planet romero

Okay, so this week I’ve been doing lots of maths, and finally cracked how to calculate – using simultaneous equations – how to find the intersection of two parametric lines.

That has enabled me to figure out how to render at least vertical walls. My problem left is figuring out how to do texture mapped floors and ceilings.

I looked up “flats” for the DOOM iD-1 engine, but don’t fully understand it, plus it seems over-kill for what I am aiming for. The idea is to make a Wolf3D engine but with arbitrary walls(which poses no problem to me), and to have the same floor and ceiling throughout a level(map or stage, whatever) – similar to the fact that Wolf3D uses the colour grey to represent a floor or ceiling!

So I am going to make it as simple as I can get it – split the screen into two rectangles, one for the top half of the screen to represent the ceiling, and one for the floor.

Now, for perspective, I noticed in the C64 version of Space Harrier, the block rows(representing the game world floor) towards the horizon are thinner than the block rows coming towards the player: This is obvious as objects appear smaller in the distance, but larger close up. So that’s a task for the vertical side of rendering…

Not quite sure how to go about the actual mapping of the floor texture itself – short of going all out on a polygon rendering fucntion! I think what I can do, though is maybe plot lines and clip them to the rectangles. I would be creating a grid for the game world anyway, so the only thing I would have to map to the view is the points of each square tile of the floor, and can go for either a mirroring option for the ceiling(just flip the floor) or can go for an open sky option with wrap-around horizontal texturing.

I would prefer a textured floor though! ^_^

Anyway, first thing I need to do is create a maths engine in Java. Once I have finished that I’ll move on to a level creation tool for plotting lines, which I had done before in C++ but didn’t have the level of maths knowledge to make it usable(which I now have! Hurrah!). Really excited about this project as it’s been bugging me for almost a decade…

Some might wonder why I am going through the pain of writing a 3D engine in software, when an API can do all the donkey work for me. Well, I simply want to increase my maths and programming knowledge. Its the challenge, and the reward of knowing that I can create a “living” 3D world from scratch and without the aid of APIs(although they can do faster, more efficiently, and even better).

Still, I’m going to make a first test game that’s slightly more advanced than wolf3D and then maybe have a crack at a full polygon engine afterwards. I just needed to “talk” about this little project as it really means a lot to me. I think I have a weeks holiday in April(better check with them at work!), so that’s when I will bang out the first test demo and post it here.

(sorry for the long winded post!) ^_^

I look forward to seeing what you’re working on. You’ve discovered something I’ve been passionate about for a long time. It’s pretty addicting and very time consuming isn’t it? It can drive you mad and burn you out though. Try to keep things fun. Maybe one day you’ll have an actual game to show for all your work. I tell ya it isn’t easy to make an engine and a game for it. I wish you luck. I have my own software 3d renderer which hasn’t seen a game yet. I have some cool tech demo type stuff to show for it though. Pm me if you want. I’d love to chat with you.

Other thoughts at the moment: 3D Applications(Max, Maya, Lightwave etc)..

I’ve used 3D software for a long time now, and the applications I’ve used have been TrueSpace, Real3D, Maya, Max, Blender and Silo. Created contest entries, animations and countless tests.

However, apart from Silo, they have all annoyed me. They usually are great at doing one 3D pipeline task, but suck at another. Or maybe the whole package is great at everything, but let down by either bugs or a bad interface. And if none of the above, then they’ll sure as hell get you on the price: price tags are rarely in the hundreds but most assuredly in the thousands of dollars(or pounds sterling! Oo-er!).

But anyway, I’ve always been happy with most programs in the model creation department. Even Blender will give you good enough tools to produce a fantastic 3D model. For me, I found Silo(Nevercenter) to be the best poly-modeller on the market, but these days any package is more than enough to deal with modelling.

What has annoyed me is when it comes to the 3D animation stage. Its such a complex process as you have the issue of creating rigs for the model as well as animating it. If anything needed to be simplified, its the animation tools!

