dungeon – Realms Of Fantasy

Ok where to start?

Right so last entry was me starting to create a large interior for the first time which was a “starter dungeon”.

So for that I needed to make larger wall sections I could slot together (rather than placing each small segment of wall which would have taken forever. I made L shapes and various lengths of straight wall for this purpose. Also needed was floor tiles, rubble, cobwebs, a tweak to the particle system to make the ground fog use the light color it was near.

I then had to finish off the basic collision detection so you couldn’t just walk through alls and objects. This was obviously a fairly huge undertaking but at least it’s now done at works across the whole game for any object.

I made a basic collider object which I could then use place invisible barriers around things I didn’t want you to be able to walk through. So I don’t waffle on about this too much you can just watch these little clips which show you how works. I had to make the camera also an object so you can’t spin it around and see through walls. It simply zooms in to the player until it’s no longer behind the wall anymore. It slowly checks to see if it can zoom back out to the default zoom now and again.

Next up I needed monsters for the dungeons. Now these were a little different from the rats, goblins and wolves outside since they couldn’t really use bounding boxes and had to be able to walk around objects to chase you and also give up if they were too far away.

The AI for this was fairly complex but fun to code and again will be really useful in later parts of the game where I can make monsters even more clever.

Below if the dungeon boss room which contains a particularly intelligent zombie (intelligence is relative).

dungeonboss

Obviously these monster and the dungeon itself had to have treasure in it or whats the point in risking it?

So now I needed a treasure chest editor…

treasureeditor

(Also added a particle effect for the bigger chests to sparkle but let’s not go too deeply into everything I added).

Oh and one final thing I completely forgot about initially was the map. The map was for outside. So i took an aerial view of the dungeon and then ran it through various filters to make it look like old parchment. It’s not bad and will do for now.

Ok so that’s the dungeon finally finished. In theory the next one can be bigger and better and won’t take me 2 months to do – especially since I won’t have to make a treasure editors and do the collision detection.

Right so finally back outside we have gathering. This needed a new editor and particle effect.

Here’s a short video of this. You can’t actually gather yet but I can attached a gathering node (mining, gathering and woodcutting – for now) but the nodes exist and can have items added to them with a range of how many items you can get, their types and rarity.

So I’ll leave you with a final video of the beginnings of that…

So next up.. finish gathering so you can actually.. err.. gather and think about crafting a little?

Also I really need to fix transitional animation soon since it’s really bugging me.

Until next time…

Bit of a gap before an update – Apologies.

Anyway I’ve been really building a lot of world now. So the North-East-ish of Tarin, down a worn path with jagged rocks around is the ruins of an old temple with some mysterious stairs leading down into… what..

The entrance uses my new “zoneline data” so it knows you’ve entered an area where the player can change to a new environment (in this case switch to interior mode for lighting and terrain and also extra information like where to get the relevant models from and also small things like where exactly the player should be standing and what way they are facing when they enter). This will need some more information at some point, like how the ambient light should be (if any).

So enough waffle.. the entrance looks like:

entercatacombs

Shrouded in mist and mystery..

And after a brief pause for the game to load what it needs (since we can’t realistically hold the entirely dungeon and world in memory at the same time). Which strangely reminds my of the old RPG’s on the Commodore 64 that came on 2-4 double sided disks. You can to change disk to enter a town or dungeon. Things haven’t changed THAT much really. So the dungeon is starting to take shape, so here’s a little taster of how it’s looking.

I’ll be making it a kind of “starter” dungeon so it will just introduce a few game concepts, such as secret doors and and dangerous boss monsters at the end. It’s taking far too long to place each individual piece of wall and floor so i’ll make some combined sections of tunnel, floor ceiling so I can put it together more like Lego.

I’ll have some undead ready to roam the dungeon when it’s finished. I’ve not decided what the boss will be or the relevance of this dungeon to the story. Perhaps I’ll keep it as a side mission and completely optional.

2 challenges remain in the dungeon/interior which are related really. I need to enable collision detection with the walls (and other objects). Every object already has that ability built in but i haven’t actually set up the colliders on any of them (an invisible hidden basic shape which respesent the object, pure used to determine if the player is about to bump into it). Which leads me to the second challenge.. The camera should not be allowed to go through a wall.

Did I mention in my last post that my camera movement is the same style is WoW/FF14/EQ2 (holding right click dollys the camera around the player). So the second challenge is to treat the camera like an object and if the player tries to dolly it into a wall then the camera will zoom in on the player until it no longer is in the wall (since the player can’t be a wall).

Ok well hopefully there will be a nice/evil dungeon to walk around next time.

I’d like to add crafting and gathering at some point and spells.. but I can’t do everything simultaneously unfortunately.

Until next time..

Tag: dungeon

Dungeon Finished and Back in the Sun

Delving Into The Catacombs