Sandboxing

Okay, I know I said I was going to make Paratrooper, and what I'm playing with now isn't Paratrooper. I spec'd out a complete clone of Paratrooper and figured on about 6 weeks of dull work, at least, and for what? I've got nothing to prove, I'm supposed to be having fun! So instead, I've jumped straight into my original intent: A top-down sandbox, a neat little virtual playground that I can entertain myself with.

With the Gyhart framework already existing, I was able to quickly add a new Play module for the sandbox logic and then get down to customising some Entities to start with. In the Gyhart framework, an Entity is just about anything that can do something, anything that can move and interact with the world, as opposed to passive elements like terrain and decals. Entities that Players control are Avatars. Entities controlled by the CPU are NPCs. Entities are also broken down into broad types according to how they behave - so far, I've got Biped and Car entities implimented in some form. (The recent TDN mini-tutorial on car physics was much appreciated!)

For convenience, I've added an option to allow Player 1 to take control of (possess) any Entity by clicking on it with the mouse, which makes it easy to switch between different Avatars at this early stage. Entities also have default crude movement capabilities so that anything can move in some form, if needed. They can also tint or flash any color.

I've thrown together some quicky graphics for some test Entities using assets from my library - my first Biped is Rufus:



He handles in a manner not unlike the avatar from GTA2, and when not possessed by a Player, currently wanders about under the control of a rudimentry Brain object. The Brains trigger the inputs of their host Entities the same way a Player does, and so should be pretty flexible. To test that idea just now, I plugged the same brain I use to make Rufus wander about into the test car, and it started driving about as expected. Keen!

Here's some snapshots from the sandbox at present:




From here, there's a lot still to do - I've got more basic functionality to add to Entities, as well as Level shifting and so on. Once the fundamentals are sorted and I can start experimenting, I do believe I'm going to enjoy myself even more.

Take care & have fun, folks.