Saturday, November 5, 2011

Project dropped, heres the resource folder.

In addition to dropping Black Shadow 3d(contains resource files as well) I decided to drop this project too.  I'll be focusing what little time I have on a new project code named OCD using the Duke3d, also a Total Conversion, but with a sci-fi theme.

Here is the complete resource folder for The Crawl that was being developed in Evaldraw at the time.

I also have several versions made using Game Maker 6.1 which can be given or posted on request.  That version was just handling maps and some environmental effects.  First versions of the project generated polygons and simply used Direct 3d while a later version used a 3d plugin form GM 6.1 which I'm unsure if its still supported.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Future thoughts, new methods.

Lately I've been devoting my free time to work on my conversion of Black Shadow into a 3d voxel based game using the Build engine, or more specificly Eduke32.  The rendering method is still the original one though done by Ken.

Now working with build, I think the greatest revelation is been working with palettes and the CON scripting.  Its given be a bunch of possibly ideas for creating the engine for The Crawl once I finish Black Shadow.

I've learned quite a few things on how the build engine operates and handles actors, counting, and frame animations which can prove very useful in creating the engine for TC.

Currently the method I used to create the AI in previous demos left much to be desired in terms of flexibility.  However I got some experiencing working with A* pathfinding that also gave me some good ideas.  I may never actually use it and do something similar though.

Getting to the point, I'm not actually considering a scripting system for this, but a detailed editor and just saving the data as numbers to save space and memory.  I'll be basing it off how Ken developed the build script, just using byte data.

Another thing is I'll be planning to used a fixed palette like in 8bit, however the game would still operate in 16/32bit screen modes.  The idea would be, like the build engine, have a fixed palette so shading and color blending calculations are reduced to look-ups.  However instead of having a 256 color limit, it would be 1024, although I haven't decided on the amount of shade variations it should have.  I believe build used 8 points per shade, I could use 4 for smoother transition.

Anyway this is all speculations, but working with the Build engine has given me a good amount of ideas on what direction to take when creating The Crawl's engine and editing system.  I'd like to make the engine pretty flexible.  If possible I'd like to eventually create it all in GLBasic, but getting voxel rendering at the level of Build or Evaldraw in opengl is a challange.  Maybe theres something I can learn from the build source instead of working with evaldraw or voxlap. The benefit of using Glbasic is portability, as in I could have it accessibly to Linux, Mac, Mobile as well as windows systems.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Things on hold, what may planned in the future.

So it looks like this project will be on hold for a little while as I've gone into full speed developement of creating another voxel based project.  I'll be created a 3d version of my Black Shadow game.  Details will be posted on a new blog.

What does that mean for this project?  Well there were a number of setbacks from the beginning.  Although Evaldraw is perfect rendering wise, it's limited and wouldn't not make a very flexible engine to create this project.  This left me with two choices, use Voxlap or create my own rendering.

The latter is a challange in itself and I've attempted a few goes, but nothing close to being quick enough.

I had limited time to work on figuring out Voxlap's source code, but that may be a route I'll take in the future.

Another programmer was working on a voxel display engine, has started work on a GLBasic compatible DLL, but haven't heard any future results.  Last I saw it was displaying voxels, but it too had limits that would be too much for this project.

So in the mean time I'll still work on my Strip2Vox program for creating models for my voxel projects and plan on doing a Voxel To Poly for polygon alternatives.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Doom, or do it yourself.

It seems that voxels are starting to become a little more popular among the indie crowd, as I've seen some new activity in the creation of voxel engines and displays.

Lately I've been in contact with one such coder working on a voxel engine.  However it's more suited towards a different style of games instead of a FPS.  The limitations of sprite sizes will prevent me from being able to use it at its current state.  However I proposed to do a future project with it, geared towards a NES style to it, most likely adapting one of my other projects to the style...

There are some new options for progressing this project from it's current slumber.  Although I had iffy success getting the basics of Voxlap to work, and Evaldraw being not the ideal for creating a game such as this, I found that ZDoom has recently added a branch off project that supports voxel rendering.

What caught my attention was sample shots that some had of a wall and floor tile from Doom converted into a voxel object.  So I may be able to get what I need from it's open source code to figure out my own voxel sprite system.

My other choices are to go back to Voxlap, create my own voxel rendering system or find someone to create a basic voxel drawing chunk that I can incoorperate into my project from the Zdoom voxel project.

When I think about it, I may be stuck with trying to figure my own method of rendering...but time will tell.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

New directions = new engine?










Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Crawl RPG, game details continued, Kingdoms and climates.



Friday, July 30, 2010

Using old world map.



Here are three version of the map.

Here is the basic map.
