User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Windows/20041206)
Regarding Panda3D: How is it "scary"? I downloaded it as my next engine to
toy with, but haven't got around to installing it yet.
The "Hello World" video on their site (not the "greeting card" demo) was
creepy. A more serious problem is that it just doesn't look very good.
There's not much point in making the effort to go 3D unless you can make
it look nice.
Soya3D looked interesting. I'm intimidated by the long list of
requirements, and don't even know which I really need -- do I have SDL
installed already thanks to Pygame? There's also still the problem of
getting 3D character models with animation. But I'll look into it.
Regarding the tiles at http://telestatic.net/tiles.html , these look
nice, but note that you need all those annoying corner pieces too -- 8
of them at least for a transition between two materials. I was thinking
about an automatic blending routine that'd eliminate the need for
corners. Would need to have certain materials not blend, though.
Right now I've got multiple tile layers (64x64): a base layer for
terrain, linked to an XML file that says "this is 'water,' and any
character who looks at it sees color (0,63,192) or something." Atop that
is a decoration layer meant for the human's benefit, and consisting of
things like shoreline pieces. Also there are invisible layers such an
obstruction layer.
I don't know whether this is the best approach. I need some way of
painting the map with both graphical data that looks decent, and