FairyMaze - DM-inspired 3D maze

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babebridou
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Posts: 25
Joined: Mon May 17, 2010 6:47 am

FairyMaze - DM-inspired 3D maze

Post by babebridou »

Hello there,
I've been discussing it on these boards at the start of summer, well, it seems I managed to get a few things working with my project.

The project's code name overall is Fairy Worlds, and its aim is of course to eventually be a full featured RPG like Dungeon Master. Right now the first version of the game is much less ambitious: it's name is Fairy Maze and it is a... maze in 3D with doors to open and keys to find, and where the player flies around.

After the Blog entry on Legend of Grimrock about level editing, I decided that I was jealous: since they are doing only 2D levels, they can use their awesome LUA engine and let the levels be made of code! Well I couldn't.

3D design is like that: if you're going to design something in 3D using 2D maps, then you will have to do tons of sheet layout and table switching to make sure that everything is properly aligned, that there isn't a missing floor or a missing ceiling, etc. So I pretty much had to do this from within the game. Here's how the hastily hacked editor looked like a couple weeks ago (not saying it changed or anything :P)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8SLr5Sq5Q

We can notice a few things from the video:
- the whole game is in Java and designed to run on Android devices, PC, Linux and Mac.
- the editor is hastily coded in Swing and that takes up all my rendering resources, grrr :P
- there is a need for a color coded map even if it displays only walls. The reason for that is that I needed to be able to visualize three vertical levels at the same time so that I could quickly see if I missed a wall, a floor or a ceiling tile.
- the 30fps limit (that is visible through the Fraps counter) is just so that the engine does not consume more power than needed on mobile devices. It's still hackity there :)

Alright now for some additional info about the initial release: it's planned for some time in the next couple weeks on Android Honeycomb Tablets only: there are performance issues specifically on Android phones that need sorting out first.
The first game in alpha ("Maze") version will be free to download and play on the Android Market.

Some informations about the engine.
Since it's fully in 3D, levels have to be designed in 3D. Take all the levels of Dungeon Master for instance, put them one on top of the other, you need to add a level between each that represents the ceiling(resp. floor), so those 14 levels really become 28 levels. Dungeon Master also features global map offsets - this engine doesn't. The current limit (decided by memory & performance) for a dungeon is a 32x32x32 cube. But wait, there's more! You can have as many as 4096 of those dungeons connected together through "shift portals". Shift portals are those golden squares on the editor. Whatever passes through a shift portal jumps from one dungeon to the other, even light - or line of sight - which means there really is enough room to satisfy everyone. Everything is loaded on the fly, so transitions are seamless, but the whole world is kept in memory at all time and "living" on its own through a message based engine. Of course, there's not much alive in there yet but the engineers in the engineering room, the artists in the artist room and the designers in the designing room are working on it!
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