The Legend of Mazzeroth - The Experimental Space Game Part 3

I had put aside development on the space game so that I could do more work on LoM. After getting a number of systems in LoM working and getting through a first and a second release, I hit a bit of a block and thought I'd pick up with space game again.

After several hours of merging changes in from LoM, rebuilding the map and camera design to be more generic, bug fixes and setting up some new systems, Space Game Prototype 2 is working.

In this video I show mostly the movement system. Players can move around what I call 'sector based maps'. It's not functional yet but ultimately the maps in Space Game are going to use what's called a QuadTree structure to enable fast rendering and collision detection of Players against in-game objects (like rocks, debris, etc.) and weapons fire. It's intended to be a very simplistic implementation of a QuadTree structure which only subdivides to three levels and all quadtree cells are made available. A 'sector' is the highest level subdivision which covers a 1024x1024 pixel area. Maps are spread out across at least a 2x2 grid of these sectors and up to 10x10 sectors (not sure if I want to do anything bigger yet).

It was helpful to LoM giving some thought about how to optimize object visibility using QuadTrees as I'll be using a much more sophisticated version of a QuadTree structure in LoM's maps not only to handle object visibility but also collision detection and combat hit detection.

Anyway, I have yet to implement that. In the mean-time I've put together the basics for the engine. The player (ship) is actually in the map itself (an improvement over LoM's current code) and the camera is attached to the player. As the player moves the camera moves to keep the player centered in view. When a player gets to an edge the camera stops scrolling while the player continues on to the edge. Exactly what I wanted to do.

The player's ship flies above the rocks as they are placed on the 'background' layer. Players and weapons are on the Object Layer (as well as any obstructions) and there's also a foreground layer which is drawn on top of everything.

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The Legend of Mazzeroth is a 2D open-source RPG/MMORPG project that's been in development since February of 2008. Originally based on The Mana World, LoM dumped that code base and started a new code base, entitled New Age, in September of 2008. I decided once there was enough material to record to video I would chronicle the development of LoM by recording short clips of each test phase.

For more information about The Legend of Mazzeroth, its developers and how you can participate, visit our website http://lom.newagesoftware.org

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