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[TiagoTiago]

What do you think of rendering the map, tiles and all, into a texture applied to a mesh with about the same resolution of the tiles (or perhaps more), using the height map to deform the mesh, near clipping plane to cut mountains and other stuff above the current Z level, a slight paralaxing as  you move to other spots on the map, fog for stuff bellow the current Z level, OpenGL hardware accelerated lighting etc?

[Capntastic]

The game's already using OpenGL, I dunno about parallaxing or fog or anything working really well with ASCII stuff though.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Yeah, it's already OpenGL, with Baughn's .40d# variants greatly improving on it. Parallaxing is a great potential way of ditching the current "1 Z-level at a time" viewmode, since it would simply extrapolate the current abilities of the engine, showing all visible layers below the current one on additional surfaces, properly scaled according to distance from the camera with very little extra effort required. Depth fog or other forms of shading are also possible - there was a great mockup video posted by someone that used alpha blending for this effect (IIRC), and it was very awesome. With some shader work, even depth of field would be possible for when there's stuff visible above the currently viewed level.

The lighting is something Toady already has planned, but whether or not it's going to be hardware-accelerated is a good question.

(edit: hrm. I just now realised that this is talking about hardware-accelerated shaders and dynamic lighting in a game that can be, essentially, played via TelNet. DF goes Beyond the Impossible even with the graphics.)

[sweitx]

The lighting is something Toady already has planned, but whether or not it's going to be hardware-accelerated is a good question.

(edit: hrm. I just now realised that this is talking about hardware-accelerated shaders and dynamic lighting in a game that can be, essentially, played via TelNet. DF goes Beyond the Impossible even with the graphics.)

Well, most rogue-like game has lighting system implemented (namely, any tile that has LOS to the light source is lit).  However, most rogue-like don't have 3D maps.

[TiagoTiago]

taking advantage of the GPU processing power for lighting should make lighting not have such a huge effect in the performance

[TiagoTiago]

Btw, for the stuff above the current Z level, cutting the mesh with the near clipping plane would better reflect how things are nowadays with us being able to see inside mountains and stuff.

Though perhaps things could be made pseudo-volumetric, with several layers, one for each Z level, but each layer would also have it's own height map (water depth/height, ramps, plants, constructions etc), with the parts without surface (free air and solid areas inside the terrain) transparent, this might allow for the different Z levels to touch each other (like in the transitions for ramps, rivers going down etc).

Perhaps it would be good to have control of at how many Z levels above the current position the near clipping plane would be to allow people to choose to see above instead of inside when desired.

[TiagoTiago]

Btw, using the volumetric approach, it should also be possible to have orthogonal points of view, looking from the sides instead of just from above (perhaps switching the navigation keys around so you still have things move on the screen the same way, basicly swapping the Z level keys with the north/south keys), geometry wouldn't connect as easily, but it would be quite useful, specially with paralaxing.

edit: you can even have a very basic navigation mode, were you move fwd and back, turn to the sides in 90 degrees increments and move up and down