Im new and have a few questions

Im a user of MMF2 and have been working on an isometric RTS game there for quite some time and it has been coming along great, but I have been checking back here occasionally to see how things have progressed and it seems to be getting very powerful and popular.

I have a few questions;

1/ Is there a LUA extension available? I know that you can use python but most of my engine relies on LUA scripting and lua is faster the py.

2/ Do you have any isometric support?

3/ Do you have any support for large scrolling backgrounds that are made up of tiles? By this I mean can I draw the background at runtime, including layering multiple tiles on top of one another with alpha masks.

4/ Does you pathfinding algorithm include a 'cell height' parameter which means that if I have grid cells at different heights the pathfinding takes this into account. (If for example I have a cell with a height of 5 and the adjacent tile has a height of 1, the pathfinding will not jump from height 5 to 1, but instead search for a way down like 5,4,3,2,1. This is good for creating cliffs which is what my engine has)

5/ And finally how efficient is it compared to MMF2? I have optimized my code as much as I can and get around 150-200 fps using 1024x768 resolution and dont want to go anything less than that.

Look forward to your answers,

cheers

1: Not yet, a plugin for LUA support would be easy to make though. I'm sure someone could whip it up.

2: This is something that you would do with Construct, but Construct has no built in support for this specific thing.

3: Yes.

4: This is something that you would do with Construct, but Construct has no built in support for this specific thing.

5: Construct is very fast, and is much faster than MMF2. Construct uses DirectX hardware acceleration, and MMF2, from what I'm reading, uses a software renderer. That alone makes Construct leagues ahead of it in terms of render speed. As far as logical speed, that depends on how your events are set up.

Isometric support could be introduced in form of a plugin, should there be a brave plugin developer willing to dive into isometric waters.

thanks for the reply guys.

What I need to be able to do is load my level at the start of the frame at runtime from an array.

I need to have all my tile images stored in one object, and then as I load my arary I will read the tile index that is saved in the array, change the image to that tile and then I need to draw it on the frame.

I dont want these to be sprites as that would be wasteful. They are just background objects.

I need to be able to handle map sizes of 500x500 tiles easily.

How do I go about doing this?

Can someone post me an example? there doesnt seem to be many examples out there (that I can see anyway).

thnx

At this point, it would involve a lot of work, so there aren't really many examples of tile based games. It also has the disadvantage, where displaying many tiny objects (tiles) can slow the game down, if not done properly.

So, basically it is an unexplored territory. I've dabbled a bit, but right now I am busy with other projects, before I get back to it. My next major game project will be tile based.

Therefore I suggest that you experiment. Keep experimenting, until you come up with an acceptable solution. There are some others working on tile engines, they may have a few tips.

The most important thing to note - destroy objects that are offscreen and create them before they come onto screen.

Well my current project in MMF does this by drawing only the tiles that are displayed on the screen.

I do this vua LUA and it works very fast but I am starting to get a bit tired of some of the work around I need to do with other parts of my game.

I dont really want to got through teh whole 'trial and error' thing again with construct. It took my weeks to get my current drawing routine to what it is now.

I guess I will stick with MMf for the time being, but I will keep an eye on Construct.

cheers