That's an interesting idea, somewhere inbetween my current method and my proposed new method.

In essence, it's combining floor and ceiling blocks, so that stairs only have to ascend 2 block heights, which would be an improvement.

The only negatives are that :
-  it would make it harder to do rooms with ledges and trenches, which I'm drawn to having now.

- the floor blocks would need both floor and ceiling textures for their upper and lower surfaces, which means having two pieces of data per block. At the moment I'm just defining a floor and ceiling texture for each level, and a block takes whatever texture is appropriate for that level.

At the moment the rooms are single height, because each level is defined 2-dimensionally. That's just how I've made the engine.

But I've been thinking, with block based design, I could consider having rooms be built 3 dimensionally by stacking blocks on top of each other. That would allow ledges and trenches to be made ~ creating places you can see but can't necessarily get to.

It's a bit more work sorting out falling from ledges, and collisions with stalactites/stalagmites, but I feel it would make a better engine.

My only concern is how stairs would be affected... At the moment, the floor and ceiling are essentially wafer thin sheets, meaning that stairs only have to ascend one block height to get up to the next floor.

But with 3D block based design, stairs would have to ascend one block height to get into the ceiling space, another block height to get into the floor space of the room above, and another block height to get into the room itself. = 3 block heights.

Yes it is generated by a video game name generator.

It's basically a maze game + keys and doors + a little FPS action.

The mansion spans several floors, and the player will have to find stairs to move between them.  I want each floor to look different.

The keys can be randomly placed to make the game different each time it is played, even though the mansion remains the same.

There will be bears of course, but I want some other things in there as well which respawn.

[Features Implemented:]

After seeing Notch's Ludum-Dare entry last week where he made a first person dungeon game in 48 60 hours, I thought I'd like to make a 3D game of my own.
 
I've never been fond of 3D, but Prelude of the Chambered showed me that I can find  pleasure in simplicity, and that it's okay to make dungeons chunky and pixelated. Furthermore, my opengl skills have gotten to a point where a simple rectilinear dungeon would be quite easy for me to build.

So over the weekend I've put together the basics of a game engine.


A room showing smooth depth attenuated lighting.


Crouching and looking up.


Looking down at decal on floor surface.

Features Implemented:
- Chunky walls. Block based level design. Lots of different block types possible.

- Use of textures. Currently using 64x64 textures. I drew them all myself.

- Use of decals to add extra detail to surfaces. (eg, yellow spots on the floor)

- Smooth Light Attenuation. Things smoothly fade to black with distance. The viewing distance is controllable. I intend for the player to collect lamps to improve visibility.

- Similar controls to Quake. Cursor keys to move. Alt to strafe. Camera can pivot up and down with keys A + Z. Character can crouch using C, and jump using X. Space-bar will operate whatever is infront of the character.

- Camera bobs smoothly as the player character walks.

- Acceleration based movement. The character takes a little time to get up to speed or to stop.

- Collision detection with walls is done.


Not bad progress for 3 days I think

- Whether you use low res / high res textures makes no difference to the engine.

- For raycasting you'll have to program a routine to render the image from the game data. This has harder maths, and is generally more difficult to understand, but level design is easier because you only need to think in 2 dimensions.

- For polygonal 3D you can use opengl, which does the hard work for you. This has easier maths, and is easier to understand, but the level design is harder, because you need to think in 3 dimensions.

Overall, one isn't easier than the other.

They died for a while after Doom was released and everyone was wetting their pants about first person shooters and shit.

QFT.

In the mid 1990s, 3D was the new and fashionable medium, and that's never really faded. Raycasters got better with each incarnation, then supplanted by polygonal 3D, then with dynamic lighting, then with shadow mapping, then with pixel shaders... 3D has been a rollercoaster ride that's never really ended.

One day it may lose momentum, and who knows what direction gaming will take when that happens.

I've always considered game development to be part of the entertainment industry, and as such the mood that should carry it forward is feelings of fun and excitement. So the music I prefer to listen to is something uplifting with a solid rhythm. ie, euro-80s, Hi-NRG, and italo-disco. It has the tempo and all the cheerfulness of disco, but with more synthesizers and sample keyboards.

