Ape Apps

I have begun designing the upcoming Scroll3d engine, which is a WebGL based replacement for my current Scroll2d game engine that powers My Colony, Antiquitas, My Land, My Starship, Epic Adventure, Gone Rogue, Hell and Back, Colony Wars, My Empire, etc. Scroll3d is my "next generation" rendering engine that will be powering My Colony 2 along with my next batch of games and graphical applications over the coming years, so it is a long term project.

I am designing Scroll3d to be similar API-wise to Scroll2d, the primary difference being that it adds a Z axis to the current X/Y axis. But I wanted the mouse/touch/gamepad interactions to work in a similar way to Scroll2d, because the current engine is fairly easy to navigate at this point.

To that end, I have created the first app and tech demo for the new Scroll3d engine, Voxel Paint, which you can check out at Ape Web Apps here: https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/

Voxel Paint is just a simple 3d drawing app, nothing special. But I needed something to start putting the basics into the new engine. Voxel Paint demonstrates that the engine now has X, Y, and Z axis. I also have most of the usual mouse and touch interactions working, including panning and zoom, utilizing both mouse wheel and touch pinch-to-zoom. Scroll3d also adds an additional interaction which is Rotate.

Anyway, you can check out the beginnings of the new engine by giving Voxel Paint a try. There is still a lot to do on the engine of course, but you can start to see the basics taking shape.

While working on Voxel Paint, I began to consider writing a WebGL loader that would take Voxel Paint save files and turn them into geometries that can be used in games, support for which would be baked right into Scroll3d. Using this, if I wanted to give MC2 a pixelated look, it would be easy for players/modders to just whip out a custom voxel model and import it into the game. Anyway, I would have to see how it looks first though, I might not like the pixelated look.