Just an experiment in pen for a tile scrolling engine... Rather than draw each tile separately I wondered about grouping them horizontally... I purposefully left a gap in the rendering of the blocks because, well it looks to pwetty *grin*. So why use pen? Well using clones to make tile games means we can't use more than 300 tiles max, and in fact after accounting for other game assets we get down to more like 150-200. As a comparison, this pen tile project is showing 728 tiles at once - Quite a lot more than is possible using sprites. And the outcome is, yep, it works pretty well and could easily be used in a game, however you lose the details of costume based tiles so it would have to be a very much more pen stylised game. If you are interested, the level on this project is randomly generated. Each tile has a chance to either be the same as the one to the left or below, or otherwise becomes a random tile. This leads to horizontal and vertical runs of tiles, but with a nice random nature. If you feel adventurous, note this is using the 3d rendering path (because if you look inside I've dropped a "set color effect (0)" block into the scripts area. Try removing this and test the project again, compare the smoothness and frame rate of the 3d player vs the 2d player. I find it looks a little nicer and works a little faster with the 3d player... How about you? (turbo gets 90fps - as long as I don't go full screen as my graphics card is not up to the job)
