Back to Roots: Exiting Dungeons And Trigger Handling
About two weeks ago, Fearyourself posted an update to the Back to Roots project websitestating that he was not yet finished with dungeons:
I had to tweak the engine a bit to get it to allow going in a dungeon room and back out. The difficulty was to explain to the engine that all characters must leave from the same place (if in a room and not a general combat) and where to go from there.
Of course, he posted a video of his progress in action:
In and out of a dungeon.
That same day, he was able to accomplish a bit more.
As you can see, objects and monsters are now loaded into the system. Objects are now added and we can get them and monsters now go to attack the players.
There is still a lot to do but I feel that it is advancing well and even better than I?d hoped.
And, again, a video:
Loading a dungeon room.
And with dungeons more or less working, he has moved on to something else!
I?ve moved forward on the trigger handling and am happy to show a new video handling them. I added the fact that you can move on a trigger or attack a cell with a trigger.
The video shows both types of triggers and how they work. As always, it requested a little bit of internal changes because I had considered only one animated object per cell but triggers actually allow multiple monsters on a given cell.
Said video:
Triggers!
As is always the case, I’m quite floored at the quick pace that Fearyourself is able to maintain in adding functionality and features to the Back to Roots engine.
The dungeons seem almost fully implemented. Just the chirp of the water fountain and it’s complete.
What would a two-color template of the dungeon look like? A “chess board” type layout of each wall/ceiling/floor tile position in 3D? It would be cool to render terrain/walls using a scaled billboard type system like in After Burner. Imagine Ultima Underworld rendering moldy stones and hot lava using billboards for the tunnels as you moved around freely.
Still a lot to do for the dungeons to be really done but we’re getting there 😉
I don’t quite understand your question though. The way the game was done is to have a cell type value in 2D and then just render it using the pre-3d-rendered elements and render it actually in 2d.
Jc
That’s how I thought it was rendered. What I was wondering was what a template for the 3D perspective would look like. Instead of using the actual dungeon graphics it would be alternating solid colors for each tile in the faux 3D perspective. I suppose something like that could be produced in OpenGL pretty easily, I’ll have to look into it.
As far as the After Burner thing, imagine the 3D perspective was being drawn in 3D with a projection matrix and all. Each wall face would be composed of a regular grid of points (internally, not visually), let’s say 8×8 points. A billboard representing the wall surface type would be drawn at each of these 64 points for each wall face. Movement could still be one tile at a time, but your position and orientation between each move could be interpolated over multiple frames so it appeared smooth as in The Bard’s Tale. You’d have to render from the background to the foreground and might have to sort the points by their distance from the camera first. I don’t think it’s ever been done, and imagine it would look pretty cool.
Just to inject something into this…I said I’d find a link to how EUO does its 3D, and thus, here’s a sample image.
The effect is almost Minecraft-ian in nature.
That is awesome. Very much how I envisioned it looking using something like Wolfenstein 3D’s engine. Now if only that client could be played FPS-style, we’d really have something crazy.
It is pretty cool, I have to agree. Once I get most functionnalities done, I can’t wait to go a bit more complicated and add features :-). What I’ve seen from VAGUE or EUO are really interesting and I believe they’ll add to playability.
Jc