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OMG a giant worm! Micro Miners iOS game.

Worms, Lemmings, Micro Miners…

A pixel based destructible ground is the kind of engine used in many popular games such as early appstore hit iShoot by Ethan Nicholas, Worms, or Lemmings. And also, since the 15th of November 2012, in my new iOS game Micro Miners. I started Micro Miners two years ago, after testing an amazing class called CCMutableTexture that was crafted and shared by the not less amazing Lam Pham. “2 years ago” means the source code provided here is based on cocos2d v1, but not too difficult to adapt to v2, I guess.

For this article, I’ve created a Xcode v4.5 + Cocos2d v1.01 project with a basic destructible ground engine. This is intended to be very simple starting point if you want to make your own game base on destructible grounds. But in any case this is a ready to use destructible ground engine.

I also recorded a short video of the project in action on the iPhone simulator. A quick way to see if this article could be of any interest to you.

Source code : https://github.com/jpsarda/Pixel-based-destructible-ground-with-Cocos2d-iPhone

1) GitHub project and video demo

Watch carefully the video below, it shows exactly what you get when you download, compile and run the demo project provided on GitHub.

2) The performance bottleneck

The engine is based on the CCMutableTexture class. Basically, a CCMutableTexture maintains an array of pixels value representing the texture. You can then quickly access and modify the pixels in this array. But once you’re done with the modifications, you have to apply them. The internal pixel array is then drawn on the actual texture. This step is the performance bottleneck of the destructible ground engine. Knowing this, all must be done to minimize the surface of the CCMutableTexture we draw on, and the number of times we call apply on the CCMutableTexture.

3) Minimizing the surface of the CCMutableTextures

This is achieved in 2 steps

1. 1 pixel on the texture will be rendered as a 2×2 square on the screen. In other words the displayed CCSprite associated to the texture is scaled by a factor of 2. The look is more pixelated but it’s still acceptable. For example, instead for applying our changes on a 320×480 texture, we will apply them on a 160×240 texture. This is 4 times less pixels to draw when we call apply on the CCMutableTexture.
2. If we use full screen textures, each time we move our finger on the screen to dig the ground, the full screen CCMutableTexture is modified and we must call apply on it. That’s a pity because only a small part of the screen is affected by our finger. To prevent this, the ground is splited in zones. In the project provided, we’ve splited the ground in 4 stripes (from top to bottom). When we dig the ground, only the affected zones are redrawn (you can see the affected grounds colorized in red while digging).

Finger digging in the middle of a ground zone, only 1 zone affected.

Finger digging at the border of 2 zones, 2 zones affected.

4) Minimizing the calls to apply

ccTouchesMoved, which is the method invoked when the user moves his finger on the screen, can be called at very high frequency. We can’t afford to call apply on the textures on every move. We solve this problem by introducing a minimum delay (0.5 seconds) to pass before taking into account a move of the finger. Illustrated with this peace of code in ccTouchesMoved :

if (now-lastDigTime>0.05f) {
    // determine affected zones ...
    // draw lines ...
    // apply changes ...
    lastDigTime=now;
}

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