Rooms at last

You might have noticed a hiatus on this project, but finally I returned to it to finish off the floorplan: here it is. The rooms were generated mainly by using polar coordinates around the space defined by the corridoor end points, and turned out to be relatively straightforward.

At this point, the project really needs to switch away from pyglet to something more useful, that can do the needed 3d extrusion more easily...

Dungeon Generation Part 4: Clearing space for the rooms

Here we are, we now have spaces where the rooms are going to go: my initial attempts at creating rooms did not go so well, so I had to backtrack and refactor the code, in order to get this to work.



Its actually a fairly simple computation: work out the length of the corridor, scale it, and re-adjust the co-ordinates of each end. This requires some book keeping in terms of data structures: knowing which end terminates at which room, so that you don't accidentally srhink the worong end.

Dungeon Generation Part 3 : Doors

Thinking about key points in positioning a room, I decided doors were a good idea, so I tried to code up a routine that would reasonably place doors. I interpolated about 30% up along a line and placed a small black perpendicular line prependicular to the line along the centre of the corridor. I went with the simple rule of thumb that a point that connected more than two corridors was the centre of the room. I got this:

Not bad, but not quite right. Probably the best way forward is to decide on an overall radius that will establish the size of the room and fit the doors to that.

Dungeon Generation Part Two: Corridors

And once the network is complete, we do corridors. This is straigtforward geometry: extrude two lines at either end of our connecting line, perpendicular to said line, then join them up. When you do that you get this:

A floorplan which should extrude nicely into the third dimension. However there's one more thing to do before we tackle this, and that is the actual rooms. Which is where things get a tad harder..

Dungeon generation for fun and..well, fun...

Recently I was inspired by the PixelCity series of articles. I was impressed what could be achieved by judicious application of basic OpenGL and some clever aesthetic decisions. I'm inspired enough to try the same thing, only with dungeons. My weapons of choice are pyglet and Python.

The first and most obvious thing to try was to generate a network of corridors. Here's what I ended up with.

I generated this mainly by picking a point and then connecting it to one of it's closest neighbours. The points are initially distributed on a grid and peturbed by a random amount to make the layout less "manhattan" like. The order the points are picked in is related to the grid order, which is why you see a "spine" at the side of the dungeon. I thought this would make for interersting gameplay: monster - infested branches connected by a relatively safe trunk. So this is what I went with. In the next part, we will get some corridoor walls. Once I have a decent looking dungeon, I will release the source.

Give it a kick, it might still be going..

Just to prove I haven't been completely inactive on the project front since my flirtation with Lisp (which isn't over yet, either, just maturing slowly), here's a screenshot of yet another thing. Basically this is a mesh importer for the excellent OGRE engine, powered by wxWidgets and The Open Asset Import Library. It doesn't handle textures or bones yet, but it does more than enough for now as the Open Asset Import Library imports an ungodly number of formats, it should be possible to magpie bits of free art from the web in whatever format and assemble them into a passable scene using this thing..