Plan for Melv May

... continued from previous .plan.
... T2D .plans.
... T2D .Discussions.


Well plans for T2D are really moving now. There's lots of work going on in the background getting it ready for public consumption. I won't go into all the dull technical nitty-gritty but I will say that I'm pretty hyped about how it's all going. At the moment, T2D is really just an API albeit a pretty good one but it doesn't yet have all the editor support that it *will* have in the future. This only means that you don't have the point & click features that some users like but you have got a pretty powerful way of combining the TGE's powerful scripting language with T2Ds easy configuration.

It really doesn't take long to get things whizzing around the scene, colliding with each other, so you can get lots of return on little effort. It only takes a couple of lines of script to get objects into your scene. It's going to be awesome when the editors are complete and make it even easier to configure your games.

Below is just a little eye-fodder which shows the latests example of how to get things running. The string of coloured balls react to collisions from the logo-sprites. The balls take on part of the velocity of the sprites but get pulled along by the rest of the balls. The window shows how you can have many views on the same scene or even multiple scenes with very little efffort. Just generate a scene-window and tell it the scene and it works. The small-windows' camera is mounted onto the lead-ball object so as it moves around, the camera stays centered on it. Mounting is attached by a specified force so I could've just as easily have the camera lag behind if I used a smaller force.

Behind the scene are multiple-layer tile-maps that can scroll in any direction. One of the layers (the checker pattern) has had its blend settings configured so that the alpha is low which means it appears as a watermark. All objects have this ability and the standard blend functions are provided at script-level for cool effects like this.

The scene time-scale slider demonstrates the ability to speed-up/slow-down individual scenes and all the physics/collisions work seemlessly. The scene zoom slider demonstrates the ability to dynamically zoom the view in/out.

There are so many features to T2D that I just couldn't explain them all here but I will say that I think we've managed to keep everything available to the scripts in a consistent and easy to understand style. T2D could also be used for pretty much anything from cool menu-systems to complex overlaid graphics.

Sure, T2D doesn't have absolutely everything you may need to make your 2D game but over the coming months, it will have. I'll be spending all my freetime working on the codebase and we've got some great plans to take it forward.

As to details on the T2D release, well I'll leave that up to Jay/Josh but I don't think you'll be waiting too long to get your feet wet in generating cool T2D games.

Just in-case you missed my little demo video; here it is. It's a pretty big download (32.5mb) but it's kind've fun to watch. Just a little eye-fodder for fun really, nothing serious.
T2D Eye-Fodder Movie




- Melv.