"!naledreG notnA ,em llik tsum uoy niw oT"
After experimenting with a debug 1st-person camera view in my ongoing Crongdor the Barbarian game development, I thought it would be cool to make a first person game. Amazingly, I have never done this, despite these being the inspiration for a lot of my career choices. I wanted to make an eerie Underworld type of game but it ended up gravitating itself into a blend of Wolfenstein 3-D, Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, with a bit of Blake Stone, Nightmare 3-D, and Ken's Labyrinth nodded to. Of course WebGL was the medium.
I decided to do yet another cube-ish blocks plan to make level design easy and retro. I put GIMP in pixel mode, disabled anti-aliasing, and drew a map using unique colours for each type of wall, item, monster, etc. I used HTML5 Canvas2D to load the image and extract each pixel's colour as an unique number, which is the code to load a specific item at a location determined by pixel row and column number * 2.0 to get into world co-ordinates.
Upon seeing the first 3d rendering of my game level I was hit by a nostalgia bomb from early 90s 3d games and it just sort of turned into a mash-up of those, with some Dangerous Dave action thrown in.
Interestingly I didn't need to do much in the way of culling optimisation. It was okay to have one draw per wall section, thing, monster, etc. The bottleneck, even on my piece of crap laptop was the fragment count and/or fill rate, so I just did some crude dot-product culls and reduced the viewport size.
Keys, locked doors, secret panels, treasure, and so on were all very easy to do. Low-res pixel art looks nice and is really quick to make. I disabled all anti-aliasing in the rendering. The monsters I could not be bothered animating, I just loaded a different mesh to use for the "attacking" state. Some neat shaders to make stuff flash in an old-school way to indicate damage were a nice idea and easy to do. That plus sound queues was enough - no need for particles or anything fancy. I think making a really old-style surround HUD for the player's stats set a tone - I used similar colours to the crappy dull palettes of 90s games. I rendered to a smaller viewport inside this for the 3d stuff - same as how the original games worked. The text using CSS and native browser text was such a relief - really clear text is so nice to have. Doing text rendering in OpenGL is an exercise in disappointing frustration. I implemented Doom/Underworld's diminished lighting to give a spooky tone, and didn't bother with Phong or anything - just normal-based basic shading, which is cheap and nice looking. I'm less and less impressed with expensive, difficult-to-manage traditional lighting models. I added a flare alpha-blended thing to make lamps look like they're shining - worked really well. Sorting transparent objects by distance was trivial in JavaScript - yay!
I finally figured out how to pre-load sound effects with Howler. It required reading the instructions. I found it doesn't work on my mobile phone though - humm.
For the AI spotting the player I just used Bresenham's line drawing to see if sight was blocked by a wall - not accurate but accurate enough. For shooting I used an interesting little algorithm - distance of a point from a line plotted between two points. Simple and effective! The point being the monster in question and the line being the forward vector of the camera. I didn't bother doing a wall collision check, so you can shoot through walls at short distances. It worked really well, and means you can shoot multiple baddies with a single shot.
The story I based on an artistic "thing" two of my friends in the graphics group were doing. The main character is lifted/reproduced from Tim's Survival Trail game, where he is the main character. Had to.
I think the only thing I wasn't happy with was that the boss drops the key in a slightly wrong location which sometimes disappears - didn't quite figure that out. Must be a rounding error or invalid parameter somewhere?
I'm having yet another crack at learning Python for the purposes of making a Blender script, some visualisation data pre-processing, and just generally sharpening a new tool. I want to get learn enough to evaluate the language's usefulness for my own purposes. I suspect there are some general scripting and file parsing tasks that will make it a superior choice in some cases, and I would like to investigate the GUI potential for mutli-platform native OS tools, as at the moment I have no really nice tool for this.
I've to-date put off learning Python properly, because like all cute technologies it has a voracious community of hooded fanatics that want you to py-everything, and frankly I find that very offputting - some sort of psychological shortcoming, a tendancy to tribalism perhaps - that catches a lot of humanity and makes them especially difficult to tolerate.
I'm putting my notes and stuff github. So far I've found it a lot more difficult to learn and deal with than JavaScript, which I can't help but compare it to. It has some extra powerful features, but is just different enough to other languages to be difficult to learn as quickly as I would like.
I managed to create a working exporter script for Blender to my own 3d mesh format. I feel another pass over this once I've improved my Python skills would be beneficial. I need to add support for export of bones, skeleton hierarchy, and animations, but the per-vertex core of data is working.
I want to try some more visual C/C++ debuggers for non-windows. I only want light-weight tools, not full IDEs, but having the ability to click breakpoints, maintain a watchlist, inspect the call stack side-by-side, and most importantly inspect the compiled assembler code, would be a great insight to writing more efficient code.
I had a go with Microsoft Visual Studio Code, which is available on Linux and Apple ?!!?! It's a very light IDE with some debug support for web development and .: completely useless.
All the cool kids are using Sublime Text editor these days. I recently wrote a post giving my opinion on plug-ins being a massive waste of time. This is the extreme end of that. It's a text editor presenting a sensible interface, with all the advantages of non-sensible Vim and Emacs. It's a very nice text editor, nicer than gedit, which I use a lot. I find a lot of the fancy productivity enhancers end up wasting my time by accidentally clicking twice and getting two cursors or something. It has a very good JSON validator (and other code validators) which will put big red stuff over bad bracket endings and stuff, which is very handy indeed if you work in these areas. Nice but not better overall than what I've been using. You can do some interesting compile-as-you-type stuff with C, which I've heard from very authoritive sources is a big development-time improver. Have not tried yet. I can't see that being so useful for me because I often work on a junkyard laptop, and I never make mistakes.