Floor casting

After I added a quick prototype of floor-casting, it was obvious the technique I’m familiar with (from the permadi tutorials) would be too slow for the android version. There is definitely a way to speed this up, but I’ve removed the floor casting for now until I come up with an alternative method that is faster.

Textured Walls

The big addition though is that I now have the ability to texture walls. Check out the screenshot!

Next Steps

Now, I need to modularize my code. It should be easy for someone to change the map (perhaps load it as a png/bmp) and it should also be easy to change the texture on each of the walls. Once the code is squared away, I plan to add sprite support. Then I’ll be ready for a Wolfenstein-like game.

Switch to LibGDX

I really wanted to make my raycast engine compatible with cell phones, but I also wanted to be able to play it on my own machine. Because of this, I decided to switch my raycast engine from QT over to the java based LibGDX. This allows me to run the same project on my desktop AND my Droid X phone. Seriously, LibGDX is great!

Progress update

I find the project to be moving a lot quicker now that I’m in JAVA and using the easy-to-use LibGDX. Checkout a screenshot of the current state below.

It features one joystick (on the android version) that allows you to move around a simple room.

Next steps

Next, I plan to implement floor and ceiling casting. Tutorial for the algorithm can be found at permadi.

I’ve recently started building a raycasting engine using QT. Here are my (simple) results so far.

Implementation

I created a View based on QGraphicsView. I then added a scene to this (inherited from QGraphicsScene) which contains 240 rectangles. Each rectangle represents a slice from the raycasting algorithm (one ray = one rectangle).

The math was from a tutorial I found online. It’s really a great source to getting started.

Results so far

So far, I have a rectangular room that renders a solid color for walls. You are able to rotate using the mouse right now, but there are still some bugs to fix!

Check out the source on github.

The Ludum Dare October 2011 challenge was to create a game in a month and make $1. I’m proud to say, I surpassed that by 60 cents! It’s barely enough to buy a candy bar, but it’s interesting how just a buck can motivate you to keep creating. Here is proof that I beat the challenge (from Kongregate):

Now I need to figure out a way to make REAL money from developing games.

Youtube unveiled it’s new autocaptioning feature to the mainstream last week and well… it definitely needs work. Regardless, I found some hilarious ‘mis’-translations. For example, check out this video of earlymorningzombie.com’s review of the iMPROV boogie board.

Here are some interesting/funny excerpts from the auto captioning:

“So let me explain how this works hand into a fist side here”
“Casey had two sheets of plastic right… He’s wanted for murder and not an artist”

“Messages conferees what that’s why all this black kids because the…”

“There’s the jews how this works”

According to Mediapost, Google is intending to use the auto-translations for metadata. At this stage, that is a bad idea. Suppose I did a google video search for “Casey the plastic murderer.” One of the top results would be the video above!

I can appreciate a good idea, but I think auto-captioning needs work (and probably will for another 20 years). Though I’m glad to see they are testing it on us!