Do you think OneFishDown could make a some what 1st person game which you can see other people's characters.
Not like the cool flying demo he made. But like this:
- Dan cant see himself but can see Tom.
- Same thing with Tom.
ID:153786
 Jan 26 2003, 7:32 pm
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Jan 26 2003, 7:34 pm
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Mordor
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ask him
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Mordor wrote:
ask him I just want to know how much confidence everyone else has in his ability to change Byond's primitive 2d design into a 3d environment. | |
Zlegend2 wrote:
Mordor wrote: As of yet, none. The structure isn't there for BYOND to support anything remotely sophisticated on the 3D front yet. Something like Wolfenstein, for example, is well beyond BYOND. OneFishDown's maze example is decent, but it cuts a corner which introduces a fisheye effect into the output. It's also very tiny, so not very useful except as a proof of concept, and it experiences graphical glitches during movement that would be bad in an action game. Basically much of this is because the icon-based representation needed is so complex that it shows off some of BYOND's uglier graphical seams, and the computation required to show anything can bog it down. The main places problems exist are textured walls and sprites (like for other players). To represent such things as scaled icons would be murderously difficult, processor-intensive, and glitchy-looking. I believe it is possible to create a 3D environment just a tad more sophisticated than the maze project, with just walls and some primitive shading. The maze project seems to use lots of single vertical strip icons, and I think this would actually work better with precalculated angled icons. However it'd still cause little graphical blips when updating, and putting any object in the maze would make things get ugly really fast. If BYOND ever upgrades its drawing routines to the point where authors can supply custom drawing procs (executed by the client), then I think this kind of thing will be much more feasible. At the very least, it could allow for primitive wireframe or polygon 3D. But this is basically a feature suited for a major version change, and the next one won't include this (though it might step a little closer in its direction). Lummox JR | |
Technically, he just said "somewhat 1st person", which is mind-numbingly easy. He never said anything about "dynamically generated first-person 3D with full freedom of movement", which is not really quite feasible (the curvy maze demo notwithstanding. Actually, that raises a question--would the wierd curved-line shortcut actually be necessary? It seems to me that the main drain here is drawing, not calculation, and the shortcut seems to be in calculation).
Static images drawn from a first-person perspective can of course be tossed up onto the screen very easily, or even simply drawn out as screens of turfs (which is probably preferable, since the drawing goes much faster). Four-directional semi-tile-based first person (SSI's Gold Box games, the early Wizardries, Bard's Tale, etc.) is still fairly simple, although you'd need a helluva good computer to draw everything seamlessly if you used a full-sized map screen. If you went wireframe this wouldn't be as much of a problem (not that that's what I'd call a great trade-off). But beyond that... yeeeeah. If you wanted roughly geometric blobs of color, I could see that, but not even Wolf3D quality sprites. It might be doable, if you happen to like playing games with a fractional number of frames per second. | |
Leftley wrote:
Technically, he just said "somewhat 1st person", which is mind-numbingly easy. He never said anything about "dynamically generated first-person 3D with full freedom of movement", which is not really quite feasible (the curvy maze demo notwithstanding. Actually, that raises a question--would the wierd curved-line shortcut actually be necessary? It seems to me that the main drain here is drawing, not calculation, and the shortcut seems to be in calculation). I agree. I didn't really buy OFD's explanation for taking the shortcut, since even games like DOOM used to simply use pre-calculated arrays to adjust for curvature. Static images drawn from a first-person perspective can of course be tossed up onto the screen very easily, or even simply drawn out as screens of turfs (which is probably preferable, since the drawing goes much faster). Four-directional semi-tile-based first person (SSI's Gold Box games, the early Wizardries, Bard's Tale, etc.) is still fairly simple, although you'd need a helluva good computer to draw everything seamlessly if you used a full-sized map screen. If you went wireframe this wouldn't be as much of a problem (not that that's what I'd call a great trade-off). But beyond that... yeeeeah. If you wanted roughly geometric blobs of color, I could see that, but not even Wolf3D quality sprites. It might be doable, if you happen to like playing games with a fractional number of frames per second. Basically I see the icon dependency as the main stumbling block. BYOND's entire drawing system is based around icons, which cuts off most of the things that'd make decent action 3D possible. Lummox JR | |
I could fix the fisheye effect, but it would still have a small view size and bad framerate. The extent of textured wall would be whatever I could cram into a two pixel wide strip.
Yes, the corners were cut in the calculation, but that was to balance out the drawing time, well it was an attempt. I could run the calculated distance through a simple formula to make it look a bit more normal, but that goes back to my point of the first paragraph, why bother? If I was going to make a game out of it, I'd use another language. Four-directional semi-tile-based first person... I was considering working on a game like that, but after planning out all the icons I'd need to make I decided otherwise =/ Zlegend, I am almost always on AIM, so you shouldn't be asking these questions on the forums. [edit] If BYOND had a command to draw a line between two given pixel coordinates on the client's screen, then that's another story. BYOND might be capable of a "3d" game now, but if anyone wanted to seriously make one they would probably do so off BYOND. | |
Basically I see the icon dependency as the main stumbling block. BYOND's entire drawing system is based around icons, which cuts off most of the things that'd make decent action 3D possible. Yep, as I've mentioned before, my major graphical wish is to have features not unlike Flash -- vector-based graphics; various settings for translucency of objects; drawing polygons and lines on the screen; unlimited scaling, stretching, skewing, and rotation; etc. | |