Using Lodev.org’s raycasting tutorial as a reference, I’ve -finally- began developing my own raycasting engine. This seems to be the best course, I’ve gotten comfortable with GLBasic and its ability to churn out multi-platform ports, and its graphic features are a big reason why I was able to do this.
Using 2d textured polygons I can easily render ray stripes with having to micromange texture data like in days of old. A few tricks with using them greatly increased the ability to render sprites compared to the original method found on the tutorial, however to give credit the tutorial is based on software rendering, where my method marries traditional raycasting with opengl rendering.
This opens up lots of possibilities as I can alter colors smoothly and easily. Lighting is featured in the demo video, but its nowhere accurate right now. The best thing is that it renders quickly.
Right now sprites are not sorted, nor is the zbuffer properly configured. Sprites are all camera facing at the moment.
Currently I’m limiting voxel size to 64 cubed, and there will be no looking up or down, it will be classic wolfenstein/dungeon crawler movement.
So this is good news in keeping The Crawl project alive, although its been frozen for awhile, I can now move away from Evaldraw and make my own engine.
Everying prior was based off a max of 64x64x64 sized voxels, with a few exceptions like the cave entrance.
Currently I haven’t emplemented floor rendering, but thats not very important. In fact the wall rendering in the video is trivial as the original engine concept in Evaldraw was entirely object based, every wall and floor piece was an object.
Other possibilties with making my own engine is that voxel destruction may be even easier to do.
Voxel models will be based of a strip of sprites. Much like how minecraft stores all its textures, but in just one row.
This will allow for these images to easily be altered and copied in real time without the slow method of scanning through a voxel matrix like in the traditional methods.
This will also make content creation very easy as you will only need image strips in place of voxel models, which are far smaller.
So look forward to some more updates to The Crawl RPG game maker. Once I get more engine work done, I’ll begin working on the complete editing suite for the RPG maker. I will try and keep things customizable so that you can either create futuristic or fantasy settings.
Think Fallout3/Skyrim, if it was made in 1991, with the Catacomb engine.
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