Hi again.

Although I haven’t posted anything for a long time, I have still been (occasionally) developing Icefall. There are three new concepts which I have introduced since my last Icefall post – two enhancements to the visual engine, and one to the game core. Today I’ll talk about one of the visual enhancements – seamless textured walls.

If you look carefully at some earlier Icefall screenshots, you’ll see the white and teal-coloured wall graphics. I actually thought these were pretty cool at the time (certainly an improvement over most Angband clones’ “single tile for every wall”, as they had a slight 3D aspect, and wall tiles “linked up” with those next to them. The only thing I wasn’t happy about was when there was a wall that was exactly two tiles thick, and the player could see both sides (e.g. they were two separate rooms), these ‘wall texture’ bubbles would appear in the centre of the wall – this was because the tiles didn’t check their diagonal neighbours, so they had to assume there wasn’t wall there (checking in the old engine would have meant I would need 256 different wall tiles for every combination of neighbours, instead of 16 when they only link up horizontally and vertically).

But, this was fixable! I have recreated the whole wall-drawing algorithm so that it now takes three passes instead of one. The first pass draws a nice ‘wall texture’ (the actual texture can vary depending on the level, so the deeper you go into the dungeon, the walls themselves will start to look more sinister).

Secondly, an “outward-facing” wall texture is applied. This fixes up all the edges between wall tiles and ground tiles, similar to what happened before except that this tileset has no diagonal corners. Finally, another pass is made over all wall-edges, looking solely for diagonals and filling those in as needed.

Although this takes more GPU power than the old method, GPU power is not something I’m really worried about for Icefall, as the visual engine overall draws the game world very efficiently. (I must talk about this sometime if I haven’t already). And the results, hopefully you will agree, look a lot nicer!

Next time (which I promise will not be as far away as this update was from the last!), I will talk about displaying the player character themselves – as they’re now displayed in the gameworld with the equipment/weapons they have equipped!