Advanced Raycasting Extension?

Hi everyone,

Disthron here. Dose anyone remember the Raycating extension? I do, it's can be used to make games that look like Wolfenstein 3D. When I found out about it I was kicking myself for not being more involved in the community. If I had, there were a few simple features that I would have suggested. Most people don't know about them because they appeared in obscure games. Obviously the team might have decided against them but it would have been cool just to have talked about it.

As it stands it is an awesome extension regardless. Between the level editor and the engine that came with it, it's super user friendly.

Anyway, the reason I'm making this post is to gauge the communities interest in having a more advanced raycasting extension. Something along the lines of Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. The reason I want to develop a 2.5D engine instead of a full 3D one is I believe that it strikes a balance between graphical quality and ease of use. You can use the sprites and textures to make a 2.5D game look really nice yet the simple to build level geometry makes the barrier to entry very low.

If there is enough interest I'll be looking to pay someone to develop the extension. It will need to be at least as easy to use as the first raycasting extension and part of the project will be to develop an engine that people can build there game directly on top of.

Quote from happygreenfrog

How about a build engine extension? That would technically be a more advanced raycasting object. I think that's the way to go, if you ask me. But yes, I would like a more advanced raycasting object, though I don't have the original to see just how awesome it is. I would really settle for just about anything in MMF2 that allows for advanced 3D games, though, since it's something I think would be an awesome thing to be in MMF2.

Well, that would depend on the developer. If porting the Build engine would be easier than starting from scratch and the dev is willing to do that, than that's fine by me. I'm mostly interested in the feature set, and how it works within MMF2. I have a list of must have features and a list of "stuff that would be really cool if we can afford it".

Quote from Fanotherpg

I would only say somewhat interested.

Played with Raycaster engine as well, and it was a good attempted but it proved to be very unstable (Level Editor) and quite tricky to use with proper game especially when you required control with objects in distance.

The closest to what you want to achieve is Build Engine or even Jedi Engine not Raycasting. I am trying to work on something Raycaster like with shaders.

Technically the closest what was in development was StoneGoose extension family by MattEsch for Hayo. But dunno if he still works on them.

Please login to see this link.

The Build engine was a raycasting engine, and a very advanced one at that. I'm not sure what you mean when you say control with objects in distance but a raycasting engine is 2.5D. It's game logic is the same as a 2D overhead game. Witch many people are familiar with. It's just displayed in a semi 3D fashion.

As for actually using the Build engine, there may still be legal issues to doing that. Even though Silverman has released it to the public I'm not sure if you can sell products made with it. So I might not be able to sell the extension and users might not be able to sell there games. If that is the case then I wouldn't be able to afford to produce it. However, I do consider it to be the gold standard in raycasting engines and the project will be taking inspiration from it's features. If nothing else.

Oh, now I get what you mean. Being able to select objects in the world with the mouse like that would be a good feature to have. Specially for RPG's or Adventure style games. But I'm not sure if it would be on the "must have" list. It would depend on how hard it was to do.

Quote from Fanotherpg

It is something I was able TO DO with Raycaster object with lots of trickery, and for me its must have. Why I would pay for 3D representation of my objects, if I can't interact with them in that 3D environment at the same time, not using its potential?

I see what you are saying. This is a good feature and if it isn't too hard, it will be on the to-do list.

Quote from happygreenfrog

Just curious, but how much interest is "enough interest"? Because, so far, everyone who has voted is at least somewhat interested, and 10 people have voted so far.

Well, I'd like to make enough money to at least cover the development for the extension. I'm pretty sure 10 people isn't enough though. Perhaps I should post in the other MMF2 forum? Even though it says technical help it seems to me the main MMF2 section.

You might be right about being able to sell the code that the MMF2 extension makes. I'll have to see if I can get in contact with him. However, it dose only say distribute and that is not necessarily the same as sell. Also, I'm not going to get hung up on porting the Build Engine. If the programmer who accepts the job thinks it will be better to start from scratch then that's what they should do.

Yea, he was the first person I talked to actually. He said that the 3D extension that was talked about in the latest Click Disk was pretty fare off and it was not an entry level extension. This Raycaster would be in entry level extension. Much like the older one it would come with an engine that would cover most of the things people would be looking for in a raycaster so people could build there game on top of it. But could still start from scratch if they wanted.

I realize you were looking for the mouse selection mechanic but I don't think most people were looking for that. It would be cool to include it though. Could you post a demo MFA of how you did it? That would be really interesting to see.

Quote from Fanotherpg

Purely math. Cursor X and Y is transferred into 2D space on arc and distance, allowing to be more precise, but it is not perfect at all. It detects edges and such but overlapping objects is pretty much no runner for it.

Please login to see this link.

The most irritating thing for me thought is that Raycaster ENGINE was closed source (WTF?) and I begged Kisguri many times to give me source as I couldn't stand crashes and some design flaws of it and couldn't get my head around how the original was done.

Do you mean the one like the Clear Sky engine or Discaster (my edit of that). Because they were both open source as far as I could tell. Unless you mean making the code of the raycasting extension itself was available.

Quote from Fanotherpg

I mean level editor source code, which was provided with the extension itself. Neither Level Editor nor Wolf3D tech demo were open source.

Well, the level editor was created using the raycasting extension. All the functions in the level editor are just inside the raycasting extension so you can make your own editor if you want.