Hello everyone.
For the past week I've been experimenting with jPCT (very happy with it, actually, I'm very amazed that there aren't more people using it! Why is that??). I wanted to share with you some of my concerns regarding a system architecture for an FP(S) platform (I'd like it to be more than just a shooter (hence the parenthesis).
My end-goal is to create a first-person game, but since I haven't quite decided the game's nature/theme I'd like to begin with creating a general platform for it (that I could perhapse release under GPL for others to experiment with).
Currently I'm wondering about the following things:
1. Levels My current architecture introduces levels as classes, for each level there is a class with the same name. The level class would store vital information like the players starting position in that level, lighting positions, etc... However, the problem is that that's a lot of information to hand sort, object positions, decorations, etc..
A partial solution to this problem would be having a certain type of signal in the level designs as pointers for a "LevelManager" which would place objects.
For example: a sphere with the texture named "PlayerPos" is actually a pointer for where the Player Starting Position should be. Levelmanager would read these pointers, and use their position to automatically instantiate and place the right types of objects, etc.. (then delete them from the world)
Theoretically, this would be possible with jPCT, yes?
2. Segmented character/player bodiesMulti-part humanoids. For an FPS game, it'd be really nice to have arms, torso, head and feet all separate objects capable of being damaged independently. However that would pose many problems: Animations for each part would have to be animated seperately and initiated at the same time when something happens to the humanoid. So it would be very hard to animate these parts independantly from eachother while the end result is supposed to act as a whole.
Can anyone think of a good way to implement a segmented-body ? There's also the question of computation, will segmented humanoids be too much for jPCT to handle?
I also noticed in another thread that Egon/Helge has been questioned before about skeletal-character physics like Half-Life uses. At the time there was no plan to implement that kind of feature. That hasn't by any chance changed, has it?
3. SavingMy current thoughts on saving are by simply making the Level class, Stats class (Contains historical info about the gameplay) and Player class serializable. When continued you would simply load the classes.
Sounds a bit brute to me, but that's all I can think of.
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Thanks for reading.
Hope you're having as much fun as I am.
Cheers,
- Raven