OK, this post gets fairly technical, if you're afraid of programmer's speak run far, far away, likewise if you don't know what C is, probably now would be a good time to press 'back'
This Aleph One replacement thing I've been working on (Not now though, my PC's motherboard died and will be 3 weeks before it can be fixed... thanks Gigabyte) is going fairly well, but I'm somewhere around about the point where a decision has to be made regarding proper 3D levels... Linking polygons vertically, to allow stuff like - you guessed it - bridges and balconies. *Anyway, it's currently Marathon-like (ie. no proper 3D, well it does allow sloped floors), obviously it's best if it can keep some compatibility (And the ease with which you can create Marathon levels) while adding the ability to make fully 3D levels... See, there's a number of ways of implementing it, they all have advantages and disadvantages, they are as follows:
1) Double subtraction - Give a horizontal surface not only Primary, Secondary and Teriary surfaces, but also Additional and Final (Or something like that) surfaces, one of which can connect to a second polygon. Basically, this system is the same as that used in AO Bridges+Balconies (I think). It is fast, backwards compatible and fairly easy to add, but it's not the 'proper' way of doing things.
2) Co-ordinate dependant Y-Axis portals- Connect polygons directly on the Y axis. Since they'd have to be the same size/shape, this'd end up very similar to the double subtraction idea, being a little harder to use, but being more like the 'standard' way of doing it.
3) Co-ordinate independant (Y-Axis included) portals- Similar to the above idea, except that the entire game is made effectively co-ordinate independant. On the plus side, it is AMAZINGLY flexible (Never ending staircase? No problem. Doorway that disappears as you walk through it? Easy), but would be pretty slow and a lot of work for me. Also, it'd be easy for a mapmaker to go nuts with CIP's and make their map near impossible to work with, but as long as they plan ahead it should be easy to avoid this
4) Addition-only - I was planning on adding the ability to add solids, naturally this would allow a lot of the tricky geometry mainstream games use. Quake, for example, *only* allows solids, so for a room you'd be manually creating the floor, ceiling, etc, and it's simply too much work. Naturally, making E/0 like this would be... foolish, but perhaps a 'best of both worlds' scenario is possible, allowing both addition (Quake style) and subtraction (Marathon-style). Let's see...
So, if anyone has any thoughts or comments, please share. I need *something* to do while waiting for my PC to get fixed. Yeah I would have posted this on a programmer's forum, but virtually all of them focus on the Quake way of doing things, and deny that 3D is possible any other way. Funnily enough.
