[F8] Orthographic engine with node based pathfinding

[renderhjs]

thanks for the coments so far,- you guys gave me some interesting thoughts

seems like I have to think even more about the controls,- or at least how to make it more intuitive to work with.

Depth management is taken out for now since I had ugly results in some levels (on faces the z- depth point is in the center of the 3d- space of that face and once a face is a little bit larger it covers smal objects/ sprites beneeth it) - but I think I will solve this soon.

I want to avoid using the keyboard,- but you inspired me and I am thinking of either:
- a focus mode wich will zoom/ rotate to an object once you hover over it
- or general ability to extend the rotation if the mouse is out of the safe boundary of the screen (meaning ,- if the mouse is in the middle of the screen nothing will be affected,- but if you move outside an invisible box you can affect the camera rotation)

My previous website was the opposite,- absolutely technical and designed for a control freaks. However a lot of people were overburdened on how to control it. That feedback back then made me this developing this method. But you are right,- maybe I should make it easier for the user to focus on the important things. Like a glow/ highlight or something else on important objects/ elements.
I also thought about a tutorial level- wich explains most important things- but right now there arent that much things you need to know- not yet.


like I already said,- I´d like to grant you some insight and share some thoughts because depending on your comments I might improve or overthink certain aspects.

Level preparations
(here are samples of 1 level)

I first always start with a sketch,- a level can be pretty much work and if the concept is not good enough it gets frustrating in the end


in the very beginning my next step was to find the proportions and sizes with a 3d application (3dsmax in this case)- and also to avoid using to many faces


next is to paint/ edit the textures and build the level as *.xml file to see how it looks in the engine (see bottom of this screenshot)


then I usually import the textures back to the 3d application,- prepare the lights bake all the light & effects on the textures (texture baking wich is a unique rendering functionality) wich look on the textures like this:


here is a sample (screenshot from engine) of how a level can look with texture baking on the textures


as you can see I pretty much mixed 3d- and 2d tools to gain what I wanted,- all rotateable sprites were rendered aswell because of the different angles (if they have some).
The main character needs some improvements,- because I am still not very happy with the bends of his arms & legs and the animation. Also I try to incraese the angle renderings of the character (currently 8 angles- planning on 16) wich will affect the engine size but I guess it´s worth it.

(another screenshot out of 3dsmax)


I´ll prepare some screenshots & illustrations on how I did the pathfinding,
wich i think is special because it doesn´t require a gird or shapes (hittest) and has special abilities like single or bidirectional directions aswell as zoning areas.