Hey Everyone, You know how you play first person dungeon crawlers where you walk around a maze and your first person view gets updated frame by frame as you walk over each cell on a map? How exactly do most programs implement this? Do they simply have bitmaps of the walls and hallways and assemble them based on what the user should see? Or do most actually render in 3D, texture everything, and just provide a static viewpoint of where the user should be seeing? I would think the easiest way to handle this would be to have images of close-range walls, far range walls, halls, etc, and then blit the scene based on what the map looks like?
The classic "Wizardry" games, in their NES incarnations, do use the pre-bitmapped approach, out to a draw distance of like 1 or 2 squares away. Of course this only works as long as you don't animate the "step" between squares. Modern dungeon crawlers like "Etrian Odyssey" I'm pretty sure it's a real 3D rendering done on the fly. EDIT: another alternative is the "Phantasy Star 1" approach: animate a very simple wireframe room with solid colored walls, in realtime. And for the morally bankrupt: the "Jurassic Park CD" approach: build a filming set and do the whole thing in FMV
It really depends on the game and when it was made. If you wish to make one now the best way is probably polygons as you can setup and render it pretty easily.
my favorite dungeon crawler to look at would be the Eye of the Beholder trilogy But like Yakumo said, at this point youd probably be better off going with a 3d dungeon and just limiting the movement to square units if you wanted to emulate the constricted movement feeling of the classics. Man first person dungeon crawlers sure were fun
Bitmaps would be easier for me since I don't know jack about 3D programming. But I guess there's always a start. UPDATE: Would anyone know where to find rips for these bit-mapped maze type games? I'd like to see how the images are strategically split so when making your own it will be easier.
SORRY totally got the avatars confused lol, LIKE SUBBIE SAID you may want to look into the Aesop32/daesop stuff that was released, it was a planned engine update for EOB3 that was never pushed into production. I think you can extract resources with DAESOP and may be able to to get an idea of how it was constructed http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=20601
What do you need to know? If you're going the prerendered bitmap route, you just need to make up a list of all the wall types you'll need, then brush up on your perspective drawing skills and draw them. Try drawing your "field of view" on graph paper to decide what walls you need.
