Beanbag Creator?

[Samurai_Crow]

Taken from the Backbone Tutorial thread:

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Keep poking me to write Beanbag Creator. I can make it handle any special requirements you might have.

Let's start out with a list of requirements! A Beanbag-based engine might be just what the doctor ordered for the Classic Amiga version of AROS.

Let me know what you come up with and I'll see about getting a version ready for a next-generation AROS systems. If it includes a high-level Copper-list creator that will work on AROS 68k, I'll see to it that it gets into the AROS repositories so that other Classics can use it. My only stipulation is that it has to support future Copper designs that FPGA users can use. (Eg. A Copper that can write to more registers but will use lists that aren't backward compatible to AGA. I'm looking for MrgCop on steroids that can precompile all of the static stuff at load time.) I've been trying to come up with something like this for a while now and haven't come up with much.

If that's impractical, I'll keep tinkering until I can come up with something.

[Mrs Beanbag]

I was actually thinking about doing exactly that. Although it wouldn't be perfectly flexible, it would allow one to do the sort of copper lists that can be seen in Mr Beanbag - palette changes and multiple independently-scrolling backgrounds. Although the code that renders the copper list would be specific to the hardware (I'd never considered any other hardware to be honest) it would be "data driven" so the API can stay the same on different systems.

I'll also be developing "Beanscript," being a kind of cross between AMOS and Smalltalk.

[Amiga1992]

I'd love to have a poke at this.
I only fear the abominations that can come out of such practice, but it's better than doing ridiculous stuff on Backbone that only runs on ridiculous setups.

Bring it on!

The first request on the list is: DO IT

[Mrs Beanbag]

Well I've just got the game engine to load alternative worlds from disk, selected from the menu, which is the first step. The next step is to make my level editors presentable, then you'll be able to make custom Mr Beanbag worlds using existing zone data. Next step will be to enable you to create your own zones.

Final step is to allow you to change the main character + behaviour. But at that point it ceases to be Beanbag Creator and becomes... Glastonbridge Super Game Creator.

[Amiga1992]

How hard would it be to replace the graphics? Can you share with us the format in which this happens? Because even while we wait for you to release that, whenever that is, we can start working on tilesets and whatnot

Here's hoping for your super platform game creator. the Beanbag engine is incredibly awesome.

[Mrs Beanbag]

The format on disk is a custom LZ-variant applied to a concatenation of banks. Inside that, the tiles and bobs are stored in a run-length encoded format.

But as far as the artist is concerned, the tiles are 32x32, 16 colours, on a page of width 320 of arbitrary height, up to a maximum of 128 tiles, in the usuall IFF image format. The zone packager will convert it from that into the internal format.

The bobs are also grabbed from an IFF image, but the layout the image grabber uses is a little complex, I'd have to upload an example. There are also global objects, like beans and such, so you need to make sure you design your palette to be compatible with these.

Background images are 320 wide, any height and 8 colours, but you have to put all the backgrounds on one image even if you use palette changes so it can look a bit horrid in DPaint, but I may work around that in the packager software later.

Music format is Protracker, but it strips the samples out and stores them seperately. All the samples from the main game are stored globally so they are shared. Recently I added support for local samples too, so that Seasons zones can be loaded from the main executable.

And last but not least, there's the handler, which is a bit of ASM code to handle the behaviour of the bad guys, and render the copper list. I shall probably have to completely redo how that system works. All the data relating to the tile attributes also resides here so it's not very convenient.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Here are some examples


The way the bob grabber works is it scans along the first scanline until it finds a non-zero pixel, and then scans down for the first box. Then it scans along the row of boxes until it ends on a single pixel. Anything after that is ignored.

The single grey pixels on the edges of the boxes determine the hot spots.

Here's the tileset for the Valley zone.

The arrows at the bottom are actually blank in the final version, they are only to indicate where Mr Beanbag should go behind the scenery rather than in front of it.

[Amiga1992]

You rock!

[Samurai_Crow]

Any news on this?

[carvedeye]

How is it coming along? I would really like to give it a go

[hipoonios]

Yeah, please give us something better than Backbone.

My crappy Backbone game will be released this Saturday, and I am ashamed of it because it runs so damn slow.

I really hope that this game creator become reality one day. Or [ Show youtube player ].

[carvedeye]

Originally Posted by hipoonios

Yeah, please give us something better than Backbone.

My crappy Backbone game will be released this Saturday, and I am ashamed of it because it runs so damn slow.

I really hope that this game creator become reality one day. Or [ Show youtube player ].

Amiga Game Creator looks amazing

[nobody]

Amiga ECS-AGA seriously needs a capable game creator. Let's hope Amiga game creator gets released soon and is of such quality.

[hipoonios]

+1

I really like to do some more Amiga games. I refuse to use Backbone for my future games!

So don't know what to do now... my choices are as follows:

1. Learn how to use Reality: The Ultimate Software Construction Kit
2. Expand my skills in Amos or Blitz Basic
3. Wait for a better game maker like Beanbag Creator or the Amiga Game Creator.

[ptyerman]

I've been trying to learn a bit in Amos again but not getting very far. I don't think I was cut out to be a coder.

[s2325]

Amiga Reality Game Creator Enemies
Just a quick video showing the enemies now working
[ Show youtube player ]