Irrlicht Engine

Hi community,

after i played and experimented with irrlicht for one year, now i started a project. You see a first picture at http://zenprogramming.tripod.com

11.06.2004:
At this time i will make the game for myself to have fun and i dont know if it will be freeware/open source or not. The project-name is at this time "Round based strategy".

Ready:
The world is full random generated. Isles are possible, too. Deserts and ice are random generated. The map at the left works, you see the red section on the map, thats clicked with mouse and is displayed. The heightmap is displayed with automatic shadows and a first texturing (i think, i will change later).
Todo:
Next i will make random-rivers (to let them flow on the heighmap) and random clouds. Then units, pathfinding and so on.
And there are some bugs im searching, maybe i have to ask in the forum (for example some trees stand wrong, as you can see and the triangleselector doesnt work if i use billboards - very magic...).


I hope i will get it to an end, cause its a big project.

whoa, map generation? how the heck do you do that!?

oops, i forgot the thanks to ;-)
Thanks to:
Bob for his super Terrain Generation Tutorial at
http://www.robot-frog.com/3d/hills/index.html
and to nebukadnezzar and his texture-manipulation-functions (look to irrlicht-forum "open discussion", and to Serg Nechaeff - i used some lines of his code.
And of course Niko.

Very nice. I'd like to hear your methods of pathfinding for height map generated levels, one of the reasons I decided to use a tile system is for easy ( and fast ) pathfinding. Not because I want to steal it, I'm just interested now that I've looked at pathfinding methods a bit.

hmm, i think im going to make a game where you can just relax. With that tutorial

Wow congrats that's looking promising. What are u using for terrain Rendering? The Irrlicht implemented TerrainSceneNode or have you extended it?

thanks for interest

@r2d2: i use the standard command addTerrainMesh.

@Tyn: like i wrote, i havent done pathfinding yet, but the best i found in cyberspace (like i wrote in FAQ/helpers, too) is
http://www.intrafoundation.com/pathfinder2d.asp
Why reinvent the wheel, they did it many 1000 years ago, why try to reinvent such things like A* ? I would never program such good algorythms and classes, so i plan to try to use the classes of the link above.

New:
26.06.2004:
Random Clouds and Rivers work now. The rivers made me crazy, cause i wanted them to flow real down the hills and if they flow in a valley to fill the valley with a mountain-lake and then start a new river from the mountain lake. And they still have some bugs in the tiling.
Next i will make a little demo.

Wow, this looks awesome! Waiting for the demo!

looks really cool!

Oh man, Knight, thats just great!

I wanted to do something like this a long time ago, but i had to learn that im not able to do it.

Please, go on, best wishes for this project!

yes Krampe
> ...but i had to learn that im not able to do it.
often i think it, too. For example the time is against. Its easy to calculate how much man-days will be used to create for a strategy game:
all meshes (= x man-days),
all textures/graphics (=x man-days)
ai (=x man-days)
sound, music (=x man-days)
user interface/Gui (=x man-days)
bugsearch/testing (=x man-days)
------------------------
all together = x man-years ?
is it possible today to do such a project really alone ?

Oh yes, exactly my thoughts. :/

But nevertheless i think you can achieve it with lots of motivation and dedication. Of course, you will need years, too... i guess for such an ambitious project it would be good to have one programmer, one artist and one musician, that would help a lot (would need years too, but not a decade ).

But anyway, i'm very impressed of your work so far, this map generation seems to be a great milestone! I'm sure you are able to finish this; you have the skill, now you just need the motivation I would kill for your programming skill Just lend me your brain & knowledge for a couple of years, would you?

I'm not a particulary good programmer but I have managed to get something reasonably functional done. If you are willing to learn then you can, motivation means more than programming savvy in many ways. Being stubbern enough not to give up and I have stubberness aplenty

Oh yeah:

Debugging = (Man-time)/Coffee

is it possible today to do such a project really alone ?

I'd like to think so. If you have enough patience I think that a whole project could be done alone, modelling and sound is a different matter but I think programming a whole project can be achieved with a little bullishness ( is that even a word? )

knightoflight wrote:oops, i forgot the thanks to
Thanks to:
Bob for his super Terrain Generation Tutorial at
http://www.robot-frog.com/3d/hills/index.html
and to nebukadnezzar and his texture-manipulation-functions (look to irrlicht-forum "open discussion", and to Serg Nechaeff - i used some lines of his code.
And of course Niko.

How did you convert what you got from the robot frog random gen into something usable for irrrlicht? Did you convert the random gen data into a bmp for a heightmap?