Archive for the ‘The code of VGS’ Category

Bold Pixel Engine Toolkit Video

Hi all,

Just a heads up for a YouTube video we just uploaded that goes through the toolkit package of Bold Pixel Engine.

Remember to watch it in full-screen HD! Clicky!

Later!

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:

1

entity.behaviors.face.mouse();

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.

Introduction to BPE’s Blit Engine

Hi everyone!

Just a heads-up to let you know that a video with an introduction to BPE’s Blit Engine is up on our YouTube Channel.

Thanks to everyone that has voiced an opinion about BPE, good, bad, bugs and whatnot, we appreciate it.

Bold Pixel Engine Released

Hi all!

Great day today! We are releasing Bold Pixel Engine today. Along with this release we are also opening our YouTube channel.

Is that nice or what?

Visit our Bold Pixel Engine Page for information and download and our YouTube channel for the first glimpse of it.

See you later…

Bold Pixel Engine Blit Performance Test

Hi all, Vlad here!

Wrote a quick performance test yesterday comparing movieclips with our own blit engine. Usually tests are performed with a number of objects. To test several loads, usually a different number of objects is used to test the results. I didn’t want that since we all know that many games don’t have a fixed ammount of objects rendered. Even if object pooling is used, what concerns me is the objects rendered.

What I did was to create one object per frame and then move all the existing objects away from the starting point. This would give an instant visual reference about how well blit performs against movieclips.

Give it a try and then read on.

Tried it? Cool!

Movement is time-based in both tests, this means that test 1, ran with movie clips took longer since the spread is bigger. This indicates a frame drop, but if you run it again and notice that there are different spreads, so not only it drops but it drops in a rather inconsistent way. Obviously the test also took longer to conclude.

On the other hand, blit engine performs rather smoothly, to the point where frame drop is not inconsistent and allows the objects to stay pretty close to each other. Above that, the test is damn quick compared to the first one, proved by the small spread (although I could’ve included a clock, I admit).

This is nothing we didn’t already know, I agree! The true testing will be with animation, rotation and scaling of blit entities.

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