Darklands - my new project.

Ive been thinking of makeing a RPG game for a long time now. Before i learned to program i wrote my own game system designed after the Darklands game.

I have decided that my new project will be a darklands sequil.

The only thing that this will involve on the graphics side that i have not done before is charcter animation, but i have some ideas and ways of doing that.

The aim here is to create the game engine, and do it in such a way that anyone can add there own 3rd party adventures and quests, even worlds depending on what level this goes too.

If anyone is intrested just mail me and well get together, im going to be updateing my site, and adding a forum for this project also.

Sounds great!!

I've been doing research on time-based animation, keyframing, vertex tweening, etc. Since your going to be using sprites you probably won't need some of those, but I'd love to help.

I am wanting to use 3d models, i can write a custom format and model loader, but i dont have a clue about charcter animation. or how the charcter models need to be laid out to be animated.

I am progressing nicely, by tonight ill have charcter classes, and individual texture materials finished.

that will add to the things ive finished

The menu system
Multiple world support
custom charcter classes
custom texture loading

There are several articles on www.programmersheaven.com about character animation. They discuss vertex tweening, keyframing, and show you how to do time based animation.

Also you can go to http://64.23.12.52/Tutorials/DirectX8/Gr_Lesson10.asp. This explains in detail about all of the above. It is for VB, but since he talks more about principles than actual code, it can be applied to C as well. Very helpful and should solve a lot of problems. It discusses Manual tweening/Linear interpolation, Vertex interpolation, and keyframe interpolation. There are also more articles there about 3D collision detection and just about every other DirectX8 topic you may want to know more about.

If you are looking to use OpenGL then the principles in those articles will help, but obviously the implementation of them will not. I'll search for a similar site about OpenGL.

Yes, i do OpenGL