Dzz
stmia r0!, {r2-r9}
I was reading Mr. Jabberwocky's delightful thread about his adventures making the game "Fire" and, although I lack his amusing dry wit, I thought "I have to do a thread about making a game too!"
One of the projects I was half-heartedly starting to poke at a year ago was a little game where the player has a marble that races against other marbles on loopy tracks hanging in outer space. This project was called "N-Racer", for no particular reason. Now that I'm starting projects again, this will be one of them, and I thought that some of you out there might have some interest in following along. I'll post thoughts, concept stuff, screenshots, and sometimes a little program as I puzzle out how to make the game.
Hopefully, blathering on in this thread won't cause any serious injury.
To start thinking about the game, I played with a CAD program to get a feel for what a track might look like and came up with this as an example:
What ends up being possible will depend on the ability to do 3D stuff on the gp2x. Some people probably make the point that since the gp2x doesn't have 3d capabilities built in, 3D on the gp2x will always suck so it would be better to avoid it. There's some truth to that; on the other hand, it makes it more of a challenge.
Rixed in particular has done amazing things with his 3D renderer; I'm really impressed by gpu940! I would use it, but I already started writing a bunch of 3D code way back when and I'd like to use it, so I'll be coding the 3D myself... it's more fun that way to me anyway.
So a "camera's eye" view of that track might look like this, which is basically what I'd expect the game to look like (except in color and probably without the nice curves):
So that's the sort of thing I have in mind, more or less.
One visual aspect that will help make the game hopefully visually interesting is a decent background, so I spent some effort starting to think about rendering that, and decided that rendering the inside of a sphere was probably a good way to do it.
A little sketch application I'm using to develop the background can be downloaded here to kind of get the idea:
http://www.dzzgames.com/nr1.gpe
L/R rotates one axis, A/B rotates another axis, and X/Y rotates a third axis
Unfortunately, the little sliver triangles near the poles of the sphere are not very nice, and doing a smooth mapping from a picture to these triangles will be difficult without odd distortions, so I'm discarding that concept and the next thing I want to do is develop a version of this using a "geo-sphere", which is constructed from equal-sized triangles. I gather that a more common way in the industry to do this is to use a "sky box", but for that to work I think the texture mapping has to be perspective-correct and I was hoping to cheat and use a faster affine mapping which I should be able to get away with if all the triangles are reasonably sized and facing the center.
I am not blasting away with all guns on this project so updates might come occasionally or in bursts.... thanks for reading!
One of the projects I was half-heartedly starting to poke at a year ago was a little game where the player has a marble that races against other marbles on loopy tracks hanging in outer space. This project was called "N-Racer", for no particular reason. Now that I'm starting projects again, this will be one of them, and I thought that some of you out there might have some interest in following along. I'll post thoughts, concept stuff, screenshots, and sometimes a little program as I puzzle out how to make the game.
Hopefully, blathering on in this thread won't cause any serious injury.
To start thinking about the game, I played with a CAD program to get a feel for what a track might look like and came up with this as an example:
What ends up being possible will depend on the ability to do 3D stuff on the gp2x. Some people probably make the point that since the gp2x doesn't have 3d capabilities built in, 3D on the gp2x will always suck so it would be better to avoid it. There's some truth to that; on the other hand, it makes it more of a challenge.
Rixed in particular has done amazing things with his 3D renderer; I'm really impressed by gpu940! I would use it, but I already started writing a bunch of 3D code way back when and I'd like to use it, so I'll be coding the 3D myself... it's more fun that way to me anyway.
So a "camera's eye" view of that track might look like this, which is basically what I'd expect the game to look like (except in color and probably without the nice curves):
So that's the sort of thing I have in mind, more or less.
One visual aspect that will help make the game hopefully visually interesting is a decent background, so I spent some effort starting to think about rendering that, and decided that rendering the inside of a sphere was probably a good way to do it.
A little sketch application I'm using to develop the background can be downloaded here to kind of get the idea:
http://www.dzzgames.com/nr1.gpe
L/R rotates one axis, A/B rotates another axis, and X/Y rotates a third axis
Unfortunately, the little sliver triangles near the poles of the sphere are not very nice, and doing a smooth mapping from a picture to these triangles will be difficult without odd distortions, so I'm discarding that concept and the next thing I want to do is develop a version of this using a "geo-sphere", which is constructed from equal-sized triangles. I gather that a more common way in the industry to do this is to use a "sky box", but for that to work I think the texture mapping has to be perspective-correct and I was hoping to cheat and use a faster affine mapping which I should be able to get away with if all the triangles are reasonably sized and facing the center.
I am not blasting away with all guns on this project so updates might come occasionally or in bursts.... thanks for reading!
