Hi all
Thought I’d show off what I’m busy with at the moment. I have built a level editor that allows you to build your levels via simple point and click.
Currently I have walls that can have different textures assigned to each side (still busy making it so that you can disable wall sides during runtime) and I currently allow you to change the floor textures and rotate them if you so desire (so if you have a texture that is half grass and half dirt and it merges with textures that is full grass or full dirt, you can rotate the image to change the direction of the transitions etc).
You can also place any kind of prop you want from a wall torch to a skyscraper and rotate them to taste also.
You can define themes of textures and models so you can have a “Dungeons” theme that contains stone textures and arches and torches and skeletons etc etc etc. Then you could have a Japanese theme with no walls and just a whole lot of fences so you can make an exterior scene… Another theme for a tavern with tables and a bar creator and walls of wood and plaster… Whatever.
Here is what makes it cool, though… I save the data so compactly that each scene comes in at between 0.2k and 2k each. As such, I have decided to build my demo of this kit and put it online so you good people can actually start playing with the kit and make your own levels and store them online for free on my site. You will be able to create new levels, modify existing levels and view all the levels made by others. Of course you will have to create a free account on my site so I can know which levels are yours so you can only edit your own, but yeah.
Since the levels are so darn small, I plan to serve those publicly created scenes for your games free of charge also. Thus, you can create your own levels to your heart’s content and then just have a section called “Additional content” and load in as many levels as you want from the online levels on my site. Infinite variety of levels at your disposal.
I am including a sample of a level I made in under 5 minutes. I used my “Crystal dungeon” theme which consists of bumped mapped walls and a few stone textures. I have not placed any props yet but the example code I will provide shortly already makes provision for them also. My intention with this was not to show you how cool a level can look but rather to show you how little data it takes to build such a scene. This way you will see why I deem this system a viable option of having a person navigate a scene, get to a door, load in a new room and repeat. Your levels can now be literally infinite in size whilst keeping your game’s download size to like 5 or 10 or 25mb or whatever… Since the levels require so little data it loads an entire scene in under a second so the only delay you will have in your game is the ping between your server and mine. But again, at this size you might just as well download all your levels at the beginning of the game and just store them in an array or something…
So yeah, some samples:
This data represents this entire level complete with props and textures as I might later choose to modify them. Smaller scenes would result in less data.
And this is is the results of the above code…
Looking forward to comments and thoughts… 
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