Hi Avan,
yeah, processing a realtime landscape would have been too stressfull and complete overkill for the game in general so the hills are just tiled together like you said, the landscape is fully optomised though with a recuction in polyount and texture size at the different depths. Adding more tiles would have been an easy exersise but the filesize and style of game did not warrant that amount of media. If it was a scrolling shooter with various locational levels and if the game was 5 'worlds' in size, we would be looking at over 100MB of graphical media for the levels alone. I actually wanted to make this a multi world game, but that would mean long downloads and a big bandwidth bill for TGC for what is in essence a 8 bit style retro game.
The player has a small amount of dynamic movement, It used to be more pronounced but the feeling of backing into objects was a distraction and basically made it too hard to judge your path through a collection of baddies if you altered your speed, I also tried fixed locations for each direction, but it also made the game to one sided by things appearing too quick behind you, so I stuck with the masters choice and kept it as close to dropzone as possible and have only minor player shifting.
I also experimented with the camera moving to new locations depending on the speed of the player but it made everything feel a bit washy in the movement and controllability department I might add an option for this if any bugs crop up that I need to fix.
Thanks, Grant.
Ohd Chinese Ploverb say : Wise Eskimo, not eat yerrow snow.
