I am almost finished with Voxelcraft. I have most of the vasic functions finished, such as texture, mini-cube, and lighting, and now all that's left to do is channels and saving, as well as a few adjustments to make the program more user friendly.
Channels will be easy. I will separate each channel into different vertex buffers and draw those separately. Each channel also contains data for rotation, translation, and scale. Cubes can be placed into those channels. This will give effects such as objects floating around, gears turning, and basically gives cubes movement. So if I wanted to make a scene where you are on top of a moving train, I'd put the train cubes and the scenery cubes on different channels. This could also allow me to easily adjust parts of the map inside game code (like if a player goes up to a door and opens it). Also, for scrolling, I'll have to copy the channel the other direction to complete the scrolling effect.
Saving is pretty self-explanatory. It will make the Voxelcraft files to be used with other programs and ultimately the game. It will save vertex data and world matrices for each channel, as well as light data.
I'm glad I got this far in development, but I am a bit disappointed in ending it here, though. It feels like there should be more things to do. Like depth blur and HDR. But that may make the project too complex. (I want to keep everything simple) Voxelcraft was meant to create simple cube worlds, not very realistic models! But I might still put such effects in later, when I work on a later development tool.
I've been working on it for so long, too. I just want to end it so I can move on. I've started it maybe six months ago (?), and stopped after I got basic colored cubes down because I couldn't figure out normals (I had no 3d experience before this) After working on another program (a 2d skeletal animation program), I decided I wanted to go back to Voxelcraft. Now I'm finally finished, and I'm quite content with it for the most part.
But I need to be working on other areas such as gameplay. Before I work on gameplay, though, there's another graphics program I need to make. It will be a 2d particle system called Dust. It will make all the attack animations and special effects used in battle for the game. I say 2D because the camera in battle will probably not be as free, it will move around but not rotate (created a 2.5D effect). Since I'm doing this, I can get away with 2D effects. Don't worry, though, camera can still rotate when it needs to, and there will be 3D particles, it just probably won't be used in battle.
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