Sidescroller games?

[Malte Brill]

Hi Judy,

it is possible to do Sidescroller Games in Rev if you keep the minimal
system requirements high enough:

The computer the game is played on should run at 600 + MHz,
have at least 4 MB video Ram and 256 MB Ram.

The scrolling part is not too hard to do. You can create a group holding
your background Artwork and set the hScroll of it in a send in time
structure. Maybe you want to set up a tile based engine to keep the memory
usage minimal and have huge landscapes.

You might take a look at libRMC to do the animation part of your sprites.

http://www.derbrill.de/librmc/libRMC.rev.zip
http://www.derbrill.de/librmc/libRMCDemo.rev.zip
http://www.derbrill.de/librmc/docs.pdf

It features (besides others):
- moving objects on circular paths
- moving objects on elliptical paths
- moving objects on linear paths
- moving objects on polygonal paths
- circle circle collision detection

You can use the predifined handlers to move your objects around, or, if you
come to the EuroRevCon, get the full sources of libRMC and can roll your
own.

Take care that you don´t lock/unlock screen too often, but at last one time
if you are moving things.

Use a series of png files to do the animation of your sprites if you need
high end Artwork. Avoid using animated GIFs
 
Another tip:

avoid repeat loops where you can. Repeat is blocking other handlers while it
is executed. If you feel you need to repat actions for your sprites you
better store the abbr ID of the controls in a custom property and use repeat
for each line theControl in the yourCustomProperty. Repeat for each is much
faster.

Using send in time is a good way to go, but on slower machines it may look a
bit cheesy.

Don´t get scared if you have many objects moving and it looks too slow in
the IDE. If you build a standalone app. it will speed up rapidly. If you
need any help with developing a sidescroller game I´d be happy to assist,
but I´ll be really busy the next 4 weeks finishing a game in Rev for a
customer.  

Best,

Malte