Wattage Tile Engine: Plugin API Docs

Quickstart

Source code may be found from here.

Find screenshots of the tile engine in action here, and a video of the tech demo here.

The Wattage Tile Engine is easy to use. Check out the quick start guide here to get up and running fast. Or download the template and start your own project. Be sure to check out the variety of sample code below.

Overview

The wattageTileEngine plugin can be used in your Corona project. It enables the display of a large number of tiles and includes the following features:

• Support for a large number of tiles.
• Support for very large worlds which are too large to load entirely into memory through the use of the RegionManager. See the RegionManager guide below.
• Dynamic lighting effects.
  • Tiles may be configured as opaque to cast shadows.
  • Opaque tiles may be added/removed arbitrarily and their effects on shadows will be realized in real-time.
  • Lights may be added and removed arbitrarily and their effects are realized in real-time.
  • Ability to specify ambient lighting. This is useful for outdoor scenes.
  • Ability to specify whether a tile is affected by ambient light. This is useful for indoor tiles in an outdoor environment.
  • Lights may be moved with smooth transitions between their states.
  • Entities are affected by the lighting in each tile.
• Dynamic line of sight. Useful for hiding tiles that would not be visible to the player.
• Dynamic tile definitions. Useful for representing a dynamic world.
• Multiple layers.
• Multiple layer types (Tile, Entity)
• Parallax scrolling between layers.
• Camera which supports arbitrary viewing positions and different levels of zoom.

Guides

• Quickstart
• Lua OOP Primer (Optional)
• ObjectSystem Usage Guide (Optional)
• Creating Very Large Worlds Using RegionManager

Syntax

local wattageTileEngine = require "plugin.wattageTileEngine"

Libraries

• ObjectSystem
• Utils

Types

The following types are exposed by the Wattage Tile Engine library:

• Camera
• Engine
• EntityLayer
• LightingModel
• LineOfSightModel
• Module
• RegionManager
• SpriteInfo
• Tile
• TileLayer
• ViewControl

Project Configuration

Clone the source from:

https://github.com/paulWatt526/tileEngine

then copy the “plugin” folder into your project. The library can then be included using:

local wattageTileEngine = require "plugin.wattageTileEngine"

Platform-specific Notes

None.

Resources

Sample Code

The template serves as a bare bones example.

• Template Code

The Quickstart Guide walks through all of the following sample code:

• Quickstart Stage 1 Code
• Quickstart Stage 2 Code
• Quickstart Stage 3 Code
• Quickstart Stage 4 Code
• Quickstart Stage 5 Code
• Quickstart Stage 6 Code
• Quickstart Stage 7 Code
• Quickstart Stage 8 Code

Additional Examples

• Loading level from Tiled
• Integrating Physics Objects
• Using the RegionManager

Support

More support is available from the Blind Prophet Software, LLC team:

• E-mail
• Forum
• Plugin Publisher

Compatibility

Screenshots

Racing Game

Roguelike

Tech Demo

Videos

• Tech Demo
• Racing Example (with parallax)

Release Notes

2-24-20

The Wattage Tile Engine is now open source software.

7-11-17

Version 1.0.4

This release consists of non-breaking changes. It adds functions to RegionManager which allow it to handle non-resource entities.

5-8-17

Version 1.0.3

This release consists of non-breaking changes. No changes should be necessary in your code.

• Added RegionManager type to assist in creating very large worlds.
• Fixed memory leak occurring when tiles are dynamicaly updated outside of the visible area.

4-25-17

Version 1.0.2

This release consists of non-breaking changes. No changes should be necessary in your code.

• Fixed bug where entities in an EntityLayer could be visible on the first frame before they were moved into correct positions.
• Minor Performance Improvements.
• SpriteInfo.new() has been deprecated. We have found that calling new() repeatedly is noticeably more costly than just creating a table with the same properties. The new() function has been left in the engine for now, but it may be removed in the future. It is recommended that a table be used instead. For example, instead of this:

local spriteInfo = SpriteInfo.new({
    imageRect = displayObject,
    width = 100,
    height = 100
})

It is slightly better performance wise to do this:

local spriteInfo = {
    imageRect = displayObject,
    width = 100,
    height = 100
}

• Introduced lighting mode NONE for layers. This will skip any light processing to improve performance for games which just want to display unlit tiles.

2-1-17

Version 1.0.1

This release consists of non-breaking changes. No changes should be necessary in your code.

• Fixed bug where tiles may be added twice when scrolling diagonally.
• Fixed bug with non-resource entity ID assignment. Resource and non-resource IDs are managed separately. It is now possible that the same ID could be assigned to a resource entity as well as a non-resource entity.