Maya was built for animation, and it does a fairly good job. But going further, I found Messiah to be even better. It ditches the Modelling tools and deals only in animation and rendering. And so long as there are no bugs, it works a treat.

My friends believe the “pipeline” should never be broken, due to compatibility, but I am finding dedicated programs that focus only on one or two parts of the pipeline to a better solution.

Okay, I’m going to start a new reply to break this up…

…continued…yawn…

so anyway, a game like Doom 3 or Half life 2 etc relies on a very dynamic and changing world. This applies to the animated 3D characters in the game where weapons have to be swapped over and with so many different characters with different animations carrying so many different objects, Skeleton tech is the only way to go. You cant use pre-created meshes for everything…it just wont do at all, as you’ll run out of storage in memory or reasonable hard disk space…

So going back, I found that the old FreeScape games(Castle Master, Driller etc) to be a more practical solution. Using the smooth controls from my “Resident-Doom” demo and some well placed animations, chuck in some alpha blending etc…I could make a nice little game. I will do that after my DOOM-FPA(“First Person Adventure” and boy I really look forward to it! The only challenge on that one will be coding a software renderer for displaying texture mapped polygons.

But I’ve gone off track for a moment. DOH!

One of the things that really pisses me off in 3D applications is how they import/export rigs and animation. Where 3D models are easy enough with the standard and easy to understand .Obj or .3ds files, animations are anything but standard nor easy to understand…

So, in the end, I will have to write a skeleton animation system for my demos anyway. I may as well just write an animation tool and be done with it! If I could pull that off, I would be free of waiting for the perfect 3D application to be written or updated by someone else.

Its really amazing how powerful the art of maths and programming can be!

Well, sorry about the very long posts I’ve made this morning, but its given me a chance to look at where I really want to be going. I really must get back to that Dungeon Master clone I’m working on… -_-

Cheers bro!

So looking at things again, last night, I’m starting to wonder if Dungeon Master ever did use anything like Ray-Casting/Floor-casting for it’s 3D. Was it all sprite based with clever placement or maybe a hint of scaling…at the moment I really haven’t a clue. I don’t even know what that kind of 3D rendering is called!

Eye Of The Beholder was a bit of a 50/50 affair with me, but I have a few RPG books lying around and would like to do a quick Star Wars/KOTOR game instead of the usual “Arm yourself with your table cloth and sandals” D&D kind of thing

I don’t actually play these D&D games for real as they seem a bit…”nerdy”. Sitting there with dice, spouting off stats, quoting the manuals…and playing with “little men” on a game board…nah, that’s just the sort of behaviour that gets you beaten up by alpha males and disgusted looks from sexy hot’n'stunning females. I confess to playing Space Crusade, Hero Quest and Warhammer 40K back in my teens, but that’s as far as I went…

So why do I own an RPG or two? Well, I think they are best suited to being played out on a computer! Rolling dice, pissing about looking in the rules and updating the game board…it’s such a complex and cumbersome effort for a board game. A computer will perform a turn in under a mere second.

Also, D&D is also about building worlds from scratch, and so one could spend more time creating art to help visualise a campaign and it’s different elements such as characters, locations, items etc. So once one had translated the rules into a game engine, its then up to the programmer to then indulge in their artistic side! Hurrah!

Looking back, my first game was a DOS-style command line game(back in 2000! Fack me!) written in C based on Bubblegum Crisis RPG, by R.Talsorian games. Although after that I moved on to more graphically awesome shoot-em-ups, it was the only game I honestly enjoyed creating. Working on the story line, battle engine, cutscenes and general roleplay mechanics…it really was the most rewarding experience I have ever had in programming or gaming. It was nothing less than art.

I could write a follow up game very quickly in a 2D point’n'click interface, but I dunno. I’d do an original story and world this time, as the previous BGC game was too crude to be played by anyone but me(it was commandline!). It would be nice to include some 3D bits, or possibly implement an overhead version of DOOM in a resident evil style? Hmmm?

Damn, decisions-decisions! o_O