AMAZE - 2 - Data

Recently, it's been pretty slow going working on AMAZE. Currently, the two biggest obstacles are collision detection and asset handling. I'll cover collisions in a later post, as it's a bit lower on my to-do list. In the past, I dealt with assets in a very simplistic way. I'd toss a bunch of PNGs, WAVs, and OGGs into a folder, then call it a day. I'll be the first to admit that it's not a very professional solution. From now on, I'll be using custom data types for assets, with various extensions. The first of these is SPA, for SPrite Asset. In the past, I'd make a PNG file with each frame next to each other. Surprisingly, it was quite a pain to make these, and that's why I use so little animation in my games. I'm writing a simple conversion program right now that'll convert a bunch of PNG files into a single SPA file, along with some simple pieces of data, like the sprite's origin point, and some options for making collision masks(I'll cover those in greater detail later). Right now, I'm writing the code that parses the PNG files, and it's rather boring. that's the main reason why I'm taking so long. Once that's done, it'll be easy to add sprites to my engine, and then I can tackle the problem of collision detection.