Monday, June 2, 2008

Dynamic Environments

There hasn't been any update in almost 2 weeks, I know, and there won't be much to talk about at the moment. I am trying to find out how to create Dynamic Environments, sort of "SimCity"-like dynamic scenarios, where you create buildings and everything. Simple as it sounds, this is quite a challenge for the noob-Apocalyx'er like me, so you can imagine the fun I am having here. What I have in mind is something like this:

1) Changeable height maps (at some point), at first the world is going to be flat as a flounder.
2) The Wild West: People build houses, villages, mountains, valleys, farming, dynamic trees, etc.
3) Mega Cities: Think of living in a Mega City like in the movie "The Judge" or "Star Wars" cities like Nar Shaddaa (cf. Wikipedia links).

Once we have the ability to just drop building blocks onto each other we can then build in runtime really large scenarios, with very high buildings, several levels, etc. This sounds very appealing to me and will allow for a more dynamic game play. What it implies is to create a collision detection per object, bounding boxes and a physique simulator, all of which are included in Apocalyx, it's just a question of finding out "how". =O

And well, I have yet to finish the routine to add multiple object to the scene, that will enable the above functionality in the first place, much work ahead and so little time, but then it's better to do it right from the beginning, instead of fixing it later on.

Cheers,

Sunweaver