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CDXTile Engine

Preliminary - 09/13/99

Welcome to the CDXTile Engine development site.

What is CDXTile Engine ?

CDXTile Engine (CTE) is a complex library, yet easy to use and have a lot of features, designed especially for creating tile-based game.

Disclaimer/License

CTE is based on CDX and like CDX, you can use CTE for FREE! There are no royalty or whatever to use CTE. You can even sell the game you made with CTE and I wouldn't charge you for a single cent nor I will force you to give me a credit for the game. As long as the CDX free, you can be sure that CTE will also be free. You can take that last sentence as my promise.

You can use the source code to modify and extend CTE to support your game project or any other project. You then can distribute and make a commercial benefit from the game, but you are not allowed to distribute any of CTE components directly (without being integrated with your project) for any commercial purpose.

By using CTE, the author (that's me) disclaim any responsibility for any damage or lost that caused by CTE.

Preliminary Version

Currently the engine is still under heavy development. I release the engine as preliminary version so everyone can see the design concept behind the engine.

I believe that two brains would make a better engine than one. So, I will follow the CDX path and make the engine to be open source. Anyone who wanted to add more functionality to the engine would be very welcome!

The design concept of the engine is very open. If you have a better idea for designing the engine, please let me know. I would be very grateful for that. My target is to make the engine to be helpful for anyone who wanted to make tile based games. And, to be able to do that, I would need a lot of support from everyone.

If you think that the engine is useful and you want to use it for your project. I recommend you to wait until version 1.0 released. Before that, the engine will be in a very unstable state. Any interface (function, class or variable name), design or even data type can be changed very quickly. And, don't forget about bugs which I believed there are many of them since I haven't test it yet.

Version 1.0 Features

I will not release version 1.0 until I have made all the features below available. You can think these features as the target that should be achieved to finish version 1.0. Of course, by the time the version 1.0 released, I'm hoping that there wouldn't any bug left un-squashed and the design already solid.

Here are the features (or limitation if you preferred) for version 1.0:

	Support many mayor compiler, but for this version, I'm targeting to support Visual C++ first. Sorry about that, but currently I'm using many VC specific routines for the engine's internal code. In the next version, I will replace them, but currently I used them to speed up the development.
	Easy to use and have flexibility to be extended (ex: by using inheritance, callback).
	Support multi-layering map. You can create as many layers as you like, and each layer can have different attribute (tile dimension, wrap, etc).
	Support any kind of tile size (you can use different tile size for different layer).
	Support many kind viewer, but only one will be available for this version, that is CDXTileIsoViewer for isometric view (you can use different viewer for different layer, ex: using FastParallaxViewer for layer 0, IsoViewer for layer 1 and NormalViewer for layer 2 (for floating object, like cloud or gas). I separate the viewer from the engine for modularity and to divide a single and complex class into several and manageable classes.
	Support many kind of file manager to save and load data map, but only one will be available for this version. With this file manager, you can save and load the engine with it's resources to a text file containing script that can be easily modified using text editor.
	Easy resources managing with CDXTileManager. This one is cool! I think!
	You can easily add sprite for each layer. Sprite will always be located on a layer, so you can have a bird on sky layer, fish on ground layer and human on object layer.
	Support for tile and sprite that have different size with the tilesize. This mean, you can create a very big sprite or tile (maybe 100x100 pixels) in a layer with tilesize only 16x16.
	Collision detection system for every sprite and tile.
	Support for user specific data. You can also save and load the data using the file manager.
	Support tile animation, tile stacking, smooth scrolling, transparency and alpha blitting for tile and sprite.
	Support to adjust viewport.
	Support for depth (or height). Each tile and sprite may have height. And when combined with tile stacking, you can stack a tile, (maybe a brick) to create a high wall, or create mountain and elevation for the ground.
	Debugging support, like notification for error.
	Adjust how the Engine and its component work by setting their capability bits. Might be useful for performance tuning or efficiency in memory usage.

More features will be added to this list later. Hopefully I don't have to remove one.

Current Version

CTE (432kb)	Download all. Include CTELib and CTEDemo.
CTELib (246kb)	Preliminary - 09/13/99. Engine, source code, help, tutorials.
CTEDemo (156kb)	Preliminary - 10/30/99. A simple demo using the engine. Complete with source code.

Previous Version

CTEDemo1 (51kb)

Preliminary - 09/13/99. A simple demo using the engine. EXE only.

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