Potential Games LLC

A big part of my Potential RPG project is to write my own software. I've spent a large part of my time (more than anticipated) developing the world rendering graphics engine. My personal goal is to increase my experience with graphics processing. My development goal is to produce a simple, tile-based rendering system, supporting some basic features.

Note: The rest of this article describes the current state of the graphics engine, primarily out of my own interest. Other software developer-types might be interested, too.

At this point, world rendering includes terrain tiling, avatar navigation, surface features, and sprite effects. The engine can render either a rectangular or hexagonal tiled world. In either geometry the tiles can have North-South overlap, providing some basic perspective. In conjunction with tiled terrain rendering, the engine can layer player character avatars, creatures, surface features, and effects atop the world. These features and effects can be static graphics or animated by the sprite driver. Avatar navigation occurs on a rectangular coordinate system at finer granularity than the terrain tiles. This allows avatars to walk in natural N-S-E-W-NE-SE-SW-NW directions, rather than being tied to each hexagonal space. While walking around, if an avatar becomes obscured by a surface feature (such as a tall tree), the engine allows the figure to be seen, as if through the obstruction. This (very preliminary) image shows a small sample of the world rendering, with a character hiding behind a tree. The inset shows the minimap, which renders a larger geographic region of the world at a smaller scale. The minimap is actually drawn by the same rendering system as the surface, just with a smaller (one-pixel-per-coordinate) terrain tileset.