I have a few quick qustions about scripting, primarily about the versatility. I know that the primary feature of Voxatron is it's editor, and scripting will add OODLES of possibilities, but, a few questions for future plans I would have with the scripting engine have arisen.

With scripting, only in your current plans for it, would it be versatile enough to make a turn based strategy game with it? Sort of like have a few entities, and define the ammount it's coordinates in the world can change, and after it reaches that, it swaps to another entity that is marked for the player's control, and so on. Along with that, the question of would the scripter be able to make AI that also uses these rules.

The second question is, well not really having to do with scripting, though it would probably be possible with it, will we ever see an entity that spawns a NPC that is grouped with it? an example is, say the PC does an action (Or even a random generator that would trigger it randomly.) that triggers the spawnpoint to spawn a monster, and would continue to do that every time the trigger is activated?

Thanks for taking the time to read my questions, and even more thanks if you answer them.

Back to NetHack for me,

-Kilkun

There are two parts to the scripting planned for 0.4 -- an events system similar to the current triggers (some people call that scripting, I guess), and general scripting in Lua where you type in a bunch of text and write any program you like.

I'll give the second type access to almost all parts of the engine, so it will be possible to make pretty much anything from scratch. If someone wants to, they could even ignore the whole engine and just write a program to draw stuff to the voxel display.

So a turn based strategy game would be able to use the display, map drawing and object management parts of Voxatron, and ignore the physics (you'd have to write the movement part yourself somehow).

After I release 0.4 with scripting my plan is to go crazy and write a bunch of mini demo games in different genres so that people can modify them or figure out how to make new ones.

As for spawning -- yes, that will certainly become a part of the core engine. probably in the form of an event-action: e.g. a generator that spawns monsters every 2 seconds if a player is visible might have a rule: EVENT: player_visible ACTION: spawn(object_id)

When scripting is implemented, will we be able to use isometric 3D view as well via script?

Eventually, but it will probably be a while before I add a renderer that does arbitrary camera angles (the current one uses lots of visual tricks based on the front-on view). Just for fun I want to do an old-school orthogonal isometric renderer sometime sooner though. It would be a per-level thing in this case -- the level would prompt the user to change rendering mode, and then optionally revert back to their original selection on exit.

Well, when I mean isometric, I wasn't necessarily thinking 3/4 viewing angle but head on, sort of like the previews for the objects in VoxEd, so that it looks, maybe if done right, kinda like a JRPG for SNES like Final Fantasy. Kinda overhead, but still flat looking.

Here's the orthogonal isometric renderer I'm working on.
The controls are rotated 45 degrees so that when you press right, you move right on the screen rather than down to the right old-school style.

(from The Last Dragon by D)

Oh, and there's also the 3/4 view used in this web-playable test which I guess is what you mean. This will also be a rendering option in the regular desktop version.

Oh cool, didn't realize web test had that view. Also, that preview image above looks really juicy. :D