GOURANGA! Forums

The kerb stones look pretty huge, imho. They are like the width of the player's body...should probably be more like the width of the player's foot.

If a cube is still the length of a car, that means a 1 cube high wall is 4-5 metres tall. That means a normal, 2 level house would only be 1 cube high (plus the roof). Some of the GTA1 textures have two levels per cube; I think the Chinatown buildings in sanb were like like this. That seemed to work quite well.

Maybe for offices you'd have 1.5 levels per cube. You'd always use at least 2 cubes for these. The top half of a 3 cube office could use a decorative pattern beneath the roof, like the government buildings in GTA1 often had. Or, always use an even number of cubes.

Should probably have 2 windows per cube width for houses. Again, maybe have 1.5 windows per cube width for larger buildings and I guess shop windows might be a whole cube wide.

In GTA1, the houses are bloody huge and the offices are relatively small. Normal sizes houses would be about 1 cube wide for a terrace, maybe 2 cubes wide for semi-detached or small detached house. Quite rich detached houses maybe 3 cubes wide, etc. Compare the size of cars to the sizes of different buildings in GTASA perhaps?

Oh, each road lane should stay about 1 cube wide. For main roads, maybe make it 3 lanes wide with the center line in the middle of the middle cubes. This means moving the word-down areas of the textures towards middle a little bit. Not sure if your engine can make cars run offset from center of cubes but these wider roads could be a nice effect.

The new cube scaling looks good. The kerb textures are way too big though, imho.

Can you stop cars from casting shadows up onto the sides of walls? I expect players will often be crashing things into walls, so getting this effect right would be noticable.

Strange...I'd have thought a Slovene programmer would be too uptight to participate in a "sexperiment"!

That looks fun - I take it there will be a god mode cheat so we can all rocket jump? :)

And erm, why did the tank die in one hit? That kindof invalidates its point.

OH NOES! EXPLOSIONS! BLAST WAVES! EXPLOSION JUMPING!
 
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFtKPNuxW6s

Icey, add a youtube embedded video tag to forums :P

Defli that's awesome, I would have commented but didn't see and have been busy.

I love your little TDC.

Strafing..possibility, although I still think aiming would be horrible.

I'm not sure if this what you meant by using the mouse...

I've played a number of top down games which use an interesting keyboard/mouse combination. I think for the on foot stuff it would be perfect.

Basically, you would have an aiming reticle, which you move around with the mouse, which determines which way your character points. You could still move north, south, east, and west with the normal buttons, but the character would keep aiming where you wanted him to. I know you've already implemented all this stuff and probably hate the idea of changing it, but I think it would be perfect. For multi, this would be neat..

How's the AI coming? I'm graduating from an AI degree this summer, maybe I could give you a hand or some help if you have problems with some stuff? It'd be cool to try and solve some AI problems for a game. Although you're a smart guy you've probably worked it out for yourself.

Ah, that is exactly what I was thinking, just like Soldat.

I think that'll be a brilliant way to do it. The FPS style controls worked really well for the platform game style of Soldat, so there's no real reason they couldn't work well on a top down game. The only difference I can think of is that in Soldat you had to account for gravity and how bullets fell over time.

Soldat is quite a popular game, I think that's quite alot down to the physics. If TDC could have things like bouncing grenades, and nice simple controls like Soldat, it'd be really fun.

The graphics features sound cool, I'm quite interested in that sort of thing, although unfortunately my graphics knowledge consists of precisely squat.

Your pedestrian logic seems fine to me. Other than avoiding things, like roads, and running away from people with guns, I'm not sure what else you could do.

What about AI-driven vehicles... I suppose general city-goers would be quite simple (I assume road tiles would denote some sort of track?), are you planning on having lights at junctions and stuff?

Police might be a little trickier, do you have a plan for them? I suppose having working police would bring you one step closer to AI bots (who could drive cars around and find the player).

I'm just trying to get an idea for what you've done, it's an awesome project.

The scripting idea is interesting. I'd definitely like to try my hand at some AI, but it'd have to wait until after I graduate in July.