That fits my personality too, as I do tend to get excited about things, as well as being inclined to put fun in everything I do.

During coding today, I was listening to this.

What's the big deal if the game falls behind where it 'should be'? If a pop-up comes up in the middle of your game, you lose place in your game anyway. Either way, the problem is remedied with frame-independent time steps.

Frame independent time steps are crucial in multiplayer games, or if you need a replay function. The problem with it is that there is an indefinite number of time steps per frame. So even if the frame rate is steady, the physics rate can be jerky.

For an analogy think of line algorithms.



Imagine stepping in x is a time step, and stepping in y is a redraw. You want as smooth a line as possible, and you can use line algorithms to do exactly that

IRC timeGetTime() doesn't have high resolution. Windows only updates it once per 16ms I think, meaning you'll get a maximum FPS of 64fps if you're using it to trigger a redraw.

So if the game loop fails to complete in 16ms, it'll be knocked back to two ticks, which is a slightly jerky 32fps. Most likely - you get a delay that alternates between 16ms and 32ms.

That's probably because the internet only came about post-1988. All the original articles will be in old books in old libraries. Some of the research may be classified too as it has implications for code breaking.

Try searching for the acronym;

http://www.google.com/search?q=ecrng

It comes from a branch of mathematics called elliptic curves.

It's a pretty deep subject, and it was all the rage in the 1960/70s.

If you want to give it a name, it's an elliptic curve pseudorandom number generator.


What are elliptic curves you ask?


The number systems we use are characterised by two operators: addition and multiplication. And these two operators make sense and behave nicely. Numbers are nicely structured additively and multiplicatively.

In mathematics we call such number systems Rings.

Well it was discovered that there is actually another operation through which numbers behave nicely, but it is extremely complicated and arcane.

Imagine if all you ever knew was addition. Imagine trying to live without knowledge of multiplication. Imagine how flat the world would feel, and how impossible some things would be. Then one day you discovered multiplication - that would be a major discovery, yes? Your understanding of quantity would be dramatically changed.

Elliptic curves are exactly like that! Discovering them is as eye opening as the discovery of multiplication.

Wouldn't that be great?

Imagine this: the story is that some British gentleman ran out of tea, and the store is all out

I say old boy, during the war you couldn't buy tea. All you could get was rooibas, which looked like tea but it didn't taste like it.

And we British won a war drinking this roobias. Now what does that tell you about our spirit? Our fortitude? Our stiff upper lip?

^ especially when the wall of text is quoted just to reply with

o_O

 or

lol

or

tl;dr

Online school's automatically graded assessments. I dropped a whole letter grade because I was being more precise with my answers ("x = 10" when they were looking for "10"). 

I've never heard of automatic grading.

In mathematics I was always taught to write "x=10", and that "10" isn't a proper answer.

In physics, we always had to add units too. eg, "M=1.5 kilograms". Writing "M=1.5" isn't a proper answer, because it doesn't have units. It could mean 1.5 grams, or 1.5 tonnes, or 1.5 oz, or 1.5 cwt, or 1.5 drachms, or anything else.

december

I was unable to finish in time, and I don't have time today to work on it.

I shall still finish my game though, just that it won't be an LD entry.

Making good progress.

This has surely got to be one of the fastest RPGs ever made!

Have yet to implement damage and make HP work, but that's all just equations which won't take very much time.

Didn't sleep very well; brain was too busy thinking of procedures. 

When you get started programming, the way you write and structure your code is probably going to be pretty messy and difficult to manage. The more code you write like that, the MORE difficult it becomes, because messy code has to interact with messy code, and it keeps getting messier and messier until you pull all your hair out and die : \

This is really true... maybe not the dying part. I've sometimes compared code mess with exponential growth.

Law 1. Code will only get messier over time
Law 2. The rate at which it becomes messier is proportional to how messy it is at the moment.