On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 17:08 -0700, Cara Quinn wrote: > Matthew, as always, a big THANK YOU! for all your efforts!… :)
Let's hope you like the results! The first release will be cut-down compared to what I intend to support in the future. I've written loads of code to do cool things like automatically build staircases and lifts but the 3D layout code (that links rooms together) can't yet deal with certain aspects of this. However, the system is designed in such a way that it can be easily and incrementally improved over the weeks and months and eventually we'll be able to support all major features of the game. It contains some features that automatically select the best textures and lighting schemes so that sighted people will be able to play your levels too. The only major limitation at the moment is the lack of support for slanted/diagonal objects, so we have only very angular structures at the moment. I am hoping that we will be able to get M.Sc. -- maybe even Ph.D. -- students here to improve some of these limitations. Of course it'll all be open source so any clever external fellow with more time can take what we've done and improve it. The system does have some big advantages which is that it guarantees that levels will not have bugs such as ``leaks'' in them, where they are partially open to empty space (what lies beyond the map is an eternal void, hehe) due to inaccurate geometrical construction. We're also thinking about how to make it useful for things like randomised and automatic level generation and so on... > Out of curiosity, which platform are you developing this on? Are > you testing / running this in Linux? Linux is the primary development and testing platform but I hope to get it running on Windows tomorrow/over the weekend. It is mostly written in Python so requires no porting, but uses the standard Quake level compilation tools (so you really do have as equal access as I can get you currently) -- however these are written in C and thus need to be compiled for each platform. I hope to support the Mac soon but I can't immediately due to lack of time -- I really need to get some questions out to the people that test it ASAP as I desperately need feedback for the paper to have even a chance of being accepted (in the next 2 weeks). Again I'm sorry for the rush but I'm constantly playing catch-up since being off work for so long. Anyway, back to it -- it's nearly there... -- Matthew Tylee Atkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ AGRIP-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.agrip.org.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/agrip-discuss
