Session 4
The time had finally come to start piecing the tiles together. Using the new user control created in the last session I removed the existing user control from the designer and created a method on the form load to create a 10 x 10 grid of ASCIITilePanel controls. Each of the new controls is then setup to point at the required file and given a unique ID.
The goal was to load an entire two letter tile set into the application which will give coverage of 100km squared. With that in mind I moved all the location details into a settings file so that if the project or data move then it is all relative and added some code to enable the two letter grid reference to be entered. For the present time I am staying with SU to keep things simple.
After that was completed I started loading the data to ensure it was all appearing in the correct position. I soon noticed that things didn't look quite right. After a few minutes of investigation I remembered that the tile data starts in the bottom left but realised when I create the image of the terrain for display I was using the top left. To remedy this I simply rotated the image 90 degrees and this solved the issue. However, the tiles now looked correct north to south but east to west the tiles were not lining up. My decision to use an area of terrain I recognised paid off when I saw that the tiles were in the wrong order. Instead of displaying left to right they should be right to left. After fixing the bug I reloaded the data and was presented with a pretty cool looking visualisation of Southampton water and the east of the New Forest.
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| Multiple tile display |
A couple of things I noticed from the image was that at the higher points of the terrain I was getting black spots so will need to think about the range of the colour picker algorithm. The other alteration I made was to store the bitmap image offline. The code then checks when the data is loaded to see if a bitmap exists for the tile and loads the bitmap rather than generate the image from scratch. This prevents the application from regenerating data each time it is run.
Session 4 finally gave me a bit a of a geek buzz and to see the image presented really got me excited for the following 3 sessions. The next session will be a clean up of the code and I will start to think about how to deal with the data as a whole before passing it to the A* algorithm. The main task will be to look at how I can improve the terrain class that holds the tiles so that I can pick points out and do some whole data operations.
