A Bad Coder.

Here be a horrid sketch of what the layout should look like (the middle is where you can edit the level). I would like to have the ability for users to customize their HUD layout to find something that works for them, but for now that is the default. Obviously there are a lot of "what ifs" and "maybes" to this. If you have any concerns/advice/questions, please tweet at @Vitontonio on Twitter and tell him what you think, he's more than happy to get feedback and/or discuss this! Until next time, -ABC

Remember that thingy I've been posting about recently (or not so recently, due to school)? Well, a friend of mine and I decided we're going to vamp it up a notch: We're going to really sit down and focus on it - we're going to enter it in Microsoft's Imagine Cup. What this essentially means is that there are official plans to turn this into something big. I don't want to say more to ruin the surprise, but I sincerely hope that it'll blow your socks off (and if you're a game developer, hopefully you'll find it useful!). I'll share more details in a few weeks. Right now there's going to be a strong focus on laying out the design and submitting a proposal, and after we hear back from our submission I can spill some more details. Another short post again; I apologize. But hopefully I'll be able to start writing longer posts soon. Until then! -ABadCoder

For some particular reason, in VS2013 (at least on Windows 8.1) it cannot convert from GameFrameworkViewSource to IFrameworkViewSource. I have no idea why, and I unfortunately don't have the time to really dig through MonoGame's source code and Microsoft's documentation to find where the issue may be. Hopefully this'll help some people out, though. I could not find a single straight answer on the Internet with regards to the struggle I was having, so for the person that happens to find this post with the same issue: You're not alone. Until next time! -ABadCoder

Pardon the mess. But essentially, as long as the tile you select has transparency to it, you can stack it right on top of other tiles! Currently I only have it working for three layers (switch between layers with the 1, 2, and 3 key for layer 1, 2, and 3 respectively), but I can very easily grant the user the ability to use more. The lower the number, the lower the layer - that is, layer 1 is the bottom layer and layer n is the top layer (where n is the number of layers). Sorry I don't have more to share; I was recently hit with something that made me feel unpleasant for the past 36-48 hours and school has been busy. Hopefully I'll be able to update this blog again with much more good news soon. Until then, take care! -ABadCoder

There! In the first screenshot you can see a few tiles that I put down to create two shadows; the second one you can see the upper panel in a turquoise color, which will eventually host a few more tools - the one that's being worked on right now is the active layer tool (I'll explain a bit more about this in a minute). Currently you can only scroll through the tiles to view more of them, but I plan to eventually add a scroll bar on the right for those who prefer it. Now - as for the active layer system: Essentially all it will be is a system that allows you to layer your tilemaps. I'm leaning towards adding a hard cap of 3-4 layers which can be switched between via 1-4 on the keyboard (hotkeys) or by clicking on them - they will be displayed on the tools panel. The alternative is to have a dropdown menu via which you can add as many layers as you like, but I feel like that may become redundant. If enough people used it and wanted me to loosen the layer cap I could work on it. Other than that... Not too much that's immediately concerning has happened lately. Mostly working on cleaning up my code (still) and making sure it's not a mess moving forward. I'd like to have a clean foundation before I start getting [potentially] crazy with it. Adding restraints so you can't scroll the tiles off the menu, making sure I'm not using a lazy hard cap, etc. Things that'll make my life easier. Good things. I think. I hope you think so, too. :) See ya around! -ABadCoder P.S: Trying to tag things "C#" is a pain in my side because of the hashtag. This language was so cool it was using hashtags before hashtags were even a thing. Stop trying to tell me #C# is just #C, Internet!

Many thanks for listening to my ramblings, especially towards the end there! -ABadCoder

