I want to make breakout as my next project. But of course I have a few snags: 1. I do not know how I would create multiple blocks? I could create "personal" instances of the object with their own unique name, That the program call specifically, but that would be long, dirty, and basically useless. So I know I need to create an array like thing to store each instance of the class, But I dont know how. 2. If I want to have this game actually play, Im going to need more than one level. Aside from having a randomly generated level each time(interesting but not what i want). I would need to make both a level editor and have a way to save them. So I could probably make a level editor even though it would take me a while. But I still dont know how to save it. My only Idea is to just save the blocks as text. With the level # in (). So I would have my code loop through the corditnates and then stop when it hit a (. And start again if there are no blocks on screen. But that would be hard to make and implement, so I was wondering if there was a better way?

I made breakout long ago. I didn't make any instances. I had a file format for it. What the file format contained was a line for each block. The first number on each line was the lower-left corner coordinate. The second number was the upper right-corner coordinate. I did this so that I could have variable size blocks.

At the beginning of the file I had the textures to load. Each sucessive texture was assigned a number. So the first texture listed would get a 0, the second would get a 1 and so on. So, on my line with the block coordinates for a given block the third entry was the texture number.

The next number was how many hits it takes to break a block. Some blocks would take more hits than others.

Then the last number was a powerup. I had 8 powerups, so the number would be from 0-8, 0 meaning no powerup, and any other number meaning that if this block is hit to drop whatever powerup. So a single line might look like this:

0.15 0.15 5.3 5.3 0 3 2
which would mean the lower-left corner is at the coordinate (0.15, 0.15) the upper-right corner is at (5.3, 5.3), it uses the first texture in the list, it takes 3 hits to destroy and holds the second powerup.

From this, I created a block editor. I could just place blocks on there, drag textures and powerups to whatever block, and then save the file. That's how I made the different levels. Hope this helps.

Thx, How did you create the editor? I could create a simple one but, not onw like that. And dont you still need instances in the program when you load in the blocks?

Quote:Original post by zergdeath1
Thx, How did you create the editor? I could create a simple one but, not onw like that. And dont you still need instances in the program when you load in the blocks?

I used a programming language called tcl/tk for the editor. It was just a personal thing so it didn't have to be really professional. Windows programming with tcl/tk is simple and fast and the editor was no problem.

I didn't use instances. The file just loaded the geometry and texture information and I just saved it in an stl::vector and then removed blocks from the vector that were hit as I went (or decremented the number of times you needed to hit them to break them).

Anyways, here is what I did with the editor. I had two basic areas of the window at the beginning. One displayed the board as a grid, and the other had the texutres I wanted loaded. I would click on a block on the grid and add a block. I would then drag a texture of my choosing to the block. When you clicked on the block after this a drop down list and a text box would appear. The drop down list had values of 0-8 for the powerups (0 was default so if you didn't change it you got no powerup) nad the textbox was for how many hits the block takes to break. 1 was default so if you didn't do this for the block it would be 1. As I did this I added the data to an array. When I was done and clicked save it would write this arraylist into a file in the manner I wanted.

Thx both of you. I feel stupid not knowing I could create multiple blocks that way.

Quote:Original post by Rhaal

Quote:Original post by zergdeath1
I want to make breakout as my next project. But of course I have a few snags:

1. I do not know how I would create multiple blocks? I could create "personal" instances of the object with their own unique name, That the program call specifically, but that would be long, dirty, and basically useless. So I know I need to create an array like thing to store each instance of the class, But I dont know how.

class Block{  // Stuff};// main.cppBlock blocks[50];// then do stuff like...for (int i=0, i <= 49, ++i){  blocks.Draw();}

I did close to the same thing. I used a vector<Block> Blocks; It just seemed alot simpler to handle with a vector than an array.