[Adonthell-devel] Some map engine fresh meat!

[Alexandre Courbot]

Finally, got out of my lethargy and coded a bit!

I have thought, thought and drafted a lot about the Z-offset enabled map
engine Kai proposed a bit ago. And it seems to me, that it's simply the
best map engine idea we ever got so far! :) It would simply boost the
current map engine capabilities, plus suppress a few boring things:

-First, as we would have information about which parts of the object
touch the ground and their height, the base tile stuff will get away, as
it was its role. I think nobody will complain about that!
-Second, the use of several levels (like bridges) will simply be
trivial. Horizontal stairs? Piece of cake. Ground slopes? No problem.
Actually these ones will exactly be the same. The stairs would be
objects which height increments gradually, so the characters can climb
them. About the characters "falling" from bridges to the lower level,
without this, I'd say it would simply be impossible (just like the
horizontal stairs, when you think about it).
-Although the rendering would be more difficult, I've found some sorting
heuristics that seems very good. And in case an object intersects
another one (like when a character is knee-deep in the water), we could
easily detect it and render it accurately.
-Further, we'll have to handle walking events, and this job will once
again be easily made. We'll have to test whether there is an object to
support the characters - when this happen, we could test if an event is
linked to it - and trigger it if necessary.

That's it - my work now focuses on porting the new-old map engine to the
new-new one (follow me?). The first step is to have functions to test
whether a character is supported by an object and should therefore fall
or not. I've finally managed to code a heavy function (for the current
map engine this is just a walkability test, which is just the same). As
I had to fix bugs in the new-old map engine first, the flat objects
rendering is broken - so I've suppressed the ground in alextest. That
doesn't matter anyway, as flat objects will no more be a special case in
the new-new map engine. The stuff is commited, with the data package on
http://www.gnurou.org/adonthell-stuff/alextest.tgz

Right, I'm waiting for your new-new comments!
Alex.

PS: Don't worry, I haven't forgot about the Windows port! :) It's just
that I wasn't able to get access to a machine these days - and have been
quite busy with my univ work too.
-- 
http://www.gnurou.org