MGM will be a top-down shooter game engine programmed in Multimedia Fusion. It will be totally moddable and will include a powerful map editing suite 'Terrain TX'.
It features a clean, elegant GUI which can be customized from INI files to suite a particular theme. At the moment, the window is fixed but will later be resizable to whatever dimensions the user desires.
A lot of work was put into creating a powerful yet almost fun to use interface. After many designs and drawings I decided to use the familiar Command & Conquer style command bar. I remembered how fun it was to click on a building and place it on the map. Terrain TX will follow the same concept with the minimap on top, categories underneath and objects at the bottom. It's very comfortable to use and it can still have everything I want it to have without being overwhelmingly complex.
The command bar will be split in three categories; Textures, Objects and Flags. To put it simply; Textures are what the player can walk on, Objects are the things the player can collide with and flags will specify spawn points and weapons etc.
I've also implemented many useful features to make mapping easier such as the ability to paint textures at any size but keeping them in sync. For instance, let's say you set the size of your brush to 32x32 and you paint it on the map but the texture is 64x64. Usually when you paint another next to it you would get a collision or the textures would look oddly the same. This new feature will just fill in the other half of the texture but without repeating the cropped area. It's over 200 lines of code alone!
Objects follow a different system. They are placed manually. You can choose to align them to a grid or place them freehand. You can also set attributes such as collision actions or destruction conditions. Objects are more flexible but they take up more memory. They can be quite complex at times because they are made of many layers to create the 3D effect of voxels and sometimes have cumbersome physics information.
The joy of MGM being moddable is that you can add your own textures and objects! The editor will load however many objects you have and will display them just as you'll see them ingame.
Terrain TX was designed to be lighting fast. All the textures are loaded from the hard drive to the RAM at startup and from there on everything is fast. The load up takes less than a minute and will at the same time search for possible bugs or incompatibilities to avoid crashes during editing.
Features to be added later include sun intensity/direction, scripted environmental sound effects, animations and complex particle systems.
Thank you all for reading this preview and good Kliking!
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