1. Re: Comments on game changes

There are a number of emulators out there for computers like the Apple ][
and the Atari 8-bits. Some of the places on the 'net that have these also
have a lot of the old software which is really commercial but lets face it
I doubt anybody gets too upset if you pirate these days. I have seen
Wolfenstein for the Atari out there on one of these sites. I don't know
if they even made an IBM version. The only ones I recall were Apple, Atari
and Commodore. Wolfenstein reminds me a lot of Temple of Apshai and they
both bring back very fond memories.

I agree that most games these days are shoot first and figure out a story
line later. That's what seems to sell these days. For the time being, it
is probably the fad of it all. Simple hunt and shoot AI requires a lot
less programming than multiple action programming and semi-realistic
character interaction. Shoot-em-ups dominated the game market for many
years before adventures and crpgs became accepted. I think we'll see
more andmore games moving to this 3d first person perspective with real
time animation but it's going to take a little time and maybe bigger
hardware -- you see how slow these things run today with a minimum of
character AI... more complicated reactions and autonomous actions will
eat more processing cycles.

I don't think Euphoria can handle a real-time 3d engine with texture
mapping etc. The basic engine isn't that bad. I've seen one written
in basic which ran well although it was a simple plot and fill with
solid colors type of engine and didn't include any texture mapping at
all -- this is where the big problem lies. I can dig up the qbasic
demo if somebody wants to see the code. I didn't write it I just dl'd
it to see how it worked.

I do believe Euphoria will work well for first-person view 3d games
such as the *old* bardstale games or more recently the SSI Eye of
the Beholder series. I'm working on something like this myself and
it requires a lot less processing. Naturally, it isn't as action
oriented but with adventure style games where the object is more to
solve the story and less to kill everything in site, I think it
works just fine. Essentially, player movement (particularly turns)
is limited so you advance one black at a time so there is some
animation as you move through the mazes and you can animate the
sprites that represent the other characters in the game with
little trouble. Image scaling is all done in advance and you can
achieve a nicer high-res picture with this method than you can realistically
achieve with real-time 3d because the pictures are all drawn first
and you don't do any on the fly scaling or texture mapping. If I get
some code I'm satisfied with for a demo, I'll post it on this list
or put it on a web page.

Keep up the good work everybody. I'd love to see more games in
Euphoria. Oidzone is actually what made me decide to give the
language a crack. I just hope I can get some nice looking results
out of it myself and maybe help convince others to give it a go.

Chuck

new topic     » topic index » view message » categorize

Search



Quick Links

User menu

Not signed in.

Misc Menu