Is this possible?

[Malohkan]

I have an RPG game I've made, with a pho-3D engine I whipped up, nothing too impressive, and a grid system for the environment.  I'm going to change that to a ray-tracing engine soon, keeping the grid-ness, so that the feel is like Wolfenstein.  The game will become a multiplayer game, but I have one concern.  Art would be much easier to manage if the characters could be 3D models.

I like the idea of using ray-tracing for the scene because I can do that without people having to download any extra API's beyond the J2SE to play my game.

So here's my problem... I can do everything I want in terms of environment there with little costs to system requirements.  However, if I want good character sprites, that would involve a lot of art and ultimately a lot of memory as well.  If I could render 3D models in the midst of my scene, I'd be all set to go.  I could create the model, and a skin for it, but I don't know if it's conceivable to have something to just render that model in my ray-traced scene.

Is there anything out there that could do what I've described?  Thanks for any help!

Malohkan

[princec]

Don't worry about downloads & libs: use Webstart!
Then the world is your oyster. Go for low-level with LWJGL, or try a scenegraph like Xith.

Cas

[nonnus29]

What a coincidence, I've been thinking about that exact same thing for my software renderer!  Sounds like without using an additional lib you will have to use a software renderer.

In a raycasting system its easy to do z buffering because the height of the wall section always tells you the distance of that wall (shorter == farther away) so for a z-buffer you only need

float zbuffer[screen_width];

So you could use this in addition so a model space zbuffer when rendering your models.

Software rendering 3d models is a pretty big topic though.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[princec]

EgonOlsen of these parts has a kick-ass software renderer and a lib on top of it that can switch to LWJGL.

Cas