Wii Internet Channel Homebrew

The following features have been added to the Raycasting class:

• Left and right strafing
• Ducking
• Variable camera altitude
• Teleporting
• Background images for sky and ground

With these added features, the possibility exists to create games in the genres of on-rails shooter and 3D sidescroller.

Much of the Wii Opera SDK is being overhauled or rewritten from scratch for the upcoming version 3.0 release.  Unfortunately, some of the new features have to wait until the Opera 9.5 build of the Internet Channel becomes available for the Wii.  The new Wii Remote class is available now, as is the Raycasting class, in the preview release.  The new Drawing class makes use of the Canvas::transform function, which is available in Opera 9.5 but not the 9.27 build of the Internet Channel.  You can see it in action on a computer, but the demo does not work on the Wii yet.  Also coming with the 3.0 release will be a dungeon editor for the raycaster so that developers can create their own games.  The raycaster is versatile enough that it can even be used to create on-rails flight sims and 3D side scrollers.

I’ve been hard-at-work on the Wii Opera SDK first-person shooter (etc. )engine for the Internet Channel.  Its release is taking longer than expected because I’m adding more features to it and tweaking the engine.  Here are some of the features:

• Raycasting-based
• Axis-aligned walls (for the first release)
• Collision-detection built into raycasting for speed
• Texture mapped walls
• Second-pass directional wall lighting (similar to gouraud shading)
• Variable screen resolution

I’m not sure when the release will be coming, but I will post more to this blog as information becomes available.