I've been talking about it for a while. Asking questions about how to do this or that. But without any real progress.
Scroll down for a question I have about ship/terrain assets.Well as of the past week or so, that has changed. I sat down, turned off my Minecraft (with great internal suffering) and got to work. Over the past week, I succeeded in creating the shields, the major non-combat systems, damage reception, power control, and more.
At this point in time, there is no networking implemented and the file is quite large (~15kb). Much of this is due to graphics and AI calculations which, when networking is implemented will no longer be present. The intent is also to hold graphics server-side and send the relevant sprites to the calc during runtime, which will be saved in a temporary assets file. Also, as Kerm told me that CALCnet will likely not be a thing for the CE due to differences in network protocol, I'll probably use the existing USB protocol on the CE with a computer side program to send data to the hub, which would have the ability to interact with connected CE's and CALCnet, allowing the color and monochromes to play on one server. I'll also open source this when done to allow it to be ported to the CSE.
But more on that later. I have very little left to do before I can release a demo. Basically just AI ship control, player ship control, rendering the viewscreen, and firing. In the scope of what I've done already, that shouldn't take too long.
Now, feast your eyes on some screenshots:
The Question:This game is played in a virtual 3D world. The map objects and ships are technically 3D. My question is, would it be better, both in terms of rendering speed and data size, to create several versions of each sprite, to view the object from different angles, or to create full 3D models for the ships and the spherical map objects (the irregular objects will be rendered differently). For full 3D, I could make 16x16x16 models for each item, leading to an overhead of 4096 bytes per object, which if it's in an external assets file on the CE isn't a major issue. When this game eventually gets backwards-ported to the monochrome calcs, we'd be talking about 512 bytes per object.
If the common consensus is the latter (3d models), is there someone here who has experience making them?