Although I had some fun playing with Voxlap and Slab6, I realized I couldn't practicly create a game with what was released. Voxelstien3d would be a good engine to mod to create a standard FPS, but I had different ambitions in mind.
I did however start a small experimental project using Voxlap for a destructuable spaceship, which could evolve into something more interesting if time permitted. Haven't had much time actually. I have found Voxlap converted into a DLL that in theory can be used in Freebasic, but haven't checked that out. A little searching on google can turn it up.
Anyways, on to the point. Inspired by this forsaken method, I decided to throw my hat in the ring. Its more of a paper hat than anything, but its there none the less.
So I came up with what I thought would be a novel idea, a voxel-esque side-scroller/top-down drawing engine. Since I know nothing of ray-tracing, and the math involved eats my brain at times, I went a more conventional drawing method. Actually I have two and plan a third attempt.
The rough draw mode, what I refere to as, consist of reading a 3 dimensional array that instructs when a pixel/box/circle is drawn. They overlay atop each other to create a 3d look. This is a very slow method and will be murder to older computers. This is on by default on the available demo.
The second method creates a point list of what is actually to be drawn, thus avoiding reading the entire 3d array and only the actual drawable parts. Coupled with that is a algorithm that negates the bits that will never be seen(since its fixed perspective), however there is a glitch in it which I can't quite figure out. F2 sets the demo to this mode.
The third method fill include parts of the second, but read in reverse, drawn in correct order. In this way it will ignore the parts that can't be seen at the time as well as those that will never be seen, reducing overdraw some more.
There still are some issues...
Anyway, packaged with the demo is a program that will convert BMP files into a file readable by the program. Included are templates and some samples and documentation.
You can get the demo here.
http://www.filefactory.com/file/ag5g3e1/n/SSVOX_24_zip
Some sample captures:
