2009/10/15 Christian Mauduit
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Hi,
I like this idea a lot.
Glad you like the idea. I think it would be a good solution, since it stays close to the original LW pixel look, while also (hopefully) look cool. There are so much 3D out there these days, so it would be cool with something a little different. I really like the look of raw pixels moving about.
As I understand it, we would let the core
algorithm do complicated, reliable stuff (this is important in network
play) and have, on top of this, a pure eye-candy superficial algorithm,
which would move pixels/fighters (whatever) here and there, keeping them
roughly in the right place but not being too pedantic.
Exactly.
This has IMHO the
great advantage to allow someone to play with apparently 1000x1000
fighters on his screen, because he has a powerfull computer, with another
who only see 100x100 fighters on legacy hardware. Both still play the same
game.
I didn't consider that, but you are right, the pixels could also be larger than one pixel. We could even write really advanced code for the pixel-movement, which might be disabled for people with slower machines. I don't know how much code we could waste at each pixel ... there would need to be an awful lot of them.
My main idea was that each pixels was aware of the nearest 8 fields around their fighter, and would act accordingly. There could be used a high-res version of map.png for the pixels movement. The pixels could also have a move-per-second which was different from that of the fighters.
We could let a lot of the pixel-groups act the same way, perhaps turned 90/180/270 degrees or mirrored.
The pixels could either:
A) move in relation to its fighter (the same way that a man walking on a road isn't affected by the earths movement in the universe)
B) move in relation to the map, and move toward the fighter using shortest path, or something cheaper.
I fear that the actual programming would take some more time than an OpenGl coolness solution. On the posetive side, I think it will be pretty fun to code!
- Kasper