Although it took me longer than expected I recently got a first prototype of a dungeon crawler, based on my recenlty published random dungeon article, polished up far enough to show it to the public. Actually one of the biggest issue holding it back were the textures. It uses parallax (bump) mapping for giving flat surfaces a realsitic 3D look (it’s pretty much an extension to bump mapping), and for that technique you not only need a color map and a normal map but also a heightmap for each texture. After not being able to find good ones around the net I decided to quickly do the textures myself.
A quick overview of what’s in this prototype : As always it uses OpenGL and let’s you walk around a randomly generated dungeon. Lighting and parallax mapping are done using shaders (so there is no real limit to the number of light sources) and all physics and collision stuff is handled by a recent beta version of the Newton Game Dynamics engine. One of the new features is an included character controller that allows you to setup a physically correct playerbody that interacts with the environment within a few lines of code. But that’s not the only use of Newton in that prototype, as I’m also using it’s raycast functionality to determine visibility for the map. That was a pretty natrual choice as I already submitted the geometry of the dungeon to newton for creating a static physic body, so adding raycasting for visibility check was pretty easy and works fine.
Other than that, there is not much to say about this very early prototype. I’m still not sure if I’ll ever make a game based on all that random dungeon stuff, although I already wrote down a nice and basic game design that’s not your traditional dungeon crawler.
So in the meantime enjoy this video I just uploaded, and please watch id in HD. Sadly it’s only 30 fps (originall recorded with 60fps) but it should be sufficent to get an impression :