Recovery, distractions and more voxel fun.

Recovering from a period of sickness, my family all caught either the flu(most likely) or a cold.  It was not a fun time...

Being sick really puts a cramp on ones ability to code, or do much of anything else, but I managed to find energy and time to do something I once loved.  Making maps in the Build engine.

Awhile back I did some testing with build, back when I was scouting out possible voxel projects, and I used the tileset from my game Black Shadow as the textures.  Personally I kind of liked how it look, but then I didn't go further with it.  Now with a bit of down time, I found myself working a little deeper into the idea and started working on a map.

I've played around with both the JF and Eduke version, and decided to stick with JF's version as it ran better on a netbook.  A little playing around and looking into some of the DEF files of the Duke3d Voxel project I found it was actually very easy to put in voxels, just some mild typing.

In light of this I have new ideas for my program Strip2Vox which converts a strip of images into a voxel model.  Now I'm planning on having the option of using a heightmap and a fore/back image to create a voxel object instead of a series of images.  However the old method will be better if the object has a lot of holes in it.  Otherwise it'll be a nice way of easily creating voxel objects.

Besides that I've been in communication with a programmer who is working on a voxel engine of his own.  I showed him GLBasic and he got the premium version since he was interested in it's multi-porting power.  A sample screenshot he sent me showed me that his efforts to get the DLL working with GLBasic was indeed successful.  Although it's no voxlap and I may not beable to realize my Voxel Dungeon game with it quite yet, it will open doors for some other interesting voxel projects I have tumbling in my head.

Of course this means I've kind of set aside the RTS idea for now.  Although I'll revisit it again since there are parts of it that I need to work on so I can be better prepared for some other projects.  I've had some mild success using GLBasic's built in path finding function, I had to create a algorithm that cleaned it up and offseted objects since it doesn't check for collisions...but then I got sick, so yeah that kind of stopped.

Not quite sure what this will all lead to, but it seems like there are more doors open then closed now.