Evening. How's it going?

Decided on the drive home from work today that I want the world of Squishy to be based around a hub world that contains a large machine that is missing cogs. Squishy's task will be to collect the cogs and attach them to the correct parts of the machine so that when a lever is pulled, the machine will operate something.

Or something like that anyway. I just have an image in my head of a tall wooden tower surrounded by portals to the different worlds, and Squishy swinging around placing cogs on different pegs. Must be all the knocks to the head I suffered as a child.

Anyway, I needed to create the cogs you see in the image above. So far I've been defining shapes by typing the vertices into the editor manually, but this was a shape that I couldn't really figure out like that.

Rather than create a new tool, I created a new level, put a very big cog in it at 0,0 then drew the shapes on as map shapes with the existing vector drawing tools used to make the map areas (excuse quality of jpeg, Squed screens don't shrink down well):



I saved that as a level, then opened the Squed project and added a tool to save selected map shapes to a text file, in the same format that shapes are defined in the scheme file for the level type.

For example, in the scheme file the shape for an object consisiting of a square and a circle might look like this:

properties{    Shapes="2 0 0 c 3 8 6 p 4 -1 1 1 1 1 -1 -1 -1";}

Reading left to right, 2 shapes, the first origin at 0,0, a circle of radius 3, second shape origin at 8,6, a polygon with 4 vertices (-1,1),(1,1),(1,-1),(-1,-1).

Obviously typing these manually is a pain for complex shapes, but with the new tool I can define the shapes visually and save them to a text file in the correct format, then copy-paste them into the scheme.

I also added some scaling tools that allow me to scale map shapes (relative to the world origin) or to scale actors (scales their shapes and quads relative to their centre).



All very useful stuff and will make more complex objects a lot easier to create now.

Next up, a system for attaching the cogs to pegs. Got some ideas about that but we will have to experiment.

Thanks, as ever, for reading and comments welcome.