All of the modifications I was musing about introducing into the Accidental Engine have been implemented, more or less. I've swapped in Golem3D's terrain blending scheme, and I've implemented walls as 3D-ish constructs in order to take advantage of the z-buffer for sprite sorting. There is better support for isometric-style walls, including smooth lighting for either diagonal or front facing walls. (Roofs coming in a couple hours.) I'll probably implement alpha fade for view-blocking walls at some point as well; the functionality is stubbed out currently, but doesn't do anything. Should be easy to create a pretty good partial fade, given that I'm using 3D tricks with this version.

It's probably not a large coincidence that this version of the engine looks extremely similar to the original Golem, since a lot of what I have done with it is things I wish I had done correctly in that first project. As it stands, I could probably reuse all the existing Golem wallsets with Accidental 2, assuming I either do re-renders of everything or write a conversion tool to unpack the textures from the ugly-ass custom file format they currently live in. Been a lot of hard-drive formats since the last time I rendered those walls, so the source .TGAs are long gone.

This v2 of Accidental still needs a bit of work before I release to the public, and I'll probably release separate from v1 since the script interface has changed significantly, enough that I don't want to have to revise all the existing articles that rely on v1's interface. The biggest change is how the terrain is placed; in v1, terrain was placed on a tile by tile basis and a separate translation routine assigned textures and alpha blends. In the new style, terrain is placed on a vertex by vertex basis, and specified as a layer and a blend factor.

If (and that's a big IF, buddy) I were to ever base a game off the Accidental Engine, I would preferably use this one. It would look better, and give me more control. Basically, this engine pretty much eliminates the distinction between rectangle-tile and diamond-tile-isometric style games.

Anyway, here is a god-awful ugly looking screenshot. Uses the desert rock and sand textures from G3D, and that ugly, god-awful wall from my first iso walls tutorial (since, as stated above, all the 'good' walls I've got are stuck in cruddy custom pack files). Got a bunch of colored lights thrown all over the place just for the hell of it as well. I'll upload a better screen when I've managed to get my mitts on some better walls.