Hi Arivor,

Below are some useful links for you to get involved with flare. Most discussions happen in these areas.

• This Forum
• IRC: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=flarerpg
• IRC Archive: http://cinnamonroll.blogsite.org/irc/archive/2013/
• Flare website and blog: http://flarerpg.org/
• Flare engine issues: https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine/issues?state=open
• Flare game issues: https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-game/issues
• Wiki: https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine/wiki

 Ryan

Hi Arivor,

fellow german here: your english is great ;)
(or I am overlooking the typical german english errors)

The best way of contribution is generally to first find a topic which is most interesting for you, so you'll really love doing it.
We're most often discussing development either at the github site in the issues for a specific solution or via IRC these days.
(IRC: real time chat possible, github issues not so much)

You seem to be interested in maps specifically. Then I'd recommend to not look into the source code of flare, but rather in tileds source code. Flare rendering is highly optimized, see https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine/blob/master/src/MapRender... how to render one map layer for example. I tried to comment it, but most likely not enough.

The tiled source code is in my opinion better readable as it actually puts more emphasis on readability than performance.
The same code (rendering a map layer) is here https://github.com/bjorn/tiled/blob/master/src/libtiled/isometricrendere...

So maybe as a general note:
A map is tile based and structured in layers. A tile is a small picture, such as a certain are of the floor or a throne or a piece of the wall.
A map consists of multiple 2D layers which are drawn above each other. In flare that is the background layer and the object layer. Additionally there is a collision layer, which you can see in tiled, but not in flare. The collision layer just defines on which tiles the hero can walk, where are walls, where there are obstacles, but i.e. arrows can still fly there.

The background layer is put into the background such as the floor where the hero and enemies are walking on. The object layer is on the same 'height' as the hero and enemies, so you need to care about the rendering order, i.e. the hero standing in front or behind a wall makes a difference in the rendering order.

Specially for mapping and tilesets there is this

http://www.flarerpg.org/tutorials/isometric_intro/

https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine/wiki/Tile-Set-Definitions

The layers are read into an array when loading the map. The array or each layer can be altered at runtime of course.

For example have a look at the caves map east of the map with guill and ukonen. Once you enter the map, you are warned not to go south or the wall breaks down. If you go there however, both the collision layer (which you cannot see, but must be consistent to the visible layers) and the objects layer showing the walls change, so you need to find another way out.

If you want to checkout a tutorial on maps, please have a look at the devlab branch of my repository.
The devlab is a mod for flare to explain the flare engine and how it works to new contributors. It is however not yet completed and done. At my branch devlab however you find a decent amount of tutorial regarding maps and mapping in flare.

https://github.com/stefanbeller/flare-game/tree/devlab

I intend to get my devlab version merged after the upcoming release this weekend.