Sorry for the late reply! been hectic with my real job
Hi Dave,
Hopefully it will have a similar feel to Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder, and certainly the dungeons of both games could be recreated from the experiments I have done though I would like it to be something new and social.
Having connecting towns to dungeons and other environments is something I like the idea of. I have already written some procedural algorithms to create towns and dungeons, tying them up should be no bigger deal. The assets such as terrain and things are however going to be a stumbling block, I'm currently using stock images and textures but that's not a long term solution.
The idea of Co-Op 'dungeoneering' is something I have been experimenting with, the main logic problem has been how do you effectively have combat in such an environment.
The solution I have come up with so far is that you can have a set of NPC's or PC's that you set as friends or aligned to. Which means you can pass them in the same square and in combat can attack in the same direction as them without causing damage. Graphically I need to figure out how this is represented though I don't see that being a major problem.
A few quick links to play around with from the videos. They have not been optimized so I don't know how they will run on peoples computers.
My gaming rig handles them at a constant 60fps.. though My laptop drops down quite a bit. I have managed to fix this in the current version I'm working on by grouping every geometry by its material, this makes a drastic improvement as it cuts the amount of shaders down by a very high magnitude.
http://myoubliette.com/dev/dev12.aspx?mapid=1
http://myoubliette.com/dev/dev13.aspx?mapid=1
In the above examples, you can move around the map with the pc gamers WASD controls.
http://www.myoubliette.com/dev/loadertest.html optimization example, use mouse and drag to rotate etc... I think there are 700 wall sections displaying there with quite a few 1000 faces...
At the moment I'm not working on the exciting stuff, mainly the backbone of the multi player core, websockets are quite devilish to get right!. I will keep people posted if they're interested!
Thanks,
Joe.