Are you going to support even flat shading?
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Yep, it’s already supported – you can turn off computing the values per-pixel and only have them per-triangle, which will also make it muuuch more faster (what you’re seeing above is completely unopotimized, that should get faster too).
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Oh my gosh… would a small blurb about this be possible for the magazine? (I’m starting to sound like an obnoxious reporter haha)
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I would enjoy writing something 
But I’d probably like to have something specific first to not be just talking about abstract things. I’m planning to create some demos again, then I can do this. Which reminds me I’ve forgotten to send you my licensing article. I’ll send it to you via PM.
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Great! Maybe for the second issue of the magazine then 
I’ll check out the article right now!
I know you enjoy working finding ways to do things more then just making games, but I’d sure love if you could just make 1 with what you came up so far. 
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We’ll see, but I’m not sure about it. The problem is I now have a job, which is not an ideal situation, it prevents me from doing useful things.
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I think most of us have the same problem
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I’d offer to help, but I wouldn’t get on very well with the C code.
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Maybe we could help in other ways. Maybe he does the coding and someone deals with the graphics, someone else helps with level design and maybe another one could help with sounds and music. That way you would not have to worry about C at all 
I can do graphics (sprites or 3D modelling, but maybe not texturing) but I’m not particularly good at it.
Come to think of it, I don’t have a gitlab account so I wouldn’t be able to regularly contribute code anyway.
I have yet to see how well it can be optimized – a small model taking only a fraction of the screen can be drawn quickly, but to draw a full 3D view of a typical FP shooter in the “per-pixel mode” (textures, lighting etc.) means having the whole screen filled and that’s a ton of very expensive pixels. Not sure what FPS we can reach.
Anyway, games like a 3D space shooter are already possible. A flat shaded game should also be no problem.
One game I’ve been thinking about was something like Neverball.
As with the raycasting I’d like to provide demos and resources to start making your own game. But it will yet take some time for me to create these of course. I just wanted to give you guys an early preview.
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If you do turn-based combat rather than an FPS then framerate isn’t as important.
I’m thinking something like Etrian Odyssey.
This trailer gives a good idea of what Etrian Odyssey is like:
But if you want to see the gameplay in action, this is the best I could find:
It demonstrates the movement and the map feature.
The first battle isn’t until about 3 minutes in.
I remember you showing some gameplay footage of the raycasters,
but I don’t remember there being any documentation as such.
Reminds me of Spectraball.
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Good idea as well! We mustn’t forget that a 3D game very often involes a non-trivial 3D physics, so most games that come into question now are games with “2D gameplay”, just visualized as 3D. I’d like to make a 3D physics library too, but that’s far future now.
I’ve quickly optimized a few things now and the model renders relatively nicely, maybe even 20 FPS (in emulator) when most of the screen is filled with textured pixels, which is the most expensive kind of pixels. If you leave out texturing for most pixels and only shade e.g. with one color + fog, you get much higher FPS, and you can still texture small objects. I’ve also found that Pokitto can handle a low-precision z-buffer, which potentially means we don’t have to sort triangles and can have a lot of them in the scene.
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I’ve often wondered about that.
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This is how it looks in SDL with shading and everything if anyone’s interested:
I’ve also got terminal rendering demo. Would like to create some game-like demo, then fix all the bugs I find and then start porting these to Pokitto.
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I forgot to ask earlier, what screen mode does the Pokitto version use?
Presumably it’s 110x88 with a 256 colour palette,
but if that’s the case then I’m surprised the earlier .gif looks as detailed as it does,
I’m half expecting there’s something else going on.
(I think I had another question as well, but I’ve since forgotten it. Time seems to really be flying lately.)
Yes, it is. I am reusing the same palette I created for the raycasting, it should allow to fake diminishing colors in a similar way to the Doom engine, though there’s no fog or lighting in the gif yet, just plain texture. I guess that texture simply adds that detail, and since it is so low-res, you can’t see it’s actually mostly flat triangles.
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In which case I’m surprised that the resolution gives that much detail.
Perhaps the added colours do make up for the lack of 2D resolution.
(I was going to say ‘dimensional resolution’, but arguably colour is also a dimension.)
Another question: are you making the models yourself or are they from something in particular?
(The low-res house in particular reminds me of Morrowind stylistically, but the chest in the SDL version looks familiar.)
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The models were made by me, it’s one of my hobbies besides programming, you can find them on my opengameart or Blendswap, they’re of course CC0. The house and the chest are older models from my RPG item collection packs (the textures are also painted by me, in GIMP), the cat I’ve made around yesterday because I wanted to test animation and couldn’t find a suitable model (the texture is made from CC0 photos from Wikimedia Commons so that one is not completely mine, I didn’t feel like chasing my cat around to get good photos). The walk animation only uses two keyframes.
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