How to: Rooms that loop back around on each other?

[DanLindeman]

Hi there! I've been enjoying the plugin and I'm wondering how you might approach this design. I'd like a set of rooms to loop back onto themselves to make a sort of "Lost Woods" area. What approach would you take, for example, in order for the outer rooms oriented like this to be connected to each other?

I've been looking at the MetSys.room_changed signal as well as experimenting with an Area2D that calls await Game.get_singleton().load_room(target_map) similar to what the elevator does in the sample project, but I think that's not the best solution since the player position doesn't get updated automatically like it does with linked rooms.

Thanks again for the plugin, it is really useful!

[KoBeWi]

You can override _load_map() method and make it return a different room. The system should be able to automatically resolve position.

It sounds like something I could add to sample project I guess.

[DanLindeman]

I've been trying to work on a _load_map() approach but not having much luck. I've tried to adapt the approach taken in generate_rooms() from the sample Dice.tscn but I keep running into issues where there is already a room allocated when I use builder.create_cell(n_coords).

Another approach I took is to get the current room coordinates and then insert a cell from elsewhere into the neighboring coordinates using MetSys.map_data.insert_cell_at(n_coords, n_cell). That looks like it will load the target room, but the character seems to get booted out of the new cell on transition. You can see on the map the purple or green rooms do get updated in the map view and the scene is loaded correctly, but the player character doesn't seem to pick up the new room.

Maybe I'm approaching this the wrong way -- the smallest example would be to make an exit from one cell go to another cell that is not directly neighboring it in MetSys, like this:

[KoBeWi]

Ok, it turned out more complex than just overriding _load_map() xd
There are 2 types of loops:

• Loop when going outside map.
• Loop when going to a different room.

They have to be handled differently.

In 2f2e199 I added an example of looping rooms (LoopRoom1-3). It's not perfect though, to make it work without any jank it'd require to modify some MetSys methods. That should be customized for the game's needs, not sure how much a dedicated general system for that would be useful.

EDIT:
Also wiki section:
https://github.com/KoBeWi/Metroidvania-System/wiki/Specific-Rooms#loop-room---rooms-looping-in-unexpected-ways

[DanLindeman]

Your example was extremely helpful, thank you so much for putting that demo together.

I have looping rooms working now (I even did some vertically!) and at this point in time I think I'm sorting out some game-specific logic. Thanks again for the work you put in to help me -- I'm working on a game for Metroidvania Month and MetSys has been immensely helpful.

The game takes place on the surface of a cube, the transitions might not make complete sense right now, but the map looks like this and the room teleports function.