[OpenSource] PlaTENG 0.7 (Platform TileENGine) Joystick support added

[abstauber]

Hey,

looking for a tile based platform engine inside of AGS?

Look no further, here's PLATENG !




Download including source:
http://shatten.sonores.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/jumpnrun.zip

Once the game has started, you can hit F1 to see/change the keymapping and F2 to configure your gamepad/joystick.

I've also put Mappy ( http://tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php ) in the zip, so you can take a look how I've made the first level. The second level and the demo level are done in ProMotion. So if you want to take a look at it, download a trial from here:
http://cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php


More side-notes:
The enemy movement is really basic, and I'd love to see pathfinding in it. So if any of you likes to add jump'n run A* , be my guest  
(please?)

Thanks to all how helped my with it and especially to dkh, Khris and Calin who provided lots of code.
Thanks guys! 


Revision History
// Version: 0.5
// - initial release
//
// Version: 0.51
// - raised the particle limit
// - fixed scrolling bug
// - dust is removed if the player dies
//
// Version: 0.52
// - fixed repeating enemy death animation
// - changed blocking load/save functions
// - hopefully fixed player getting stuck after enemy collision
// - fixed platforms with a speed > 1 (and updated the demo level)
// - added a FPS counter
// - reduced mouse-aiming refreshrate
//
// Version: 0.6
// - frame rate optimizations
//
// Version: 0.7
// improved mappy script
// native Joystick support

[Scarab]

Just played it. Excellent job, Abs!

[Rocco]

very very cool. 
great functionality, allows to make giana sisters-mario clones and a lot more, with the mouseaiming.
i'm really impressed, outstanding job.

[DoorKnobHandle]

That is absolutely brilliant. Marvelous work there, that must've been a hard task! Love all the details and the death animation of the pig!!

[Mehrdad]

congratulation.Excellent job.
please continue this project for release another versions.

Thanks a lot 

[Kweepa]

Ugh! Too much Mario-inspiration!

Awesome job. I particularly like the climb onto block and the slide.

[tzachs]

This is mucho impressivo, well done!
It's a shame you can't shoot the girl, though   

[abstauber]

Thanks for your comments so far


In the meantime I've fixed two more bugs, just in case you're running into these.

[Jim Reed]

Nice job abstauber!
There's a glitch though, you can't destroy blocks if you hit them closer to the edge, you need to ht them near the center.
But, anyway; WOW!

[abstauber]

There's a glitch though, you can't destroy blocks if you hit them closer to the edge, you need to ht them near the center.

Oh, that's on purpose and also applies to this bonus boxes. It somehow felt wrong when barely scraping the block triggered the action.


On a side note: If anyone likes to try out mappy, don't directly mirror an imported tile, but instead create a copy of it first. Otherwise the tilecode will get discarded.

[Wyz]

Good show! That didn't take you long either.

[abstauber]

Good show! That didn't take you long either.

Hehe, that's mostly because I didn't have to reinvent the wheel all over again (and also the reason for the "special thanks" section being so long )

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

FUCK YEAH!  Now if CJ allows dinput gamepads, we'll be well on our way to having old school jump and runs's!

[Wonkyth]

Good stuff.
Am looking at it now!

[abstauber]

Yeah, direct input would be cool indeed. At least this would put AGS in favour of Gamemaker 6

Anyway, somehow I regret that I made this family compatible concept art and not some blood dripping, cementary zombie bashing stuff :\ But maybe I'll safe this for a later game.

The few of you who had a try with this: could you tell me something about your frame rates? I'm a bit worried, that PlaTENG might be too slow for serious entertainment. I've uploaded a new version, featuring some bugfixes and a fps counter.

[Khris]

I've mentioned this before; there's a free utility called JoyToKey; it maps gamepad input to keys and will run fine in the background while an AGS game is running.
And of course it's still possible to change the key mapping inside AGS.

Damn nice work btw, I'm going to download the newest version now!

[abstauber]

Updated to 0.6 thanks to Kaputtnik, who did some great testing.

@Khris
JoyToKey would of course do the trick for most of us, but I'm afraid you can't sell it to the masses
Not that I would have such plans, but for most casual gamers "plug'n play" is pretty important.

[Khris]

True, but you could "hide" it and use a bat to run the game. The downside being of course, that running the game by winsetup wouldn't work any longer.

Since many people seem to have difficulties with choosing the best options for running a lowres game windowed or fullscreen, I sort of decided that, should I ever publish a serious game, I'd probably use two batchfiles, one for full screen, one for windowed (which simply overwrite acsetup.cfg before running the game).

On the other hand, native joypad support would be a great addition to AGS, of course.

[abstauber]

Using batch files is a neat idea.

Once I wanted to write my own replacement, but then I couldn't decide which language/toolkit to use without have the player to install runtime environments.

So batch could come pretty handy - would this work with as a vista standard user?

[Khris]

I tried it with a Win7 guest account and a 2.72 game (I'm at work).
Neither overwriting the cfg file nor running the game itself works without admin privileges, unfortunately.

The latter is a known issue; AGS tries to create the 999 savegame and fails.