Back to Roots: Dungeon Combat and Musings
Fearyourself has posted another update (with video, of course) to the Back to Roots website, detailing his latest progress:
I finally got the time to work on backtoroots again and moved forward on an important issue: how to generate a combat map that includes surrounding architecture.
What I mean by this is the fact that I actually do look around the group and generate walls where needed.
…I’ve played around in most of the dungeons and I think I’ve got most issues handled correctly.
Therefore, I’m happy to say that I’m 99% finished with dungeons now. The last 1% you ask?
As mentioned, a video:
Dungeon Combat
He also poses a question to anyone who is interested:
…[N]ext step: who knows for the moment? I can either go and make a dungeon editor like I did for maps and Npcs to allow users to integrate new dungeons, continue the U5 port, or integrate dungeons for the U4 port.
What do you think?
What do you think, Ultima fans? From where he has arrived at, where now should he go?
Solid work. The tile grid representation of the dungeon map in the video should be rotated 180 degrees so it’s “upside-down” to represent the player’s variable orientation from the previous first person perspective. Your code probably already can do that, but an axis may be flipped or not rotated. It feels more natural for “forward” in first person to mean “up” in an overhead dungeon mode for me.
Dynamic templates (wall and opening combinations for four sides) with rotation for last first person perspective orientation would be my first thing so there would be a subconscious connection between FP and overhead perspectives. Each room transition would “feel right” because it lined up with the first person mode they were just looking at.
Second I would definitely do a map editor. It might be easiest to incorporate the editing features into the client rather than making a separate program and borrowing code from it. You could enable or disable features as necessary using the same codebase to create separate normal and editor versions to prevent “cheating”. 🙂 Some of the editor features could eventually be allowed as limited additional gameplay mechanics in accordance with some arbitrary variables like player skill or possession of certain assets.
All suggestions aside, great work on the project. With programming it either feels pretty good or you’re distraught dissecting bugs. Progress always feels good.
Agreed but I’m still in the “keep it original” (though I have a surprise for the next update). So, though you are right and it would probably work best, I’ve left it as it is (or so far as I’ve tested it).
I agree on the editor, I’ll have to work on that one day to get one up and running. I’ve actually decided on what was the next step and it’s moving steadily 🙂
Thanks for the support,
Jc