So far I have drawn the background using sprites that were set as public variables. It was convenient for getting things to work fast. However there are things that I don’t like about it.

Managing the sprites manually in Unity sounds really tedious to me with all the clicking and dragging. Furthermore, I’m not working with final assets right now so I expect my tileset to change. So I feel an incentive to  write code that does the boring part for me.

In fact, I want to minimize the work of adding new tiles as much as possible. Its with that desire in mind that I came up with my new scheme for handling the tilesmaps. It works like this:

1. I created a new class called TerrainData. This new class only holds 3 bits of data: An identifier, the sprites index on the spritesheet, and if it collides with the player (example being water)
2. In the Tilemap Manager I added a dictionary of TerrainData and filled the dictionary from a JSON file with all my data on my sprites.
3. From the dictionary I created another collection of Tiles with all the correct sprites and if any of my tilemaps need a tile they can easily pull a reference to it.

Overall, I got all of that working and I’m pretty satisfied with how its going. I’m fully anticipating some unanticipated problems to crop from it that I need to fix. Also spent a good hour on a bug where everything compiled fine but on closer inspection the problem was hiding in plain sight. It’s in the section below.

public void AddPrototype(string key, TerrainTile tt)
{
if (prototypes.ContainsKey(key) == false)
{
prototypes.Add("key", tt);
}
else
{
Debug.Log("Invalid Prototype");
//throw new ArgumentException();
}
}

 

So with basic collision detection added, I started looking at a couple things that involved much more C# scripting than anything I did on the project previously. Anyways here is the latest.

So what’s different? Well 3 things.

I wanted more tiles on the screen, so I zoomed out. It was fairly simple, just one setting on the camera.

Next, while I found being able to paint tiles onto the screen directly in Unity to be convenient; I wanted to have a little more control over the tiles on the screen. For that I spent time figuring out how to add tiles through scripts. Or, more accurately, straining my eyes on the documentation and banging my head against my desk while missing the completely obvious answers to questions I had. Questions like, “how does one create a tile on the tilemap, if a tile is a necessary parameter?” The answer is, of course, you just create the tile separately and then fix it to the location you want in the tilemap.

So with that figured out, I replaced the old terrain with a 32 by 16 square of grass. All the terrain was created by a script. The code wasn’t pretty and I’ll be revisiting it later to make it better, but instead moved onto the third task.

Previously, my keyboard input directed the object on the screen called player to move it around. However I’m not going to only be controlling that one single player. Like any good rpg game, I want to give keyboard input to other characters. So I added a new class that had a list for all potential characters where I can get references of whichever of them is currently getting user input. To test it, I promoted the npc to Player2 and added a switch player button on the top left to toggle change the active player. It ended up being good practice working with Unity game objects.

While the lack of collision detection is bugging me, I need to tackle one other matter first. My code for moving the player currently looks like this:

public class PlayerController : MonoBehaviour {

void Update () {
if (Input.GetKeyDown("right"))
transform.position += new Vector3(1, 0, 0);
else if (Input.GetKeyDown("left"))
transform.position += new Vector3(-1, 0, 0);
else if (Input.GetKeyDown("up"))
transform.position += new Vector3(0, 1, 0);
else if(Input.GetKeyDown("down"))
transform.position += new Vector3(0, -1, 0);
}
}

Depending on whichever arrow key is pressed, my player will move one unit in that direction. The problem is, instructions how to move is all written directly into the player’s script. It isn’t a big deal right now because its just a transform.position statement(one line of code), but I’m going to be adding stuff to check for collisions before movement and there is nothing really unique about how the player moves compared to anything else. At best its pointless to have the same bits of code in multiple spots and at worst it will become confusing and tedious to make any change to movement because I would need to make the change in more places than one.

So I’d rather have one function for movement to use for multiple different things.  In that case, how will I know that it works?

I redid the scenario from last time. I added an npc to the bottom right. I’m going to have him move around once every hundred or so frames. Then I’ll have the player move with the keyboard. If both move as expected, then the code does what I want it to do.

In my Java prototype I did that by making a parent class called Entity where the move function existed and was available for anything that needed to move. The solution here is essentially the same.

public abstract class Entity : MonoBehaviour {
protected void Move(Vector3 movement)
{
transform.position += movement;
}
}

Having the Entity class as an abstract class was advantageous in my Java prototype, so even though the one here doesn’t need to be abstract to work, I still went ahead and made it one. The code is not going to know (or care) that the movement is originally from keyboard inputs, so I’m just asking for the direction of movement.

Then all I need to do is change the class for Player to inherit from Entity, and make it use the new Move function. I decided to go one step farther and move all the Keyboard stuff onto a separate function which is called from update.

<blockquote>void KeyboardInput()
{
if (Input.GetKeyDown("up"))
Move(new Vector3(0, 1, 0));
else if (Input.GetKeyDown("down"))
Move(new Vector3(0, -1, 0));
else if (Input.GetKeyDown("left"))
Move(new Vector3(-1, 0, 0));
else if (Input.GetKeyDown("right"))
Move(new Vector3(1, 0, 0));
}</blockquote>

Lastly, I saved everything and hit the play button. The npc is running around in circles as expected, and my player moves around according to my commands.