aah.. Is it possible to make a 3D raycast engine/game in basic ?
and what kind of 3D stuff is already been done on a MSX ?

I'm thinking about making a 3D engine/game in BASIC for the MSX,
I want to see how far I can push the limit of the MSX

I have no idea if it's going to work... I'm going to try anyway


I want to try it in Basic first , after that I maybe rewrite the whole thing into ASM
and update it with some extra stuff .. (like big texture maps ,etc)



Greets,

Hugo Smits

That's pretty brave of you, if there is one thing MSX is not good at, it's 3D stuffs. It's mostly due to the fact that you have to "out" every calculated point one byte at a time which slow down the displays.

The only decent realtime 3D I've seen in game was Elite, and it's only vectors. There are also demos using 3D but all are based on "tricks" so I doubt this can be used for a game.

Anyway, if your goal is to do raycasting (which is somewhat "fake" 3D), I'd advice using screen 3 to limit the amout of data you have to "out" to the VDP, or perhaps screen 2/4. There was a Doom clone made for the Spectrum in such screen mode, of course you'll probably have to limit yourself to 2 colors only.

Good luck anyway.

Elite ? the space trading game ?

anywayz.. I don't know what kind of screen mode I'm going to use,
I want to make a DOOM clone , with full color texture's on the walls and ground,
I'm going to use sprites for the enemy's,etc

What a great idea, Hugo. I can't wait to play this Doomclone for MSX-BASIC! Keep up the good work!!

This is great stuff

There is a page, describing how to write a doom-like game for MSX.
I think it's on Core Dump's maker page.

What you want is IMPOSSIBLE in MSX-BASIC, unless your MSX runs at 3.58 GHz.

Your best bet is to learn Z80 assembly language, and use the tricks described in this webpage: http://msx.gnu-linux.net/doomlike/doomlike.html

Even in 100% optimized assembly language, this is going to be tough.

Good luck!

"basic"

first try to output some polies with correct perspective and z-buffering anyway ... then bother about textures..

then get a better videochip since you need to update the whole screen frequently.


and then wake up

Hope I didn't wipe your dreams now.. but Doom on an msx with the same playability as the pc version is a real 'no no'.

If you want to supply games to the msx world -go for it-, then rather stick to platformgames, birdview RPGs, topview RPGs, racegames, shooters, pacmans, puzzles etc.

ppl (at least I), prefer a good 'semi-simple' game rather than an unplayable high-end game that was made to show the coder's skills only, but lacks playability in all aspects.

Quote:

anywayz.. I don't know what kind of screen mode I'm going to use, I want to make a DOOM clone , with full color texture's on the walls and ground, I'm going to use sprites for the enemy's,etc

If it's not too hard to implement, could you also do some bump mapping and nifty particle physics?! That would be awesome!!

Good idea, especially since bump mapping is even heavy for a 1400MHz PC with GeForce 3 !

well he didn't say how many FPS he would like to have.. I could imagine that it takes .. dunno.. 10 seconds to build 1 screen in asm.. after all, wolfenstein ran on a 286 already..

Quote:

I'm going to use sprites for the enemy's,etc

No, that's lame. Polygons! Come on, you can do it!

hmm I hope he's using KUN on a turbo-R at least

btw.. where do you store all those maps.. would be kinda boring just to walk around in 1 room..

Quote:

hmm I hope he's using KUN on a turbo-R at least btw.. where do you store all those maps.. would be kinda boring just to walk around in 1 room..

Of course he should use some realtime compression. But that's not the hardest part.

well.. I think it will run pretty good on a MSX , like I said after I've done the BASIC version, I'm going to make an ASM version!

I'm going to work on it tomorrow..

at the end of the day I want to have this :

*wired frame 3D level
*collision detection


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Quote:

If you want to supply games to the msx world -go for it-, then rather stick to platformgames, birdview RPGs, topview RPGs, racegames, shooters, pacmans, puzzles etc. ppl (at least I), prefer a good 'semi-simple' game rather than an unplayable high-end game that was made to show the coder's skills only, but lacks playability in all aspects.

hehe.. I was just waiting for somebody to say that
I have made some nice puzzle games,etc but I really want to push
the msx to it's limit .. I'm not going to sell the game, I will just
give it away for free

I'm working for SEGA as a lead programmer for a gameboy Advance game,
and In my spare time I want to do some crazy projects (like this one)
I don't know if it's going to work..

I just don't want to make another puzzle game , because I'm working on that kind of games the whole week.. so In my spare time I want to do something "impossible"

check out RMF megademo 1 ... (dunno where to DL it tho)..

there's a vector part somewhere half of the disk, showing a pre-calculated space shuttle. The number of wires isn't that much, but it runs smooth.

The number of wires is by far not enough to make a room/building, and these wires were precalculated, and 'cut' when they went off the screen! Forget about realtime for xxx sake!

As can be seen from some of the reactions here.. just skip this idea Rather do a good platformgame with good gfx/playability rather than a screen3 2-color experiment no-one's gonna play..!