Screens of the day 14 - Pulse

I am a little late with the entire IndieDB operation. I did not anticipate correctly the amount of administrative and otherwise not codey tasks that need to be done. Oh well, a couple of weeks delay won't be the end of the world.

Meanwhile, I took a new swing at the 3D engine thing and I failed again. First I tried to do a 2D isometric engine, but with the world drawn with the help of 3D polygons. It was fast and seemed promising, but I just couldn't figure out a way to make it not ugly. Then I tried a traditional full 3D engine, but with an orthographic camera. I may have failed both tries, but I did learn some important lessons, and now I can tell with a reasonable amount of certainty that DwarvesH, because of its inherent complexity and requirements for the engine, will have a 3D engine if and only if all of the following condition are met:

• I acquire very good theoretical knowledge about 3D worlds, the math behind it and the practical implications.
• I have worked extensively with a 3D engine for at least a year.
• I have spent at least 3 months doing nothing else on this project except implementing the 3D engine.

So this task is put on hold, maybe forever.

The whole 3D revival was due to some events that happened while I was trying to get new graphics. I should post a collage with all the experimenting here soon so you can see how much friking work it is try and give a good look to such a game .

Anyway, I am in the process of adding a few more features to the 2D engine. Take this cube as example:

"My what a pretty cube! Did you draw it yourself?" is what a sarcastic reader might say. I know it is ugly and I did draw it myself. Procedurally! It is actually supposed to be stone, but it turned out more like sand.

This is not the first time you see something procedurally generated here and this process still has the same properties, including slight differences at every generation so nothing looks exactly the same twice. But the new feature is that this time the resulting size is no longer fixed. I can generate such cubes at all size, but due to the way isometric tiles work, multiples of 4 are preferred. Here is a animation demoing the generation process: