3D Turtle

[sunjay]

A (probably silly) idea I had was that we should think about supporting a mode where instead of drawing a simple 2D triangle we actually draw a full 3D turtle that walks around a plane and draws with a pen tied around its tail.

I thought of this while looking at a screenshot from one of my oldest (10 years ago!) games:

The green thing in the center of this screenshot is a turtle. We could have something like that drawing on a white plane.

Other than some method to set the mode, none of the turtle's interface needs to change. This is just a neat way to render the animated drawings. I think it's important to have some sort of mouse controls so you can rotate the view, pan, and zoom around the 3D world while the turtle draws.

I have no idea how we would render the 2D paths (the actual drawings) in 3D. I think the new rendering backend should help with that though because it represents everything in terms of vertices and faces using the lyon crate.

• Model a simple, low-poly 3D turtle with a pen on its tail
• Create a new backend for the turtle that draws in 3D instead of 2D
  • Render a turtle 3D model
  • Render the plane it walks on (better if very big / infinite sized)
  • Render the paths being drawn as the turtle moves around
• Mouse controls for moving around the 3D world
  • Left mouse button drag - rotate view around center of view
  • Middle mouse button drag - pan the view
  • Right mouse button drag - zoom in and out
• Consider what the control scheme should be for people without a mouse / middle mouse button
• Bonus points for making it possible to change the color of the 3D pen when the pen color of the Turtle struct changes