Surreal game engine

[Ed Minchau]

I've been working on this for a long time, and I finally have a little something to show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43u2_Eb7fwA
This is very much a work in progress, but I've already got a lot "under the hood" that isn't apparent from this little video. The demo I will be putting out in a few months will include a demo map, and the map builder program, so you can change the map or even start over from the default map, but any changes will overwrite the demo map. There's already hooks in place for adding triggers and timers, to make animations and sound effects and music easier to add later.

The maps this code will display are a little more complicated than Wolfenstein or Doom, more like Duke Nukem; walls can meet at any angle, ceilings up to an apparent height of 16 feet, you'll be able to add stairs, elevators could go to another part of the same map, and you could even have non-Euclidean geometry. The wall images (up to 32 per map, though probably half that will suffice) can be flipped horizontally and vertically, and a wall can even be part of one image and part of another.

The VERA FX features added in R44 will make the code to generate sprites (for enemies etc) fairly fast. Eventually I'll add state machines for NPCs as well, and perhaps some rough physics simulation.

I think I've got my display code right (though I still have a bunch of testing to do), and I have to rewrite a lot of movement code that I'd done as a first approximation, but after that things will go fairly fast and I'll have this in everyone's hot little hands.

[Ed Minchau]

[Ed Minchau]

I've fixed some bugs, and now things are looking right. It's a little slow for my liking, so I'm going to find some ways to streamline a few things. Next up: some new test maps to see if I can find some more bugs, and then I'll work on movement.

At some point I'll probably do a writeup explaining how this all works, but I've got to make sure it all works first. I'm basing a lot of it on some ideas from this video:

He includes a link to his code, which was very informative.

[Ed Minchau]

Non-Euclidean geometry:

[kelli217]

One of these days, I hope to see you doing translational movement, not just rotational, in one of these demos!

[Ed Minchau]

One of these days, I hope to see you doing translational movement, not just rotational, in one of these demos!

Soon. I still have some bugs to kill, and some ideas for speeding things up a bit, and then I'll start on movement.