Summer break's almost over.

You haven't heard from me in a while. This is because I have hardly been working on Clockwork Wanderlust over the summer, but work will start again soon.

I've been looking into OpenGL to get more performance and more efficiency. I will post my findings soon.
In the meantime, OpenGL is opening the road towards proper shading of used textures. Tiles will look red in the sunset and blueish during the night. Got to add that to my list of planned features, actually.

I've had the "game" so far tested by a few people, and they were complaining the rotation of the camera leads to eyestrain. Therefore I am going to decrease the resolution from 16x16 to 8x8.

Everything is coming along nicely so far, and hopefully I can soon start on coding the game itself rather than the rendering.

Hope you're all well,
- Gamesaucer.

Quick update on Java port

I'm getting there, and since I already have all the functions I need to draw things (I just need to port them) I don't really expect any trouble.

Fully fake-3D rendered 3D world.

I'm pretty happy that I can report some more progress:

However, I am running into performance issues that I cannot properly address as long as I am using Game Maker.

The trouble is, I need to do a lot of math in Game Maker, whereas in Java I only need a few lines of code.

So I'll be busy getting the exact same thing to work in Java right now and then I'll be continuing from that.

Demo

Build 2: Full rotation

Isometric? Check.
Fully rotatable over 360 degrees? Check.
Character movement? Check.

I think it's about time to call Indev version 0.02.
You may notice that the tile textures are gone, but that's because I'm still switching to primitives for drawing them.
But that's going to be in Indev version 0.03.

Implementing theory into the game

Sorry that it's taking a while, I am busier than expected with other projects.
However, that does not stop me from making progress with this one:

Still need to transform the tiles themselves, but I'm getting there.

Vertexes demo

Well, I got the drawing itself sorted out, as you can see:

It behaved exactly as I wanted it to behave, so minimum effort on this part.
The hard part now is calculating the grid nodes to draw the texture at.

Isometric view: Solution?

It occurred to me that, if normally the square on which the texture is drawn can't be transformed properly, why couldn't I simply make a primitive?

So I'll research using primitives for my isometric view now.
Here's what I understand so far:

(Fixed as of May 27.)

Notice the 2 triangles (ABD) and (BCD) the primitive gets split up in.
This way it is easy for the computer to draw the shapes.

Now I can have my texture:

And map the texture to the primitive as follows:
(WA), (XB), (YC), (ZD)

Can you imagine a field full of those?
This is how it looks:

Not bad at all. The texture is a bit blurred, but I will scale it down in the final game instead of making it larger, which will reduce the blur but hopefully retain the feel of the texture.

But all we have now is still a grassy plain, without any hills whatsoever - I'll have to add an extra dimension to my array soon, and recalculate the drawing height. Wish me luck.

Isometric tutorial

During my quest to research isometric views that can rotate, I found this:

It's very clear and understandable, and describes almost exactly what I mean, drastically reducing the research that I still have to do.

Isometric view

I'm running into some trouble when making the isometric view.
I'll try to explain my problem.

I have an original image. It's a square 32x32 tile.
I want to rotate it and scale it down vertically for it to be able to fit into the isometric grid.
I want to keep rotating it under different angles before scaling, because I want to smooth 360 degrees turn.

The top example is what I want to happen.
The bottom example is what happens in every tool I tried out so far.

I cannot add transformations to the graphic seperately.
Scaling seems to be prioritized over rotation by default, and I have no idea how to chnage this behaviour.

I'm of course working on a solution, but what I'm trying to achieve here is way more default to process for a computer than having to render an actual 3d view.

I will resort to 3d if I cannot find a way to change this, but either way, the results will not be seen in the final game. Unless you have a slow computer.

Clockwork Wanderlust

Welcome to this blog.
It is about a game in development called "Clockwork Wanderlust".

It's a survival RPG sandbox.
Sandbox because everything is destructible and creatable.
RPG because of involved skills and NPC interaction.
Survival because of player restictions.

The game is going to be isometric and it will provide a nearly endless world, the size of the world only being limited to the size of your hard disk.

Current team:
"Gamesaucer", lead developer

"Xemhinor" and "Scheurneus", test panel.

I'll keep you informed.