RPG Maker MV 3D Labyrinth Tool Idea

[LumpyTouch]

Sounds great! Voted yes. I'd pay $20. Bring it on!

 

[AdamSakuru]

I'm on board with this as long as you can use it on specific maps without having to make the entirety of your game a 3D Dungeon crawler.

Think Jurassic Park on the Super Nintendo. It was in top down perspective, but when you went inside buildings those parts played as a first person shooter.

 

[HawkZombie]

I'd almost say it should be a separate engine. I love the idea, however.

 

[MikePjr]

I'm on board with this as long as you can use it on specific maps without having to make the entirety of your game a 3D Dungeon crawler.

Think Jurassic Park on the Super Nintendo. It was in top down perspective, but when you went inside buildings those parts played as a first person shooter.

So was Phantasy Star 1 on the Master system... and Dungeons and Dragons Warriors of the eternal sun... and a few others i can name.

 

[xilefian]

Excellent, I love these kind of first-person ray-casting engines and I've implemented some myself in MV as an experiment, even though the ray-casting technique isn't actually that good for modern processors (wasn't even that good for the i286 back in 1992, but was an ideal solution for quickly solving the visibility problem).

Would the player movement for this be axis-bound where they can only look in 4 directions and move 1 tile at a time? Or would it be free-movement akin to ray-casting games?

I think the community as a whole will always be interested in extra features like this. Native support for building these kind of maps would make our first-person Plugins far simpler to utilise. I think this is what would be most interesting, utilising the tile-map for creating the floors, ceilings and walls and adding scaling sprite objects.


A lot of the concern seems to be about performance and people have posted some example Plugins that have a dependency on WebGL; WebGL is not necessary for this kind of Plugin, it is possible with Canvas2D, but it requires a lot more code to get working. Performance concerns only apply for free-movement, if the movement is axis-aligned and the player can only step 1 tile at a time then performance won't be a concern as the majority of the effect can be pre-calculated, which is how it was done in the classic console RPGs that featured first-person dungeons.

 

[SOC]

It's not really my thing, but I have no problems with adding it and seeing more genres RMMV can support.

 

[MikePjr]

A lot of the concern seems to be about performance and people have posted some example Plugins that have a dependency on WebGL; WebGL is not necessary for this kind of Plugin, it is possible with Canvas2D, but it requires a lot more code to get working. Performance concerns only apply for free-movement, if the movement is axis-aligned and the player can only step 1 tile at a time then performance won't be a concern as the majority of the effect can be pre-calculated, which is how it was done in the classic console RPGs that featured first-person dungeons.

The issue is, people want different things.
I don't care for the sort of thing that does the slow moving blink blink blink thing, i much rather have smooth movement and simple polygons, i don't mind webgl being used.
I don't understand wanting something antiquated like what they used to do on old dos games.
But they pretty much showed a few videos of what they have in mind at the top of this thread, the first post shows video examples.
Personally, i hope that's what we get.

 

[Animinity]

I think it would be a great addition, but would need the ability to go in and out of the 3D. What I mean is, I would like normal over world maps and town maps, but would choose to have "Dungeon" Maps in the 3D format. Personally, I don't want to force the player to explore a town in 3D and map it. But that's just me.

 

[Lupinos]

I would love it! Already loved the FPLE by MGC for RMXP!

It should render events though, so monsters are visible and treasure chests, doors, levers, etc.

 

[AdamSakuru]

I'm on board with this as long as you can use it on specific maps without having to make the entirety of your game a 3D Dungeon crawler.

Think Jurassic Park on the Super Nintendo. It was in top down perspective, but when you went inside buildings those parts played as a first person shooter.

I'd like to elaborate on my earlier post. I think having it be optional in specific maps in RPG Maker MV gives the developer more customization in terms of how they want to utilize or frame certain aspects of their game. Like someone might want the 'map-screen' of their game to utilize a 3D perspective, while the rest of the game looks like a visual novel.

If it's not feasible to have this as an addition to RPG Maker MV (due to how it handles visuals) then it should be its own engine. But if possible I really think this should be something additional in RPG Maker MV. More options like this is always better for developers.

