Hi All,
I have been doing indie game development for 14+ years. I actually have 2D WW2 turn based strategy game done written in VC++ for Windows XP+ platform. For the future I would like to replace the 2D map graphics with 3D. I’m not thinking of something fancy, I just want a 3D hexagonal map plane (with elevation) that will have 3D objects of units and buildings. I have Maya 2016 that I will use to make 3D objects like Buildings, trees and units. I will need to be able to export these objects from Maya for my game to be able to read and display the objects in in the 3D window. I’m not sure if I will need to use 3D OpenGL engine like Ogre or simply just write the OpenGL code in my game without any need for 3D OpenGL engine (Overkill?).
In any case, I have done a bit of OpenGL 5+ years but nothing beyond a bit of messing around with VC++ integration into a MFC application. I have ordered 3 following books on the subject of OpenGL:
- OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to learning OpenGL, Version 4.3 (8th edition)
- OpenGL Superbible: Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference (7th Edition)
- OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookebook, Second Edition.
So my idea to now dive deep into OpenGL, figure out how to do the 3D hexagonal “map” (no idea where how to build this) and place 3D objects like units/buildings as well as be able to select hexes based on mouse coordinates. I don’t need to worry about Fog of War Line of Sight processing in 3D since I’m using my own in the 2D world which already has support for FOW and LOS.
I just want to purely use the 3D graphics window to represent the game map (2D array structure) and units state.
Any ideas, how to create the 3D hexagonal maps, do I need to use 3D engine like Ogre and how to generally start with this?
Thank You all for your listening and feedback
Cheers!