Killing some time, I decided to try and figure out what that game I made 5(I guess) years ago for a 10 day of VERGE contest. VERGE, for the uniformed was a neat rpg maker back in the day, and with it I actually completed a game…in 10 days. Amazing. Anyway, I'm not sure how well it handles, but if you want to see a full rpg haphazzardly slapped together in little over a week, dar it be.

Old ass game

Regarding my Side-Scroll vox engine…

Well I don't have anything neat to show you, I got called in to work before I could load up a fresh new demo and some screenshots…I'll have to do that some other.

With some more work into it, I created a nice system that condense what needs to be drawn. It still has some work to be done, like ignoring completely hidden voxs and figuring out which ones will be hidden based on there position from the camera. Already its set to ignore out of view voxs.

The results were nice, except for a minor draw glitch that occurred, it brought render time down from 18-22ms on my main computer to 1-2ms. So I most definatly need to perfect it to make something nice.

In addition to that I manually put in a method to give the imported sprites some thickness. Up to 8 levels of thickness can be applied. Coupled with circle draw instead of box draw it creates nearly seamless depth with out the need for creating cubes.

The next big challange after perfecting the drawing method is attempt to affect the enviroment dynamicly. Like destroying chunks of the vox box. Another rountine I need to create is to allow for animated sprites.

My planned method for this is to forgo saving each frame and have a program that saves the first frame and then creates list of changes that occur between frames. Could do some interesting morphing effects with this.

As for the final thoughts of this project, if I can get it to work nicely, and make it easily editable, I'll most likely release it as opensource to the community, hoping that someone can possible perfect my attempt and thus develope a really sweet voxel side scroller or top down game.

Currently with no intention of using cubes, mainly to dramaticly save on calculation times, I can kind of rule out Isomertric style…although in theory its not impossible if you use circles to draw.

On to the topic of spheres to render, anyone know what that game back in the day was called that had entirely sphere rendered characters and pre-renderd spherical backgrounds?