
Originally Posted by
Inigo Montoya
Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but as I have said the Marathon Source is a bit hard to read, not to mention that college eats up time.
But I now have something close to a schedule for the first part of the port.
I have decided to start with getting the overhead map to work correctly on the PSP because aside from the physics the map seems to be the most non-trivial part of the engine. I believe if I can read in the map file and display the overhead correctly, including the different line widths for different types of polygons and coloring non-secret platforms red, then rendering the map correctly in will be simple. The hard part will be transparent textures and 5-D space.
I also had an idea for a slight tweek to the rendering engine that would allow for smoother vertical rendering; The Marathon engine dosen't actually render the BSP rooms as real 3-D polygons but instead simulates it while drawing. If it instead changed the rooms into real 3-D shapes when it loaded the map it would be able to correctly render the map at viewing agles greater then 60 degrees; something even Aleph One doesn't do. However, I am not sure if this would work with 5-D space or not(which would explain why Aleph One doesn't do this). The perfect time to test if this works with 5-D space would be while implementing the overhead map because 5-D space can be tested with only the overhead. I already know this works as a rendering technique because all other games with BSP tree maps render them as 3-D polygons.
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