Is Lime a good product for this? Newbie Question

Lime
#1

Hi Everyone,
I have been looking into tiled and lime to use for level design. I have a couple of questions.

I would like to create large levels with large tiles. Tile size 256 x 256 px and levels at least 100K x 25K px.

The reason I want to do this is because i can just create the graphics as I need in illustrator and then have tiled cut them up and lime manage all the camera transitions, culling and all the other fun stuff that I am now doing manually and don’t want to do.

I know that Lime is currently having some performance issues that I am sure will be figured out with Ansca.

Is this something that Lime can and will be able to do with great performance?

For some reason whenever I think of people using tiles I think of 32 x 32 px not such large sizes and I don’t know if this is feasable.

Thanks and congratulations on the great product.
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#2

Hey, I can’t really say if it is good or bad product as I would naturally be bias. It’s the most awesome product ever! :slight_smile:

At present I would say that a map of ~390 tiles by ~98 would probably be too much for Lime to handle as that is ~38220 tiles, and without any real visual culling in yet I think Corona would just die. It’s not really the size of the tiles that would be the problem as Lime uses spritesheets so texture memory won’t really come in to play, it is simply the sheer number of them.

It will run fine in the simulator though so if you wanted you could atleast start devving your game while we wait for the performance improvements from Ansca, it really just depends on your time requirements. [import]uid: 5833 topic_id: 8528 reply_id: 30580[/import]

#3

Thanks for the quick reply. I am very excited about Lime. I think it has a great start and even a more amazing future ahead. I particularly excited about the camera features and would love to start toying around with those and possibly suggest and expansion to them :slight_smile: as I get more knowledgable. Things such as zoom transitions etc.

I know what you mean about the performance. So if I read your post right. After the culling issue is taken care of I could use basically any size map with no issue whatsoever?
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#4

Zoom transitions are something I would really love to add, well basically I’d love to add loads of different transitions so any help in that regard is very much welcome :slight_smile:

That is the plan yea, but it really depends on how the culling function is made. As if it only culls visuals then you would still need to think about physics objects. Plus thought will need to be put into what happens with animations etc. There is a lot of thought Ansca will need to put into it but I have no doubt they can do it. [import]uid: 5833 topic_id: 8528 reply_id: 30584[/import]

#5

I don’t know much about the animations part. I use sprites and they work fine except when I zoom out it seems that the origin of the sprite changes or doesn’t scale. It’s weird. I have to bring it up with Ansca.

Anyways. About the zoom effects. Would love to contribute what I have figured out so far. Zoom transitions can be great for any type of effects. A great example of zoom effects is iStunt2. Please check it out and see how they do smooth zoom transitions that I am sure are triggered by the main character hitting some invisible sensors. They seem to have an ease in an out transition, which makes it very smooth.

Would love to have some parameters to the zooming functions such as. x location, y location, zoomScale, time of transition, type of transition. This would cover most of them

I currently implement a zoomGroup below the localGroup for the scene. I keep the localGroup just in case I want to use Director Class. Then I have a zoomGroup with all the groups that I want to control with the zoom effects.

WHere it gets a little difficult is with the culling method that I have implemented. You have to factor zoom in to recognize when stuff is off the screen. Unfortunately I still dont’ fully understand how to use contentWidth and content Height so I compare everything to the main actor or camera location.

It would be amazing to develop something were you simply set the camera boundaries and then lime and corona do the rest. [import]uid: 8192 topic_id: 8528 reply_id: 30587[/import]

#6

That was the sort of method that I was going to take, I just haven’t had as much time as I wanted to properly put into it yet. And yea the sprites origin will need to be taken into account for it to work.

The culling method in Lime at the moment isn’t perfect and was mainly just a POC to show Ansca that simply hiding tiles would be a huge performance boost, only it would be much better if it was done in native code. It currently doesn’t take into account scale or rotation either. [import]uid: 5833 topic_id: 8528 reply_id: 30588[/import]