 

[Firgof]

Would pay $15-20 easy for this.

 

[wariolandgoldpiramid]

I'm worried about the display performance.
Given that 2D display with MV is already the slowest I've seen from a 2D engine, how will it handle 3D?

I have no idea what you mean, MV was never slow for me...

 

[Nirwanda]

I would consider adding an automapping plugin to this idea otherwise the 3d labyrinths may become a problem for the players. But yeah this is a fantastic idea, I would pay $20 for it no doubt about it.

 

[cabfe]

I have no idea what you mean, MV was never slow for me...

Certainly because you have a high end PC.
To give you a comparison, a blank VX Ace map runs at 60 fps on my (old) computer.
A blank MV map runs at 15 fps.

I have tried a few MV games and some ran as slow as... 1 frame per second. Totally unplayable. This has never happened with all the Ace games I've tried.
So, for roughly the same thing, MV runs considerably slower, so that's a millstone when you add things on top.

 

[Wavelength]

I voted Yes in the poll, but with reservations about how it will actually create 3D environments.

I was never interested in the Wolfenstein-like labyrinths in early PC games, but one of my favorite things to do in an RPG (or platformer or MMO) is to take a long time appreciating the world from all different views.

So I'd try to use this kind of tool to create wide-open, 3D spaces that players could appreciate. And therefore whether I want this tool to be made depends on whether it can create a good experience for the player in these wide-open spaces. If it's just taking a single 2D tilemap and distorting it to "look" 3D, I don't personally feel it's worth having. If movement and perspective are going to stutter a lot, I also don't feel it's worth having.

If it's a tool that will allow you to combine multiple maps to create a faux-3D environment in different perspectives, or it will allow you to place 3D objects (made for this tool, I guess) onto your map (perhaps a la RPG Maker 3?), then I'm all-in, and would pay pretty much any amount to have it.

 

[wariolandgoldpiramid]

I voted Yes in the poll, but with reservations about how it will actually create 3D environments.

I was never interested in the Wolfenstein-like labyrinths in early PC games, but one of my favorite things to do in an RPG (or platformer or MMO) is to take a long time appreciating the world from all different views.

So I'd try to use this kind of tool to create wide-open, 3D spaces that players could appreciate. And therefore whether I want this tool to be made depends on whether it can create a good experience for the player in these wide-open spaces. If it's just taking a single 2D tilemap and distorting it to "look" 3D, I don't personally feel it's worth having. If movement and perspective are going to stutter a lot, I also don't feel it's worth having.

If it's a tool that will allow you to combine multiple maps to create a faux-3D environment in different perspectives, or it will allow you to place 3D objects (made for this tool, I guess) onto your map (perhaps a la RPG Maker 3?), then I'm all-in, and would pay pretty much any amount to have it.

So... Something like RPG Maker 3 on the PS2?

 

[MikePjr]

No, i'm sure he means something that's still first person but is more than enclosed areas.
Personally that's what i'm hoping for.

 

[JosephSeraph]

probably doable by doing 3D tiles, which is what i'm hoping for
movement would still be locked to a grid and 4 directions, but actual maps could be drawn as organically as you wanted respecting the limitation of one "object" per tile -- being that on that object you could actually add multiple 3D models, or have an object span multiple tiles, it'd be possible to create some pretty beautiful places while being easy to program and use.

additionally, support for stuff like lighting and mist would be pretty cool :3c

 

[peq42_]

I think that it would be a nice new tool...But paying for it...
I mean, common.... how much more for how many more tools are we going to pay? Shouldn't things like that come with the engine?


A few EXTRA things(like tilesets and tools for new users) to buy is fine, but not a new tool that is possibly the only way to do this kind of game in MV. It will make MV look like an unfinished engine, wich you need to buy the core part and DLCs to have the options you wanted.

 

[JosephSeraph]

MV is a dragon quest / final fantasy clone engine at its core. If you want it to have functionality for other stuffs you either code it yourself or you can buy graciously made asset packs.
in any other engine is like this, nobody will say that Game Maker is an unfinished engine because it doesn't have a "click and make [insert game genre here] function"