next »

[nunix]

So let's say you're wanting to make something like Wizardy, The Bard's Tale, or the like; something very much like what Mr. Silva is doing right now. Let's also say that you'd like your levels to be both proceedurally generated, and deformable: imagine exploring a Nethack level from first-person rather than top-down, essentially. It's also not going to be real-time, so you need the engine to be able to pop up a turn- and menu-based combat interface on occasion. To top it all off, whilst you're pretty comfortable with scripting, the idea of coding up the 3d dungeon environment makes you cry and question your fitness to live.

Also, you want this to be natively cross-platform if at all possible, but at least playable in OSX, which rules out Game Maker (for now).

So.. where would one turn to for this? Unity seems simultaneously excessively powerful for the need (specifically the 3D environment) and also ill-suited (in the turn-based movement and RPG department). Game Maker, as mentioned, is Windows-only at the moment. I've found ZERO examples of this kind of game in scripting language game sites like pygame. I feel like the dungeon display/environment is the big stumbling block here and I'm just not sure what to do. =/

[zacaj]

You might want to look into ray casting(think wolfenstein).  Its actually pretty simple(My first game was one), and there was a really good tutorial around that now I cant seem to find.  Itd be good for simple 3d in a dungeon, as long as you dont have ramps or anything. (one level, just wall/not wall for level storage)

[Ivan]

Yeah, simple raycasting is very simple to do, so I would look into that. You could do it in flash very easily. Just google for raycasting tutorials, there's tons out there. If that doesn't excite you, you can try doing it with static images. I think oryx had a system for his first person tiles that explains how that would work.

[hatu]

With Flash you're going to run into performance problems very easily with 3D.

I don't think Unity would be 'too powerful' for something like that. It's probably your best bet since you can skip the whole 3D stuff and start straight from the turn-based combat and movement.

[Ivan]

Raycasting is not really 3d, and it will run fine in flash if done correctly. I mean, doom, heretic and hexen run in flash. Granted, they're probably compiled with Alchemy, but still, raycasting can be done very fast even in native AS3 code as long as you render to a bitmap.

[Hajo]

Dungeon Master and it's relatives did it well. They used a 90° geometry though, but that would fit nicely to roguelike dungeons as you mentioned them.

An example of a project idea:
http://forums.rpgdx.net/viewtopic.php?t=2262

I had also started to make a rendering framework like Mattias, but so far other things seemed more interesting to me, so it rests most of the time ... but if I had to, I'd do it this way.

[nunix]

Yeah, 90* turns are the kind of action I'm talking about..

The really great thing in that link is the random stuff on the walls and floors; shelves, barrels, moose head.. I don't know if I've seen another first-person crawler with that kind of detail, so thanks for the link, Hajo, as it's definitely something for me to think about. =D

[Average Software]

Yeah, 90* turns are the kind of action I'm talking about..

The really great thing in that link is the random stuff on the walls and floors; shelves, barrels, moose head.. I don't know if I've seen another first-person crawler with that kind of detail, so thanks for the link, Hajo, as it's definitely something for me to think about. =D

I wrote a C++ OpenGL engine for just this sort of thing, step based 3D dungeons.  I wrote it several years ago, and I'm actually very ashamed of the code now, but if you want to try it out, you can download it here.  It requires a bit of OpenGL knowledge to use effectively.

I intend to rewrite it someday and make it not so embarrassing, as well as provide an Ada interface to it.  It should be much nicer to use then.