Wii Internet Channel Homebrew

The dungeon editor for the Wii Opera SDK’s raycasting class is under development now. To play around with a very early version, visit here.  Currently the dungeons cannot be saved or loaded, but they can be edited and viewed by clicking on texture images.  The final version will offer the following:

• Ability to load and save custom dungeons
• Seemless integration into games
• Linking of dungeons to website accounts
• Uploadable textures
• Gallery viewer for dungeons made by others
• Set teleportation points
• Scriptable settings for levels
• Customizable dungeon sizes from 10×10 to 99×99

The first demo of the Wii Opera SDK raycasting dungeon class is available for play at http://wiioperasdk.com/wall.html. Features in this beta are as follows:

• Axis-aligned grid-based raycasting
• Texture-mapped walls
• Second-pass wall effects (flashlight, gouraud, shadow)
• Variable ray resolution (for speed adjustment)
• Bounce generated by walking

I will be tweaking the engine and writing documentation for it throughout the day.

Currently, the first-person shooter class for the SDK uses texture-mapping of skewed rectangles to generate scenes, and this can be very slow (and glitchy in FireFox) because it does not efficiently skip drawing wall sections that are hidden. In the next few weeks, this class will be completely rewritten as a full ray-casting engine like Wolfenstein 3D or Doom, using elements from my dabbling with raytracing in JavaScript.  Developers will be able to designate grid coordinates and textures for each wall segment then automatically generate scenes.  At first I will not be including code for collision detection, variable-height walls, and moving doorways, but they will come later.  Enemies may come later as well.  I will re-release the previous demo with the new engine so that speed and quality comparisons can be made.  I expect the speed/framerate to be significantly higher and even playable on the Wii with semicomplex level constructions.