Cleaning up and moving forward.

I did a little housework on the project today, I finally decided to go with the legacy texture mode because I can fake nearly all the things I can do with the advanced render mode, get a better framerate and be sure that almost anyone can run the game, even if they're using windows XP on a 5 year old laptop.

I went through all the currently added monsters and optimized them for the single texture rendering environment. That means they're not going to have any flashy stuff like normal maps, but to be honest, the characters are so small you couldn't see the results anyway.

Here's a shot of some of the monsters, the Undead:

The green guys are specters, they can walk through walls. The zombies and skeletons are parts, I'll be mixing and matching heads, bodies, skeletal limbs and armor to create a whole bunch of different possible undead creations.

As you can see, they look fine, with just a diffuse texture, anything else would be overkill.

Here's what they might look like with random bodyparts:

I also worked on some code concepts for swimming and jumping. I moved the water level up in the tileset I've been testing so that I'll be able to try it out soon and see how it works. if you can't find a bridge, or an alternative way round, it may be possible to swim across a flooded area, but you're going to risk ruining your items. Of course you could leave most of your gear behind and go skinny dipping, but what if there's a monster hiding in that room on the other side?

I want to add a lot of exploration type movement to the game, so you can climb down pits of you have a rope, or jump over a section of collapsed flooring, or swim down a flooded corridor to see if there's any interesting gear at the other end. I'm working on all the different types of movement now so I can be sure to be able to create interesting tilesets and dungeon generation rules to allow the player to use them.

I found some old portraits to use for testing from the old Neverwinter Nights forum. I'll get some proper ones in future, but for now they just need to work for testing and keeping track of the players.

Here's what I'll be using for alpha testing. Anyone who ever played the original NWNs will probably recognize a few. The bottom row are going to be potential NPCs.

If anyone knows someone who is good at 2d portraits or knows a good selection of free, non-copyrighted portraits I can use, please tell me.

Comments

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra...

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.

Video Diary 8

Things are moving along well, there's been a lot of progress on the action manager side of things. Actions have finally moved to the UI, so you can initiate actions by clicking the appropriate button. I've set up some dummy actions to show what happens visually when actions are taken, but the actual dice rolls and such are yet to be integrated. The UI objects are also being added, though some are non functional or empty at the moment. Click on the image to see this week's development video. Every time I add something big I also add about a dozen small things. Like the selection box visualization. Previously this was using render.drawline, and old fashioned Blender function which can be impossible to see at certain resolutions, or at certain frequencies. I replaced it with a function that adds planes of the right size and scale in the right location. I also made all characters a little bigger. I still need to do some work with vectors and final target locations t...

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