Colossal Cave

"Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in treasure and gold, though it is rumored that some who enter are never seen again. Magic is said to work in the cave. I will be your eyes and hands."

This is the introduction to the original Colossal Cave Adventure Game written in the 70s by Willie Crowther and Don Woods. See Colossal Cave for more information.

I have always thought that a 3D animated version of this game would be a great. The problem is drawing and animating all the 150+ rooms, to say nothing of the various creatures and magic that abound in the caves.

This page is about further animation using the QueueBehavior routine discussed in Animating the Joints. Animating the joints was about using various animation routine activated by QueueBehavior to rotate or move various joints. Rotating and moving are not the only things that can be animated. Java3D allows you the change the colour and transparency of objectsin real time. It even allows you to change the textures used on an object.

The theme for this page is the Colossal Cave game.

"You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building"

Animating both water and smoke present difficult challanges. It was not until I found a routine by David Griffiths that I had any idea how to approach animating water. David has now closed his web site but there are many examples of his applets in use all over the WWW. See using the Lake Applet. The source of the Lake Applet is also available.

Working out how the Applet works took a while. A series of copies of a texture are created and the ripples simulated by moving rows of pixels up or down the texture using a sine wave function. The ripples are then moved progressively down each texture to give direction of movement. Davids code is complicated further by adding perspective (JavaD will do that for you). I finally endedup with a series of textures that, when animated using the QueueBehavior routine, look like running water.

"You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring. The stream flows out through a pair of 1 foot diameter sewer pipes"

"A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully"

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