rewrote renderer

I rewrote the rendering library last night and now the engine uses polygon clipping, the FOV is corrected and now it is possible to look up and down using the mouse... (yes; I folded on my thoughts of mouse aim in flash games... *sigh* ).

I imagine that I might be reusing the rendering library I made a few more times... maybe the map engine too... just for quick projects though... the actual rendering library I made is fed vector points, it then clips them and renders them onscreen... pretty simple but useful to have lying around.

An interesting thing about the new renderer is that it no longer colours the tiles darker using colour transformations... it renders a second texture that holds a transparent shading map... the effect is alot more nice and pretty fancy... It gives more atmosphere than vertex shading... It sort of looks like a volumetric fogging effect at times.

Well... the project is getting closer to being finished... even though the rewrite of the renderer from scratch only took a day; it was quite an effort... I had to resync up alot of the other functions...

Hopefully I'll get around to writing a few tutorials on all this later on... and release the source code at some point.... it could be a good learning tool for others.

Back to coding

Unfortunately my notebook (which I have written many horrible things about) was just getting too slow for what I needed... probably because of the amount of stuff I had on there...

Anywho; I purchased a new notebook which has been very helpful... no more annoying slowdowns while coding or waiting for my computer to unfreeze... So I've went back to my coding...

The first project I have to finish is my GFPS engine (which I SHOULD of finished AGES ago!)...

Now the game has 4 weapons... a new monster (more soon), it's faster and I have written a level editor for it to make level creation faster and to use the potential of the engine even more.

The image of the editor is quite small, but this is what it looks like anywho... I coded it in c++ using the openGL & SDL libraries... The key commands are pretty silly, but since it's just for me to use so far, it's not important for others to find it easy right now. Tile selection is at the top of the screen, item selection is at the bottom... Thankfully the editor makes stair cases and platforms easier to craft.

"So WHY isn't it released yet?" you may ask... Well apart from the lack of time I've had for it until recently; I need to rewrite the renderer... when I originally wrote the basis of the engine (in one night), it was in AS2 and I wasn't think about height differences... just speed. One of the speed tricks was to avoid polygon clipping (too much complicated maths with floating point numbers really slows down AS2)... so I adjusted the FOV and clipping plane... which is now showing dead space on the screen where nothing is being rendered.. and distorting the perspective... making platforms confusing and rooms look smaller than they are... So a better rendering library is going to be coded... This shouldn't really cause too much slowdown thanks to AS3.

Well, that's some of what I've been up to...
Back to coding, university work, painting and reading for me.

If you have any questions, advice, need help on your own projects or wish to work with me; feel free to leave a comment or Email me at "kalisme (at) hotmail (dot) com".
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