The XI Cast engine, coupled with the Rival Game Creator, is a modern ray-casting engine that is designed to help those who wish to create 3D shooter games but have no knowledge of 3D programming. The Rival Game Creator features an easy to learn UI that is designed to be familiar and logical to follow, it will allow to you to create a first person shooter game in a matter of minutes.

Report RSS Editor + Models + Textures + PNG format

Worked on a few things including: Rival Game Creator's Level Editor Variable Wall Heights (Technically this is ceiling-floor height) Textures 3D Models Optimisations

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So what have I done in the past few days? I'll go through this in order of date completed:

Level Editor

It actually exports usable map files now, now for the other 99.9% features it needs before it is finished!

In it's current state it will only export 0's and 1's (Wall/No wall) as well as heights (Which aren't yet editable in the editor).

Wall Heights

Yeah the walls can be different heights (Dictated by ceiling:floor height relations)

Textures

They now load.
But because of the 0 and 1 maps they're all the same :s If I threw in a 2 the texture would be different.
Loading textures is hard-coded currently, I plan to make a sort of manifest of textures that's generated in the editor for the engine to read from and assign into slots that are read by sectors, sprites and the...

...Models!

This simple 1 poly model (The thing that is sloped to the side over the cabbage sprite) can very easily be turned into a full 3D model! Only problem: I have zero knowledge of 3D modelling programs, this uses my own model format which can only (Currently) be edited inside a text file. Doh!

I'll impress you all with my hand-entered 3D models later down the line.

Ahem:

One big problem I've faced, being a software rendered engine (Haven't learned 3D acceleration yet...) every time a new feature is added the frame rate takes a hit, so I've been optimising so adding an extra polygon doesn't lose you 1 FPS, after the code fixing the engine gained 15FPS, doesn't sound like much but one of my test machines (2.0ghz dual core laptop, 2GB RAM) needed that 15FPS to stay above the refresh rate (This is at a high resolution rendering).Comparing to Raycasting Game Maker, XI Cast runs at a much much higher resolution with much higher frame-rates, for some reason RGM runs pretty slow on great machines.Let me put it like this: When XI Cast is set to RGM's resolution (Something like 313x212 for some reason) it runs at 357 FPS tops, 340 FPS min, if I were to remake Wolfenstein 3D down to the resolution (320x200) XI Cast runs at 360 FPS on my machine and that's with floors and ceilings being drawn, without them it's much higher, keep in mind I had itunes, gimp, visual c++, visual basic.net, dropbox, steam and firefox open, so this is a rough benchmark done just to test.If you want to know the target FPS it's actually 30fps stable on the worst machine I have at 640x480, that's the 2ghz laptop I mentioned above.

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