Tag: MiniMap

Radar demo update

development, games
5 Comments

I’ve made a number of really nice enhancements to my earlier Radar demo.

The improvements:

  • The original demo used collision_line() to detect when the radar sweep collided with the radar blips to refresh them. This meant that the collision detection could skip over smaller objects at great distances from the antenna, since the space between steps is not scanned. The new one uses an approach based on the angle difference between the mappable object and the sweep’s current and previous positions, and is therefore much more accurate.
  • The original radar used a classic looking monochrome green radar screen. The new one implements IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) color coding. This system is flexible in that it allows you to change the value of the color variables used in the color key, or even a unique color if desired. oMappable child objects must have two instance variables, blip_alpha and blip_color. The demo only uses color for IFF, but for colorblind players it would be helpful to modify the routine to use shape as well as color to identify the blips.
  • I’m particularly proud of how understandable and well-commented the code is, so if you’re a developer and want to modify it for your own needs, it should be quite easy to do so.

I still can’t get it to run in HTML5 builds, so a screen shot will have to do.

Radar Demo by csanyk

Download radar_example.gmz

AutoFullScreen and MiniMap scripts for Game Maker 8

development, games, programming
Comments

I came up with some handy scripts for Game Maker 8 projects.

  • AutoFullScreen(Border_W,Border_H,objFollow):  This script automatically sets the game window to full screen mode, and sizes View0 to the pixel dimensions of the display. If the room is not as large as the display, the room is scaled up to fit the display, and will stretch to fill the display in both the horizontal and vertical dimension, which can result in distort the room if it has a different height:width ratio than the display.
  • AutoFullScreen2(Border_W,Border_H,objFollow):  This script automatically sets the game window to full screen mode, and sizes View0 to the pixel dimensions of the display. If the room is not as large as the display, the room is scaled up to fit the display, but does not get distorted by a different height:width ratio.
  • MiniMap(minimap_width,minimap_height,top,left): Sets up View1 as a minimap view of the room. Takes parameters which set the height and width size of the minimap in pixels, and whether the minimap appears in the top/bottom or left/right corner of the window.
  • MiniMap2(scale_factor,top,left):  Like MiniMap, but with a slightly different argument for sizing the minimap. Instead of sizing the height and width using absolute pixel dimensions, you provide a scaling value. The map will be sized to a proportion of the display size divided by the scale factor (e.g., a scale factor of 8 means you’ll get a minimap that is 1/8 the size of the main window.)

The .gmk file is pretty well documented, contains example rooms with reference implementations of the scripts, and can be downloaded from releases.