Just quickly announcing my plan of accomplishing two goals before 2019.

Goal 1: Develop fully 3D 'Return To Rom' game based on Rick Adam's 1983 'Temple of Rom' game for the TRS-80 Color Computer.  The game will be built in Unity 3D and will be available as high-end version for pc, and lower spec version for WebGL and Android.

The 3D game labyrinth MUST adhere to the exact theoretical dimensions of the original Temple of Rom, using wall heights as described in the May 28, 2016 post entitled "Determining Scale and Room Size".

Although I have a long ways to go (learning to program shaders right now and designing floor / wall artwork), a lot of progress has been made in creating dynamic walls and corner supports that 'grow' into position and can be modified as the game progresses (changing from blue to red, grow/shrink, etc).  These improvements really help speed up level/room building.

Here are two pics of my current 3D development work-flow...

The picture above shows the level in 3DS Max.  I'll share more about my process of building the map later, but the golden dots in the map on the left are all the corner points accurate to a tenth of an inch of the original game corners.  Using these coordinates, I can dynamically 'grow' walls to the right height, width, length.

The picture above shows the 3DS Max scene after importing it into Unity.  This is taken from the perspective of a 6-foot tall person looking towards the 35-foot tall walls.  You'll notice the overhead map in the lower right corner which mimics the view from the original Temple of Rom.  That overhead map is simply a camera looking down at the scene, so you can see... from a bird's eye view... the 3D walls actually light up just like the original game.  For now I have a white square dot representing our hero, however in the final game... the overhead map will show the original Temple of Rom character sprite animating as you walk around.

Goal 2:
My second goal for this upcoming year is a programming challenge to re-create the original Temple of Rom via 6809 assembly code for my Vectrex.  I don't plan to decompile the original Temple of Rom 6809 code for the color computer, because I want to challenge myself to solve the problem of smooth 8-way scrolling and other optimizations that will be required to make it work on a Vectrex. I tried coding my first game on the Vectrex during the month of January 2017 and ended up with something that looks like the picture below...



The Vectrex display works more like a vector oscilloscope than a normal crt display, so it has some challenges of it's own.  However, I was pretty happy with the results above which allowed me to jump the fox in a 'quasi-3d' space back into the distance and forward to the front as shown above.

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