# Non tile engine platformers

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/non-tile-engine-platformers/268432>\
**Category:** programming\
**Created:** [August 13, 2008, 7:51pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/non-tile-engine-platformers/268432 "2008-08-13T19:51:36Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![snottlebocket](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8baadc/32.png) [@snottlebocket](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/snottlebocket)\
**Post date:** [August 13, 2008, 7:51pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/non-tile-engine-platformers/268432/1 "2008-08-13T19:51:36Z")

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Hey guys,

I’m just doing some ‘research’ out of curiosity. I was just playing around with Tonypa’s tile engine tutorials the other day, applying them in AS3 when I started looking around at some of the platformers out there.

I have a fair understanding of all the simple platform functioning like the basic ‘if your y-position is beyond the floor, reset your position to the floor’ kind of stuff and straight up ‘you can’t walk on this tile kind of stuff’.

I’ve also noticed there’s a few platformers out there that use a decidedly non tile based way of checking character-platform collisions. Most notably the amazing mr fancy pants game. ([http://armorgames.com/play/553/the-fancy-pants-adventure-world-2](http://armorgames.com/play/553/the-fancy-pants-adventure-world-2))

I was wondering if anyone knows how games like this work out their platform collisions. I know that games like for example the recent super mario galaxy let’s Mario run around all kinds of funky shapes by aligning Mario perpendicular against the face of a 3d object he’s standing on by using vector normals.

My best guess is that fancy pants is based on a similar system using vector normals. Still that’s just a guess and I’d love to know more if there’s anyone here with a better understanding it. Fancy pants is such an amazingly smooth polished ride that even if it is based on vector normals it’s only the beginning of a lot of very neat programming. (and so smoothly running in flash too!)