Atlas, wheres my atlas...

Well Tombstone can now use atlas image sheets for the games we create this may not sound amazing but it has allowed me to compress over one hundred images into four atlas sheets. Now we have the sheets the game looks amazing (with Emm's guiding graphical hand :) ) I cant wait to see the final build of the game and once its all together we should be able to do anything with the engine.

To this end I have changed the sprite grabbing routing in Tombstone so it can grab a sprite sheet from any location on an texture using a fixed width and height this function is extensively used to grab bitmapped fonts and fixed size graphics. There is nothing spectacular about the font selection on the iPhone so making bitmapped fonts and using them in the game is the best way to use anything you want in the game engine. Now we have the new command in place I can have several fonts on one texture and grab anyone I require when I need it.

Tombstone is still shaping up to be something special and I am still looking at the 3d side of things but the current game that we are working on takes precedence over this at the moment once thats shipped we should be able to look at our other sections of engine and get that started. I am itching to get the Win32/OSX and Linux builds going so we can have an engine that is cross platform and allows us to write amazing games on any platform we wish but as with a good wine everything takes time and open the wine to early and it wont taste half as sweet ;)

More soon...