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 ) 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...