Here's a small techdemo for the diversion known as 64digit's halloween contest as started by Rez.

Its not at all optimized yet, its like a combination of a in-progress engine and a mock-up.

Right now I have ideas on how room data is going to be stored, but first I wanted to get the look down for rendering scenes.

The maps are pretty simple hallways, objects provide details like doors/windows/lockers and so on.

Walls/Floor/Cieling are composed of 4 point polygons with colored vertexs

Overlays are used to produce light (PNG image) and shadow (polygons w/ alpha)

I was almost considering doing something that Cyrus is working with, 2d skeletons. I found some good documents on how to set it up for both 2d and 3d in opengl, C languages. However at this point I figured frame based would be easier. 5 Unique frames for walking seems smooth enough to me, but maybe I'll revisit 2d skeletons later on.

You can find this great tutorial at gpwiki.org look for the opengl basic bones system.

Another reason I decided against this was that some enemies will have unique or difficult movements to handle with skeleton animation. Both the devil and Dracula characters have capes and the main character is a ghost costume. Although I may change that since I haven't made any vector art for him like the rest.

I'm kind of stuck on using the ghost since it would provide the most generic character since you can't tell what sex/race the character is, thus less of a disconnect.

Models are built in-game, since they're simple face or 4 sided cubes (no backfaces).

Tech Demo Download

Video…when it uploads….

Here's a capture with process view to monitor the impact on a AMD Athlon 64 3200, 2.5gb ram and Geforce 6200 w/ 256mb. And of course cam studio running. There's a few spikes were it hits 20%, which is pretty good since it hovers at 0-5% usage, and only uses 20mb of ram.