement | Says:
March 8th, 2010 at 6:09 am
[…] wanting to build on BPE to make it go further. That’s what I felt when I read Arne G. Strout blog post about BPE. Under the spirit of open-source, Arne offered a great deal of thought and ideas […]

Bold Pixel engine

3 Responses to “Bold Pixel engine”

Leave a Reply

Contents

History

Topics