Prototypation Art: The Construction Set part1

The Construction Set Basics.

To be up and running as soon as possible I'm making a prototypation art kits.

Kits can be reused in many project, but in this case I' will make one from scratch for blogging purpose.

Most of the gameplay mrechanics I want to prototype come from 2d Tilebased Arcade games so to make a good 3d conversion I have to stay in the quad grid realm.(convert some mechanics to esagonal grids Is also an option I want to explore in a later prototypation stage)

Unit Setups

Can be wise in this situation to choose a smart unit size you can easely snap on in vforge and in your 3d application of choice and easy to calculate by mind.

Generally you can save a template for your 3d application to recall the setup you have choosen for your project.

Physic Unit Conversion

If you choose a non standard unit setup and you want to use Havok Physic you may have to set a conversion factor to get realistic results.You can set it in vForge Physic panel.

You can recognize a bad physic scale generally looking at the speed object fall by gravity when drag is set to zero.

The Power of Powers of 2

My choice for a base unit setup is alwaysa Power of 2.

Powers of 2 make possible various optimizations in your code and generally programmers finds very comfortable to use powers of 2 as unit base.

Even If engine uses floating point numbers for positioning entities in space when you make those kind of old games you could find usefull  to do many gameplay calculations with integers and there powers of 2 are even more powerfull.

More About Snapping

Programming vForge it is possible to create special snaping helpers in your custom shapes to let them snap together in a very customizable and flexible way.

InThe Next Part...

I will provide other details of my construction kit setup, I want to find some level editing tricks to show and I want to post some pics and downloadable content as soon as I finish working on It