Re: 8 bit 3-d game

[heuser.marcus@freenet.de]

I know Lucas' website and his library is a major piece of work. Nearly
a science project ;-)

But for a simple map in a game that uses another kind of display
technology most of the time (3d, for example) its overkill, imho. And
AFAIK its GS-only, too.

If you want a much simpler (and smaller) implementation of a tiling
routine I may have what you need. But it's a tiling engine in the
"classical sense": Its practically a specialized copy routine geared to
block shapes and not sprites that move smoothly around the screen.

You surely know the kind of display the old Ultimas or strategy games
use? Exactly this kind of graphics was my target and I already
described it a bit in a posting in your thread "Apple II "tile based
graphics" ?".

The goal was to implement a fast routine so its geared a bit to these
standard tiles (2 bytes wide, 16 bytes tall) but its customizable.

It surely isn't the fastest routine (can anybody make such a claim?)
but its sufficient: At this time a 13x11 matrix (Ultima 4: 11x11) uses
around 74.000 cycles - not bad for a 4576 byte screen area. In theory
more than 13 screen updates per second, though a game will produce much
less, thanks to the game logic, NPCs, special effect and so on.

If you (or anybody else) wants it - its availably by request (the
e-address is valid) - but I expect to be credited accordingly.

However, I doubt that I'll be using it myself, as it has - because of
its nature - one major "flaw": It cannot display anything "pseudo-3D".
Which means: No overlaps.

So my next target was making a routine that can display graphics like
in the brilliant game 'Moebius' - but with a twist: The "player" can
rotate the display in steps of 90 degrees.

Its much slower than the simple brute-force byte blasting above but it
should make up for a much more interesting screen display. This routine
is 'exclusive' at this time as it is not debugged and evaluated.

As I said I'm now sitting at a proportional font routine - similar to
the excellent one in the Sherlock-Game 'Another Bow' - and when this is
finished I'll do a shape/graphics editor.

Hopefully I have the discipline to do these baby steps ;-)

bye
Marcus