Strategies for making platformers

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Strategies for making platformers

Nate the Great(Posted 2012) [#1]
I have made several small platformers in the past and on every single one, I either used a physics engine (my own) or I just kept solving collision issues until they were all fixed. I don't want to use a physics engine for this project (it needs to be light weight) and I can't figure out a way to get player colliding with simple blocky terrain properly. Is there a good standard method for platforming collision detection or am I just going about this the wrong way? So far, I have tried box-box collisions for all nearby blocks and a point system where I had collision detection points all around the player but I had a hard time getting those to work right because the player would fall through jagged terrain, One of my problems is that the player is much larger than the blocks, about 3x as wide and 5x as tall.

In short: Is there a simple clean (standard?) way to do collision detection for platformers where the blocks are significantly smaller than the player? I will keep working on it but rewriting code to do the same thing 5 times is getting discouraging.


Jesse(Posted 2012) [#2]
guide to implementing 2d platformers.