The best approach to a high-speed platformer?

[LRH]

While I know AGS is very capable of producing platforming games, is it the best bet if I want to make a platformer that requires *very* fast scrolling? I'm just kind of curious as to what you all think the best approach for something like that would be. It's not something critically important, but it has been on my mind a lot lately as something of a future project.

[DoorKnobHandle]

Depends mostly on whether you want to use a tile system for your levels or hand-drawn backgrounds. With tiles, you shouldn't run into big problems, room-style backgrounds I haven't tried yet but large levels might pose problems.

[LRH]

Depends mostly on whether you want to use a tile system for your levels or hand-drawn backgrounds. With tiles, you shouldn't run into big problems, room-style backgrounds I haven't tried yet but large levels might pose problems.

Yeah, it would be something with fairly large levels.

[R4L]

Depends mostly on whether you want to use a tile system for your levels or hand-drawn backgrounds. With tiles, you shouldn't run into big problems, room-style backgrounds I haven't tried yet but large levels might pose problems.

Yeah, it would be something with fairly large levels.

You'd probably be better off with tiled backgrounds.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

You'll definitely want to go with tiles or some kind of procedurally generated background -- basically create some functions to give some instruction to draw shapes on the screen in some pattern.  For instance, if you wanted to use multi-dimensional arrays or matrices, you could potentially map out a design for a level and then have a function line draw (or whatever) to the screen based on this 'map'., not unlike creating a 3d dungeon layout.  This may or may not be faster depending on just how detailed you wanted things, but you could certainly have an outline color in the map (say green for ground), and then below it filled in with brown for dirt, and so on, simply by assigning a different value to each cell in the matrix that corresponded to a specific color or type of terrain.  In this way, you could either specifically construct the levels or assign the renderer some rules (like there must be x amount of land, no water in the air, etc) and let it randomly construct the terrain, place the baddies, even the exit and entrance.  You could certainly do the same with tiles, and the only major difference is that the renderer would be tossing the tiles directly to the screen instead of filling an area with color.

AGS as you know isn't really ideal for a platformer, though, and I'd recommend something like Game Maker if you wanted to go with a very fast, very large tile-based platformer as it's very easy to pickup and use without having to construct your own tile mapper, etc.

[Calin Leafshade]

The other approach would be to use regions which is a little more intuitive for an AGS user. This way you can use all the built is AGS constructs like objects, rooms and hotspots.

Heres a quick demo http://www.thethoughtradar.com/AGS/Pixelformer.zip (z to jump)

All the platforms are dynamically drawn just by reading the regions but in reality you could have any background you liked.  

EDIT: Sorry just reread your post. Regions wouldnt work for a scrolling platformer.

[Vince Twelve]

Infinity Bit is a tile based platformer.  I used Mappy to layout the levels and export text files which were read in by AGS and drawn onto the screen.  I made it in less than a month and designed features as I was going along with little forethought.  I didn't even know it was going to be a platformer when I started.  So I wound up coding myself into a bit of a corner and causing the game to have performance issues, but it all worked out.

Source code is available here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=41576.0 but again... messy.

[DoorKnobHandle]

You can also check out my MAGS title Revelation, it has a map editor so you could just try and make a big one with it, see how it runs and all.

[LRH]

Wow, you've all been very helpful. Thank you!

[abstauber]

Even though this has been already answered, I'd like to add that you'll suffer from screen tearing if you don't activate v-sync and play fullscreen.

Apart from that, my very own platformer scrolls pretty speedy nowadays.


@Vince: Wow, infinity bit sure is stunning. Where were you when the Amiga needed you