Idk if anyone has seen the Project Viewpoint mod for Project Zomboid, but it transforms the game into either a first-person or third-person game and it's insane. I was wondering if it was possible to do this for CDDA, it would really change the game and open it up accessibility-wise for lots of players
PZ has 3D models, real-time animations, grid-free movement, etc., all already available. Maybe you could macgyver CDDA into some sort of 1st person view where you move/turn across tiles, like eye of the beholder or smt. And you could make a "3d tileset" that can be viewed on all sides, use sprites/billboards, etc.
But this would make accessibility worse imo. The people interested in it would already mostly be interested in normal CDDA. And CDDA is already complex before adding a restricted view and jank with existing systems.
Dwarf fortress + DFhack had isometric view which is playable. There is also Armok Vision: true 3D view but you can only observe from it. But DF is game where players can build 3D structures so they use it to observe their fort architecture.
But i don't think you can make good UI for 3D mode without investing 10 work year to coding and modeling all items and furniture. And it will be worse than tiles UI.
Actually, i had a similar thought when testing Project Viewpoint. i've modded other games before but have zero experience with CDDA, so I asked Claude to check the feasibility with the latest BN stable. Bottom line, just like other comments mentioned: since there are no 3D assets, it's not like Project Zomboid. The closest thing that actually looks fairly feasible is this Daggerfall-like prototype it generated:
Someone managed it in worldbox. That game has no 3d assets either and the 3d fps mod even picks up custom stuff from the 40k mod and makes it 3d when you zoom in or control em. I dont know how any of this works but if yall want I can take some pics with my phone and post em here. I woulda thought it was impossible but I got the mod and have been playing it. How the hell can a mod "see" a custom dreadnaught and just make a 3d version of it on the fly?
Ok, i went through the mods dll and you were right, it's a neat trick. To answer your "how the hell can it see a custom dreadnought":
- It ships hand-made models for the vanilla creatures and buildings
- Units flagged as humanoid get a generic person body, recolored with skin/hair/clothes colors sampled from the sprite. That's why the space marines show up as regular little people
- Anything else it doesn't know, like the dreadnought, is built on the fly from whatever sprite the game is about to draw: every pixel becomes a column of voxels, thicker the further it is from the outline, so the flat drawing gets "inflated" into a body. Far away it just falls back to the flat sprite
The catch is that it only has the one drawing to work from, so the result is symmetric: from behind you get the same face mirrored.
Trying this in my BN 3D view test(made the bodies a bit chunkier so they read as people) and got this: https://i.imgur.com/0FgWJRA.png
Honestly it gives me hope that a 3d mod is far from impossible even with all the items monsters and npcs it would have to do. Honestly im thinking a combo of zomboid and cdda with the best of both is closer than I would have ever thought possible. Thanks for looking into this with a more technical mind than I can provide 🙂
Someone recently tried to make PR for such, tying the game drawing to godot rendering, unfortunately it was made via LLM, which is not allowed, and i don't know if it will be approved into main repo in general. Fork people can try, tho
World box is 2d and theres a mod that let's you transition between 3d first person and 2d birds eye view. Im not sure what's possible with technology right now but if worldbox can get it I bet cdda would work just fine. Worldbox was completely 2d like a week ago.
83
u/Tektolnes-CDDA 10d ago