Now, perhaps the most obvious difference between #1 and #2 is the sudden disappearance of the very rudimentary HUD. This is done with a simple right-click, allowing the user to quickly and fluently switch between a full view of the map they are editing and to also edit behind the HUD without the need to scroll. The second difference you may notice is that the bright shade of blue in Screenshot #2 is not on my tile textures. And you are correct to notice that. It is the result of the user choosing map dimensions (in the console window) that result in a map smaller than the screen, allowing the user to make even small maps such as perhaps a house or a small room in a dungeon. I'd like this editor to be flexible for just about any sort of tile editing without the need for a poor developer to burn their eyes out staring at and editing 2D arrays. Current functionality allows you to right-click to show/hide the HUD, left-click (you may also hold LMB) to paint your selected tile, and use the arrow keys (with plans to add WASD soon) to scroll across your map, given its bigger than your window. The editor currently exports the map as a 2D array; I want to toy with this some more before saying too much to try to find a method as flexible and simplistic as possible. Plans for future functionality include support for larger spritesheets (this along with toying with the export file are the two things I will do before considering releasing it). I would like to add a zoom/full-map view, multi-layer editing (so you could paint pretty flowers and static buildings on your map, hooray!), and if I'm feeling ambitious, a port to a full Windows Store app (because if you're developing on your mobile device, you're one hardcore gamedev and I salute you). That's it for today methinks. Game on! -ABadCoder

This may not boost your program's speed tenfold (in fact, some compilers out there already take care of a lot of optimization behind the scenes), but I'm a firm believer in the idea that every bit counts and that knowledge is power. So, without further ado, here are a few tips that may be more or less relevant to my fellow novice programmers: Code Motion ("Precomputation") This is a fairly simple thing to catch. For a simple example, let's say you have a for-loop that reads: for (int i = 0; i < someString.length(); i++) Every time your program runs that loop, it will call someString.length(). The easy solution to this is to define the length just before the loop and store it in a variable: int len = someString.length(); for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) And just like that, you only call someString.length() once! On modern day hardware, this doesn't always make a huge difference (unless you have a humongous string), but for more intensive algorithms - or if the loop happens to be called a lot - there will be a noticeable difference in your program's speed. Share Common Subexpressions Let's say you have a few variables being computed: int i = (q * p) + 1; int j = (q * p) + 2; int k = (q * p) + 3; // etc... Now, it may seem messy to want to add another variable on that list, but it improves program performance if you assign (q * p) to a variable beforehand, so your code reads more like this: int qp = (q * p); int i = qp + 1; int j = qp + 2; int k = qp + 3; // etc... And just like that, you've improved your program's performance. Know Your Language - Row Major or Column Major? This tends to make a big difference if you're working with nested loops and a data structure such as a 2D array. If I said to imagine drawing out a picture of a 2D array, you would imagine it would have n columns and m rows, right? But on computers, a 2D array isn't stored as a rectangle in memory - it's stored as a continuous row of data. Depending on your language, it may store this data with the rows as one giant row (row-major - languages such as C++ and Java), or the columns as one giant row (column-major - languages such as FORTRAN and MATLAB). To illustrate, if we have a 2x2 2D array: a  b c  d This would then be stored as: Row major: a b c d Column major: a c b d Let's say we're working in C (because we're masochists and like low-level languages), which is row-major. If we have a loop such as: // Psuedo-code given a 2D array, arr from i = 0 to 2048     from j = 0 to 2048         arr[i][j] = (i + 1) * (j + 2) This will run noticeably faster than: // j-loop first, then i-loop from j = 0 to 2048     from i = 0 to 2048         arr[i][j] = (i + 1) * (j + 2) And vice-versa for column-major languages. I know this was a long point to illustrate, and it may seem a little jumbled, but it's not too bad - I promise (you may have even worked with nested loops this way prior discovering this). So, with that, hopefully this will help some of you guys looking to fine-tune your code. There are many more ways to optimize your program than this, but I hope the points I discussed are something you can remember and, with any luck, turn into a habit. Happy coding!

Just a quick post, but while I ramble about my own things, I figured it's only proper to give a shout out to AndEngine and MonoGame (links to both at the end of this post). I've been using both to develop games, and they've both been serving me well - AndEngine is fantastic for Android development, but I really like MonoGame for PC applications. Even more good news is that they're open source, so you're free to contribute to the projects yourself should you so choose. If you're familiar with Java or C# and want to get into game/app development, I highly recommend AndEngine and MonoGame! AndEngine: http://www.andengine.org/ MonoGame: http://www.monogame.net/

Thoughts? Regardless, I want to change how the tiles look, but I'm not sure if I should change their style or just make them look better (and fix some alignment issues). Note this is a work in progress, and as always, all work belongs to me.