And now, for something *completely* different...

[DarkDragon]

I took time during the recent downage to create my first custom quest, titled "Labyrinth of Wisdom." It uses a slightly modified Classic tileset.

It is more of a test/demo than a full-fledged quest, but I have worked on it to my satisfaction.

You will need the very latest beta (378) to play this, as it fixes some otherwise very annoying bugs (being a developer occasionally has its advantages.)

Except for art and music that I obviously stole, the quest is unpassworded and in the public domain. Cannibalize as you see fit.


NB: Running in full-screen is *NOT* recommended on sluggish machines!

[bigjoe]

Holy shiznite! How in the world did you pull this one off??

[The_Amaster]

Duuuuuuuuuuude! That's awsome. I am not kidding when I say we have the first steps of ZC3D here. If we can eradicate the lag, and smooth out the distance stuff...

Maybe not al la N64, but our own custom engine, kinda like 2.5d

[DarkDragon]

Heh. Breaker never saw this coming back in his "Top 20 sign's."

If we can eradicate the lag, and smooth out the distance stuff...
Possibly. There are a number of technical limitations at play in this demo:
1) Only 16 rays are cast, giving the game an effective resolution of 16x160. Casting 32 rays instead, and using "half-tile" strips instead of the current full tile strip, would double the game's horizontal resolution and make the game look a lot better - but since it was already running at ~50 FPS on my laptop I did not go down this path. You are free to experiment though.

2) I've recently greatly optimized the scripting engine, but this quest is essentially a stress test of the engine and has pushed it almost to the limit. Consider the rendering pipeline:
1. The ray casting engine is written in ZScript,
2. Which is compiled into ZASM (with efficiency loss),
3. Which is interpreted into ZC drawing primitive commands by the ZC scripting engine (with efficiency loss),
4. Which is interpreted by the ZC rendering engine to invoke Allegro drawing routines (with efficiency loss),
5. Which calls your hardware.

Like I said, I've recently optimized step 3 and 4 somewhat, so significant performance gains from these areas is unlikely. Porting the entire thing to ZASM might make the 32-ray plan feasible, but... ugh.

[Zelda_Warrior]

Hmm... Yes, this is quite slow considering it doesn't look the hottest

But wow, thought I'd never see ZC doing 2.5D

Btw, good music for this kind of quest 0.o

[Majora]

Freaking awesome. In all honesty, I thought the limits of scripting would be worse than this (No offence :P) There is hope yet for what I want to script, well done DD!

[erm2003]

That was pretty cool DD. It's neat to see how much ZC really can do when you know how to use it.

[Pineconn]

Though obviously a little rough, that was pretty dang awesome. Perhaps a way to block would make it better (since I always end up running up to a Wizzrobe and shooting at it rapidly).

But enough of my being picky! That was so excellent. Never expected that full-ish 3D was possible on ZC's engine (and a little scripting...).

[C-Dawg]

Hah, awesome. Not even sure how you did that!

No slowdown at all on my machine, btw.

[jman2050]

Good god DarkDragon... just... wow...

[Gleeok]

Wow...just wow... I don't even think I want to know how you managed to turn an NES clone into something like that. I'm impressed to say the least.

[*b*]

Shit, DD. That's incredible. Seriously. It's hard to imagine that's just Zelda Classic... Wow...

[Shoelace]

That was awesome dude. :P I was wondering though, is there a way to look at the scripts on a unpassworded quest, because I was wondering how you did that. It was great. :P I love the, "Now back to bug testing." lol

[DarkDragon]

Absolutely. Go to Tools->Compile ZScript and you should be able to edit the scripts/dump them to a file.

[CastChaos]

But this is INCREDIBLE!!!
This IS a 3D game!!! Making a 3D game with ZC is like making an atom bomb from a tinderbox!!! DarkDragon sets the limit very high!!! I feel like teleporting or time travel were invented just now!!! Ultimate provement for everything is possible!!!

Questmakers, I command you to copy this script and make your games 3D! For great justice!
(wow, swordswinging in 3D... just imagine for example Hero of Dreams in 3D... King Dodongo would make some pants wet...)

[Joe123]

That was amazing...
I didn't get any slowdown on my computer, but I ran it in 320x240 though.

[Zelda_Warrior]

It wasn't slow on my main but it was slower on my Pentium I machine. Also, the quest looks fairly big. 1.30MB with classic tiles and a short quest?

Maybe that's normal size, but it seems a bit big to me

[_L_]

This IS a 3D game!!!
Uh, no. It's Super Mario Kart.

Say, maybe someone should have a "ZScript Engine Abuse" competition wherein people compete to make quests that produce games that least resemble The Legend of Zelda. Compare with Z-Machine abuses (http://wurb.com/if/genre/42).

[Dan Furst]

Neat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting

I've written some raytracing code in college; well, it's not the same thing, but I can at least appreciate the extensiveness of the algorithm. Good job!

[Din]

Whoa! I never thought this could be possible... this is awesome! Wow!

[Zelda_Warrior]

The fighting system is kind of messed up...

All i did was let the wizzrobes get close then spam shots at them then heal with the cheat and repeat.

This is actually quite 3D. What defines 3D? It's like Doom or any other early 3D. Granted, its not as good because of resolution and the way it is displayed but it is well on its way to being a full fledged 3D-capable zelda editor. Of course, you need to know how to do it

[Pheonix]

Wow. I would have never expected that 3-Dish graphics would be on ZC. Odd how there is this before Z3 scrolling...

[DarkFlameWolf]

Wow. I would have never expected that 3-Dish graphics would be on ZC. Odd how there is this before Z3 scrolling...
yes, you think the devs would have their priorities set the other way around. :rolleyes:

[Majora]

This is an achievement, no doubt. But for true 3D, you need Polygons.
So yea, it's 8-bit 3D, let's settle on that ;)

*gets shot* :goofy:

[Sam Atoms]

My ZOMFG-O-Meter just shattered. Now, you will have to pay me to buy a new ZOMFG-O-Meter. :cool:

Outstanding concept, but it looks like you just get the one time through the way it is set up at present. Could you take on the cluster of blue wizzrobes in the box chamber on three hearts? Not likely.



By the way, you know . . . . . right before discovering Zelda Classic and the ability to create custom quests, my previous interest was in DOOM Wads. We've come full circle........

[elise]

It may be wow and it may be all that to allot of you but for me it really has nothing to do with ZC and to be totally honest I really don't hope the old ZC Quests disappear because of the things you can do with it now ( making Doom games and call them ZC or making ZC quests in a doom environment ) :shrug:

[Zelda_Warrior]

It may be wow and it may be all that to allot of you but for me it really has nothing to do with ZC and to be totally honest I really don't hope the old ZC Quests disappear because of the things you can do with it now ( making Doom games and call them ZC or making ZC quests in a doom environment ) :shrug:

Won't happen.

1. Too hard to make

2. The quests made with it just can't be very good even with more updates, because the ZC engine just isn't good at making that style game.