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WOLFENSTEIN 3D - SOON ON YOUR ST
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Ok, welcome back in the second part of the PROPAGANDA for .tSCc., this time it
is special dedicated to ...
Please think that this is a downscaled screenshot...
At the moment I haven't much to review about "Wolfenstein", our coder RAY's,
heartblood. Just this... So far the game engine runs quite fast on a ST and very
fast on Falcon, ofcourse. In fact "Wolfenstein" will be the first 1stperson
shooter on the STFM (!) that can be called so and is using the machines techs to
the edge. The few other games around using texture mapping suffered under very
sparse and coarse textures, slowness, missing colours and so on.
So RAY's attempt to convert "Wolfenstein" can be called the first real attempt
to bring an ego shooter with texture mapping 3d engines to the ST in all it's
possible glory, and that is, after all still very well playable.
So far only the 3D engine is running and there isn't much of the game itself
implemented, but the development is going strong in comparison with so many
other game projects on the ST and everytime we see a new test version, more
features are implemented.
Anyway... here's what RAY plans and thoughts about the future...
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- completely finished: wall-environment refresh, including animated doors and
pushwalls. The walls get rendered at 16.16 fixedpoint
accuracy, and still it runs at up to 15fps on a plain ST
- partly finished: controls, keyboard movement works just like in the
original game, mouse and joystick support need yet to be
added.
- still to be included: statics, such as pickable bonus items, bodies, tables,
pillars etc. that's what I am working on at the moment
and that's what the next beta will be all about.
Implementing this includes visibility detection, sorting
transformation and clipping + additional masked scalers
as any of the sprites' pixels will need to be markable
as transparent (colorkey!). I guess this will drop the
framerate a bit, depending on how many objects are
visible at a time, however.
moving objects i.e. enemies. having inmplemented statics
once, those shouldn't be too hard to add. Nevertheless
that's not all because they need to be controlled, which
means:
a game engine emulating the enemies brains is still
missing, too then :). In my opinion this will be the
hardest part of the game as it doesn't have to control
the enemies only, but additionally needs to check if our
bullets have hit the enemy, if it's dead, if we are
dead, it has to count our score, control our items
(keys, weapons) and so on. So again this might drop the
framerate, although I'll try optimizing this as much as
possible just like with the finished features, before.
sound-sample replay/mixing... we don't want to run
through a silent maze, right? - hance a 2-4 channel
mixer will have yet to be added, as well. On the humble
ST I need to emulate a DA directly writing into the YM
via timer a, on the STE+ i will the DMA sound system, of
course.
menus, a level loader (I hope to recieve the level data
from the Apple IIgs guys, soon :), will be one of the
last steps in finishing the game.
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Where are the enemies?! Originally the screen has about 3o colours...
But I think even if "Wolfenstein" will be finished somewhen, the running engine
could be help to port more games of this kind to the ST, I don't think on DOOM
and such stuff, but there are enough ego shooters around that aren't on a much
higher technical level than "Wolfenstein" but still a good play.
Naaaah.... This game itself would be cool enough at first (...) :)
_.tSCc.__________________________________________________________moondog_o9/2k2_
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UCM23
