Hello!
I thought to give you a little update on what I've done with Sabre.
First, I have to say that I've been extremely busy the whole summer, so my plans of making great progress with Sabre
did not come true. But I've still made some progress, and I believe that now I will have more energy to concentrate on Sabre again.
To the progress updates -->
I've played around with the mouse look and it begins to (mouse) look nice.
And I made a somewhat interesting discovery concerning the graphics once again..
The current version of Sabre uses two images for each texture, one in which every vertical stripe is one pixel
wide, and one in which the stripes are two pixels wide. The second one is needed when drawing distant walls, because when distant,
the walls become smaller. I use draw_from() with a height factor for drawing the walls in the desired size, and when that size is small, the
height factor gets so little, that if one used the one-pixel-wide texture image, nothing would be drawn, because the factor also affects the
width the image is drawn in, and thus makes the stripe less than one pixel wide. This is why I need the second image file, in which the stripes
are two pixels wide, one pixel gets cut off, but there still is the other one left.
And now to the point.
So, I have been testing the engine with nice quality textures, mostly 256 x 256 and it looks nice when you're near to the walls.
BUT, when you get farther from the walls and the walls get smaller and lose pixels used for drawing them, the textures, because of their high level of detail
start to look messy and ugly. So, what I found, was that if I take the second texture (one used for drawing the distant walls), scale it down to 1/4 of it's size,
and then scale it back to normal, the level of detail in the texture is lowered greatly, but the main shapes remain. And when using lowered-detail-level
texture for drawing the distant walls, the result is much nicer than with the high-detail-level textures. The small details are gone, but the main shapes
are more visible.
Here's a picture to represent the difference:
It looks really nice when playing, and because only the texture file for drawing the distant walls has been changed, the small details are there when they are needed,
when the player is close to a wall! It looks nice, but I think the change is too noticeable when you walk towards a wall and it changes the graphic. That's why I think I might
add support for one or two more optional textures, so that people could add mid-detailed textures also, and thus make the change less noticeable.
And for all of you waiting for updates on the sprite drawing... I'm sorry but I haven't had time for trying to realize it.
But soon! You just have to wait a little.