Open World FPS without FPLE

[JayRay]

and maybe.... without scripts either?

Ready to take the dungeon crawl outside?

Okay, so, we're mostly familiar with FPLE by MCG, a script and DLL package that allows you to have a First Person Dungeon Crawl. I've had a chance to take a look at it, as well as another 3d dungeon script used for VXA, and I think I may have a solution that if works would allow for a psuedo 3d experience.

We've seen the mode 7 where sprites are shown, but they don't turn, or of they do turn they don't apear to have any substance, except for being a 2d plane. What I think I MAY be able to is set up variable X and Y for each 'event' and the Player X and Y... Depending on if the event is in the players 'line of sight' it can appear on the screen as a picture, Since RMXP has a limit of 50 pictures, it makes it quite easy to setup a good enough FOV for all the pictures I'd want to display.


7 in the back row, with the centermost having a higher z-index 1,3,5,7,6,4,2
7 in the next to the back row, with the centermost having a higher z-index 8,10,12,14,13,11,9
7 more in the next row, with the centermost having z-index priority 15,17,19,21,20,18,16
5 more in the next row, again, centermost, being pictures 22,24,26,25,23
5 in the next, pictures like this, 27,29,31,30,28
5 in the next, pictures like this, 32,34,36,35,33
3 in the next, pictures like this, 37,39,38
3 in the next, pictures like this, 40,42,41
3 in the next, pictures like this, 43,45,44
and then the foreground most picture, lucky picture 46.

Ironically, if you're going for a Drakken 3rd person style play like...


Then you have the perfect opportunity for your 4 party team to have pictures 47, 48, 49, and 50 be your partymembers.

Now, in each event that you want to be more than just the terrain (hills, trees, whatever, you simply have to have it check your direction(orientation to north,south,east, or west) and the X and Y of the event, as well as the X and Y of the player...


This way if on the map the event is say, 20x, 15y, and the player is now at 24x and 17y... The event can cehck for the orientation...
If the player is facing west... then the player is four spaces back, and two spaces to the 'left' of the event. this means that the event would JUST come into view at position 33. This is where it gets good, and may require keen perspective drawing skills or a 3d program.

Using the same gridpattern in a 3d rendering program, you can have the images display at different points of your 'field of view' render then, and save them... For instance, say I have a windmill... animated or not, I might create 184 pictures of the windmill, showing it at diffferent perspectives and distances, and save them as something like windmill01-e.png, windmill01-w.png, and so on and so forth.... Now, you will end up with a lot of images, depending on the diversity of the items you want to have in your game, but each rendered item if placed in the right coordinates for the grid space, won't take up that much space in the broad range of games of today.





In addition, now you have a pseudo-3d openworld that can literally be any size, and if you don't think you can have 100 events on your map, you can chain maps together with a 7-9 tile border that matches up, so that it looks like a seemless transition from one map to the next. (If your map is already going to be crowded like a forest, you can also determine a firest tile as the default picture tile, and CUT into it with events, or even set up a grid of variables, say 400, with every item you need, so that you don't even need to USE EVENTS!

There are a dozen or more different ways to implement this, but the main thing to remember is that it doesn't have to BE 3d to look 3d...

Now, in game, you can change how your arrow keys work by having left and right instead ROTATE the world view, and put you in the orientation of north south east and west, and thus, go through on the events and change things to represent the fact that each 'event' is now being viewed from the south side.


This would have been perfected in implementation in MCG's FPLE except events never could be higher than where the ceiling would be, and the rotation make this billboard effect look crude and unreliable. Plus in FPLE, the pictures never timed correctly. This will allow you to quickly change all the pictures quickly, change the views, and have a view you could be proud of. On top of that, using seamless billboards, you can create longrunning walls, castles that go on forever, geographic features, even your floor textures can be supertiled, with more than the FPLE maximum of 8 floor textures. There really is no limit.