Overweight Manatee said:
DraQ said:
Overweight Manatee said:
Dicksmoker said:
since it can also represent a few things that most 3D engines today can't,
And those would be?
It can technically represent 4D space, where you have multiple areas existing in the same 3D game space. There is a particular map in which you have to travel 720 degrees in a circle to return to your starting point.
Trivial to do in UE1.
Like I said, it should be possible to make Poincare's Sphere level in UE1 (haven't tried, but seems technically plausible unless something bad happens), which is far more impressive than anything possible in DN3D. Hell, I don't think you can make Odyssey-style centrifuge in DN3D which isn't hard to do in UE1.
While I can't say I have seriously level designed in many engines, I can only assume that the fact that I have seen exactly zero beyond-3D constructions in any recent game means that this capability is fairly hard to duplicate and/or nearly unique. Or possibly every 3D engine has this capability and instead every level designer in the industry is absolutely shit at anything requiring imagination beyond linear corridors. Its probably a 50/50 chance either way now that I think about it.
I'd wage that the latter is the case - most people have little imagination and usually a level designer concentrates on working hard to avoid violating geometry and to represent fairly natural environments in games, rather than on going Mc Escher on player's sorry ass (I'd LOVE this kind of shit in stalker past the Scorcher).
And thus, endless warehouses of crates are born.
Hell, even Wizardry 8 had capability to violate spatial geometry in real 3D - it used it in two of its retro dungeons.
Stitching together different parts of level geometry doesn't seem to be rocket science, Build's solution was actually rather crude since the stitch point was an entire sector, which imposed a series of limitations, like not being able to construct levels where the direction of down would change as you travelled. UE1 stitches parts of the level using pretty much arbitrary planeswhich means that you can, for example, make corridor that bends upwards and loops around, where floor will stay floor, even upside down. You can make the loop non-360 degree too.
Buildings with larger interior are trivial. I'm going to try and make a dodecahedron and stitch each of it's faces with the opposite one, with necessary 36 degree twist. If the recursive rendering doesn't make the engine fart blood and die (it doesn't with ordinary endless corridors, but then it only follows one branch, not about six - I may need to limit visibility somehow), I'll have Poincare's Sphere.
If that fails, I'll try something easier, maybe hyperbolic geometry or "just" an asteroid where you can walk on entire surface? Shit, I really need to play with the editor a bit - I know the basics, but haven't built anything nearing playable state.