I dont live in the USA. But still this is going to be a long night, even in Europe. So much can happen tonight that i am loaded with Coffein and ready to work until i hear the first results..
That being said.. what am i going to work on? At this point Roots is at a very much finished point. Pretty much all that i wanted to have finished before starting my Kickstarter campaign is now finished.
Shameless self ad: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magetec/roots-of-a-kingdom?tab=prelaunch-up...
Everything that is open at this point is mostly what is written in the stretch goals or too much for one night anyway. I started replacing the GenAI textures a while ago and while there are still some left i am tired of nudging pixels arround. I will continue this for a while when the game is closing in on its 1.0 release anyway.
So.. what can I do...
Today i went through a somewhat abandoned part of the factory I work on my dayjob. I have always had a soft spot for lost places and since this is where i work i simply went through some barred doors and looked arround. Imagine, for a minute, a factory some 80 years old, build in the very dynamic times when Germany just came out of WWII and, at least this part, went into the soviet union. The building was from the early 1950, the machinery, as far as i can tell, last checked by some maintanence crew in the late 1980s, the computers.. wait! Computers! There were some very old and very dead parts of computers scattered arround. 5.25" floppys all over the place and some old style CRTs on rotten tables with at least one housing an empty birds nest - stuffed with cotton bandages which packaging sayd "proudly made in the German Democratic Republic"
This kind of abandoned. 50m from an active factory with somewhat modern 2000er stuff inside.
Seeing those floppy disks brought me back into my childhood and my first computers a C64 and then a shiny Amiga 500 (yet with 3.5" floppys). When i was not even 10 years old I already loved to use my trusty old Amiga playing the games which became legends later on. Shadow of the Beast, Giana Sisters, Elite and so on.. but one particular game followed me through the decades. Might and Magic 2 - no. Not Heroes of MM.. the real one.
Might and Magic II had a particular feature that blew me away at that time: Full 3D gameplay with an open world. I played it on the Amiga 500, on the SNES and even later on my PC... and some times i dust off my Disks/CDs/DVDs/Usb drives that contain my old copy of it and I enter Middlegate once again.
So.. this for the Nostalgia. Why do write about this? Simply because it brought a thought to my head.. what about Raycasting?
Raycasting is a very very basic method to create pseudo 3D on weak hardware. In short terms: You have a grid and a movable object. The object casts rays into multiple directions (well, into those you can see) and once the ray hits a wall on the grid you measure the distance and draw it in front of a camera scaled to the distance. This is basically the same effect you have in Wolfenstein and similar pre-Doom games that were using 3D.
So.. my game is using a tile engine - or in other words, a grid. My gnomes have eyes and i have some time to spend.. I wonder if i can get a POV done until these midterms are over - and if i get a bit more "polishing" done on the "3D" than just having a solid-color gorund, a solid color "sky" and some solid color walls.
Here is an excellent in depths tutorial on Raycasting and how it is done: