Scratch

Ok, you may not be aware but most 2d games are made up of many squares. You know how a lot of the area in super mario games looks similar? Thats because it isn't drawn as a whole, the programmers stamp many squares to make up the game's landscape. Try any other game creation program and you will see that it lets you built the game by drawing a map of small squares called tiles.

Yes, you can manually create tiles with a stamp feature, but you can't scroll them, and collisions with stamped tiles is usually too hard for beginners.

I don't think you understand the utility of this feature.

One main use of tiles is that the data for each tile picture is very small as opposed to drawn maps. This is the reason the original mario games were only a few kilobytes. Having tiles would allow scratch to make a perfect mario clone among other games.

Also you say that a one would be able to stamp the tiles effectively but this is not so. Tile maps are made of 100+ tiles so stamping 100+ tiles every time the map scrolls is not going to work.

Wouldn't Scratch loose it's broadness it has now?

Yes, you can create games with it but it's not necessarily a game creator.
How would you do something like this in Scratch?

JSO wrote:

Wouldn't Scratch loose it's broadness it has now?

Yes, you can create games with it but it's not necessarily a game creator.
How would you do something like this in Scratch?

I suppose having tiles is more specialized than most scratch features, but it would allow for easier creation of certain projects which I don't think makes the program worse. I think it could work by having a special sprite called a tile map which lets you add tiles and build a map, or something like that. There are tons of examples you can use for such a feature.

Putting tiles would make Scratch seem more of a game designer to me... no, Scratch is not a game designer (contrary to what plenty of people think), it's a tool designed to teach programming basics. 

archmage wrote:

Yes, you can manually create tiles with a stamp feature, but you can't scroll them, and collisions with stamped tiles is usually too hard for beginners.

you can scroll them
see this script:
<when green flag clicked>
<set{done  }to( 1
<forever>
<repeat until><( done(variable) <=>lentgh of positions (list) )>
<go to x((     item <{ done }> )<+> scrollx(variable) ))y ( (( <{ done }> <+>1  ))> <+>scrolly( variable)  ))
<change{done  }by( 2          ^
----------------------------------------I
then an if clause in there too see if the item(+ scrollx/scrolly) is on screen!

Last edited by cruelty247 (2010-07-20 03:51:28)

done mock up and even though it renders slow doesn't mean the collision won't work because you now every location in a list and in costume tab it tells length of "tile"

Ok archmage - I'll support your idea - as long as you make some kind of mockup and explain what additional specific features and/or blocks Scratch would need to make this possible.

Yay for tiles! Less file size!

Support. Maybe you could combine this with rhy's object group ideas...

Maybe if the tiles are a feature that you can turn on and off? If so, I support this idea.

Like a grid that you can snap to. My one and only project involved tiles. I was mad that I didn't figure out sooner that Scratch has a proper size, and actual measures, so I was guessing at how big to make the tiles the first couple of times.

What blocks related to this? Where does it say that? I must've missed it.