Game Programming in Squeak

Jon Hylands jon at huv.com
Mon Oct 29 20:00:51 UTC 2001


On Mon, 29 Oct 2001 13:20:13 -0500, "Lex Spoon" <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:

> Most 3D game developers don't have much experience with high-level
> languages like Squeak, so they don't really know.

Yeah, of course. I was only including those who were Smalltalk programmers
in my thoughts, but clearly that intent never made it into my message :-)

> More to the point, however, forget about "modern".  Let's aim for
> "good".

It would be interesting to try and aim for something like, perhaps, the
original version of Descent, or maybe a proper 3D version of Doom.

Descent might be the easiest in terms of dealing with scene complexity. The
cube structure of the world makes finding the visibility set from each cube
manageable, although realistically we'd probably want to cache it with the
level the way Doom & Quake do with their BSP trees.

The other type of game that might work is an fog-limited one, where the
visibility set from any location in the world is limited by a set distance.
Underwater games work well, and look realistic to boot, with fixed-distance
visibility. 

You can divide the world into large cubic sectors, where the size of each
sector is equal to the visibility distance. Then, if you've only got one
sector in height, you've only got 9 sectors to deal with in terms of both
rendering and collision detection from any given location in the world. You
also have to deal with dynamically moving objects (like other
players/monsters/ships/projectiles), but the number of those is typically
small, and you can handle them using a different approach.

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Seeker (Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicle)
           http://www.huv.com




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