10 SEP 2022:
- Scrap now rotates when it flies through space. I think this makes the game look much better!
- The scrap generated from destroyed enemies also rotates, relative to the direction it is going in. So scrap going left is going to spin counterclockwise and scrap going right is going to spin clockwise (as seen above).
- I recently discovered a new QB64 forum and saw that they even have a new version of QB64 . . . QB64PE (Phoenix Edition). As a result, Scrapship has now been migrated to this new version.
- In Embergen, I figured out how to get my exported images to look they way they do in the viewport. Embergen is the particle effect / explosion and fire software I use and it is very powerful.
- Finally, I learned A LOT about Sprite Sheets. See this link here for a thread I started here on Itch. This whole time I had been loading graphics in individually, which resulted in a load time of about 10 seconds when the game first starts. Clearly that's not acceptable.
Here's where sprite sheets come in handy: Let's say you have an animation sequence for an explosion that is 100 frames long and each image is 200x200 in size. All of this together, loaded individually, might take up 2.5 MB. However, if you pack all those explosions into a Sprite Sheet, it makes better use of the empty space and you get the same animation at a cost of only 1.5 MB! Now 1 MB doesn't sound like much at first, but when you have lots of graphics files and animation sequences, it can add up very fast.
I downloaded this amazing program called TexturePacker that makes it easy to drag and drop your individual frames over and it can sort out your sprites in a variety of ways. Furthermore, it works with a variety of game engines and can even export the files that tell you the x and y coordinates of each sprite. Here's a quick sample of some JSON data:
But QB64 is not a game engine. Fortunately, I was able to get some help from the people at the QB64 forums and they clued me in as to how to use code to implement sprite sheets.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"Never apologize for having high standards."
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!