| Submitted by , posted on 28 February 2005 |

Image Description, by This is a screenshot from the game I'm programming for PC using MSVC++, using OpenGL and DirectX. As I am primarily responsible for the engine, I will talk about that. I'm particularly interested in the use of fractals and random seeds to create compelling worlds. The engine consists of two main parts: the city and the character.
The city is represented as an mxn array of quadtrees that stores objects, textures and neighbors. Each quadtree is made of subtrees that store smaller levels of detail from city blocks, to buildings, to sidewalk tiles. The idea was to write a script to do a fractalized-"Conway's Game of Life" thing to create a believable, randomly-generated city. I'm looking into Python and Lua to help me do that.
Like the city, the character is also built on fractals. The GameCharacter class supports stats like health and strength and manages control and animation. It is built on top of a Stickman class that stores the appearance and animation. The Animation class stores various poses and interpolates to fill in the blanks using either slow-in or slow-out animation. There's also a tool that allows animators to create these files. The animation pose system is built on fractals: the Body class contains 5 Limbs, (torso being a Limb) and each Limb contians 3 Joints. The plan was to apply this idea to animate hands so that each hand could be represented as an instance of the Body class.

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