Bold Pixel Update: IT’S ALIVE!

It’s a bit more than an update. I can confirm that our engine is now born and is currently being used for the current contract project. I will be telling you more about it in the next couple of weeks as we fine tune it, but here’s a bit of info about it.

Basically I recoded most of the current engine in order to make classes more logical and easy to use. Coded proper singletons for all manager classes that had a use for that particular pattern, moved classes around to make the engine more tidy and commented all classes from top to bottom.

Added a couple of nice things, for instance, we had a Preloader class that was supposed to be extended to the preloader movieclips all games have. Problem with it is that preloaders from portals rarely fit this class. I recoded it to be a Load Manager class that handles all loading processes, from external files to the preloading while giving info about the current progress of it. This way I have one class that handles all loading needs (including preloading) and that doesn’t need to be extended… so sweet.

The Bold Pixel

Bold Pixel Engine is the name I selected to honour the work of my partner Marco. I’ll write a funny fact about it one of these days. Anyway, Bold Pixel is our engine’s name as soon as I can call it a game engine, and now I can. The missing link was the blitting engine we have planned for some time.

The blitting engine is made of a texture manager, a layer manager, a render engine which handle textures, layers and entities. It currently supports frame independent animation for entities as well as rotation, pivot points per texture. A lot of thought was put in finding a good balance between flexibility, speed and reusability.

I’m quite happy with the results although moving the current project to this version of the engine is more work than I anticipated considering how well the actual staging of it went. Production is always tougher than staging I guess.

Later,
Vlad