Brain Melt

I’ve been writing and re-writing a lot of code lately. Somewhere between the work to be done and the work I want to see done, there are dozens of thoughts and discoveries that are worth sharing. Some are puzzling, others are simply brain melting.

Behaviors

A long time goal: behaviors! What is it? How does it work? Well… imagine you write this line of code in a Bold Pixel Engine entity:

And from that moment on, the entity will always rotate to the mouse position. That’s a behavior.

Imagine that you could say that instead of facing you’d want it to rotate to the mouse position at a given speed, or with a tween, or that you want it to evade another entity or to find the path to a certain point. Now imagine that behaviors could applied to time… that you could tell your engine time would slow down so you could see all in slow motion…

Well… I wrote two behaviors and it works like a charm!

Flash Player is somewhat smart

I’ve noticed that if you copyPixels() or draw() outside the target bitmapData area, it won’t render anything. Having thousands of objects outside the rectangle area is absolutely meaningless, even if you apply a transformation matrix and draw.

I thought about the possibility of creating a camera object… suddenly this possibility became obviously closer since there will be no need to verify if an object is supposed to be rendered, Flash Player does that for me, I just have to pass the right rectangle… awesome! or at least I’m thinking it will be!

Filters

I really needed a rest a couple of nights ago… so nothing better than writing some new functionalities! My goal was to write filters to apply in layers. After noticing that most flash filters need a BlurFilter applied on top of it, I decided to make it simple and just work with one BlurFilter and one ColorTransform in each layer.

BlurFilter is a huge performance killer, so I played around with only applying the filter to whatever the area the filter needed to be applied to and it works great! The bigger the area, the bigger the performance impact that’s for sure!

ColorTransform seems to have no impact. I’m betting that the pixel color is calculated directly when drawing… if this is true… it’s quite smart!

All in all and since I didn’t want to use any other filters for performance issues, I noticed that with just a little tiny bit of patience, blur and color transform can do most of the cute effects we might need, from shadows to glows to motion blur.

Brain melting the possibilities

A camera with behaviors, like moving to an area with tweening. Flames coming out of a structure and then exploding in thousands of particles flying around with fire trails. Zillions of projectiles flying around in a huge map… wow… this weekend really caused a brain melt.

Need to finish the tutorials to Bold Pixel Engine v1 because v2 is already shaping.