I started this iteration of CPRL using a .NET SDL wrapper for the graphics, which I quickly discovered to have one huge flaw that would make it very problematic to do what I want to do. It was pretty much impossible to render sprites with shading or tinting in real time, which would be necessary for the lighting engine I hope to do. Even if I had decided to drop lighting I would still need it for drawing explored terrain outside of the current field of view. Rather than limit my options, I decided to write up my own hardware accelerated 2D framework using OpenTK. Being not very experienced with OpenGL, I was intimidated by the thought, but it ended up only taking me a day to get the core functionality I wanted.
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Don't worry. The final game shouldn't look like this. |
As you can see, it supports rotation, scaling, and tinting and is also relatively fast. The screenshot is just a sample I did to test as I worked on it. It's not quite finished, so I haven't yet integrated it with the existing game engine. On that note, I did throw together a few new graphics.
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Fans of the Sega Genesis Shadowrun game may appreciate this screenshot. |
My art really isn't that great, but it's easy for users to swap out tiles with their own, so custom tilesets can easily be a thing if the game ends up being good enough to have a fan base.
2:30 AM Edit:
I wasn't quite ready to call it quits after this blog post, but I did change gears a bit and do something that I've been meaning to do for a very, very long time.
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I finally put that level generator to use! |