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Faking 3D on the map

While I have 3D modelling software, meaning it is possible to create the map entirely in three dimensions, doing such a thing for Coffee Quest just doesn’t make sense. The primary reason for this is that true three dimensional environments are expensive in terms of development time not to mention that the game engine would need to be able to render the maps that were created in three dimensions. While this is possible, even with Java applets, it is a lot of work. Likewise, Java applets do not have access to 3D hardware (and indirect access to 2D) meaning that you would have to use software rendering which is a lot of work and very slow compared to hardware solutions (which is why most commercial games use Direct X and/or Open GL).

Not all games that look like they are 3D are in fact 3D. In fact, most the games that inspired this game do not use real 3D. Maze plotting can be done by taking a 2D map and extruding the walls to form what appears to be a three dimensional map. This means that the map file is sort of like a blueprint for a house.

The advantage of two dimensional maps is that they can be quickly created and changed. Also, many types of two-dimensional maps can be represented in a human readable format. Writing software that can be used to generate the maps is also a vastly greater undertaking. In fact, games that use true 3D maps quite often use 3D modelling software for the creation of the map and convert the software’s file format into a format that the game uses. This is done because writing software for manipulating 3D maps is very difficult. Meanwhile, there are a large number of 2D map editing tools and I wrote the Coffee Quest editor in a very short period of time (and in the future plan on creating a much more versatile map editing tool for use with a variety of games on my site).

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