SUPREMACY ERRANDS - v1.6

[andrei25ni]

Its november! So when will the demo be out? Will it include the source as well?

Initialy I wanted to release the demo (and source) today, and then release a small patch to fix/add some things, but I'm affraid I'll have to postpone the release in order to have all things nice and working. Sorry.
You've waited one month, you can wait 2 more days, right ?

I have to ask, sorry this is a newbie question, but I am a programmer, and not a modeler. Is the texturing for that city just one big texture, or do all the buildings contain their respective textures?

I'm using DeleD as my editor.
With it I build models, for example a building, and assign a texture (or more) to it. So, yes, I'm using multiple textures for the whole thing.

Cya.

[GameDude]

Well I can wait for two more days, I just wanna see the improvements and stuff. Plus the source is good stuff to learn from. It dosen't matter to me if the source is sloppy or not.

[andrei25ni]

Ok, it just happened : version 1.5.0 released !

>> Happy downloading <<

New things in this release :

- animated clouds;
- fake bloom;
- trees;
- animated grass;
- more complex city;
- large terrain;

TO-DO for the next release (1.6.0) :

- 3rd person camera + main character;
- vehicles;
- save sistem;
- basic hud;
- inventory + stats

System requirements :

Processor : 1500 Ghz
RAM : 512 DDR
HDD Space : ~250 Mb
Display : [also recommended] 1024 x 768 x 32

W,A,S,D - Move
Cursor - Move
Space - Jump
R - reposition on map
F9 - take screenshot (saved in data/Album/1.jpg)

Known bugs

1. Get's stuck in terrain
- Press Space or R .


Please report any bugs you find, fps count and of course your opinions.

Cheers.

[sio2]

One minor point: you have ~10MB of "thumbs.db" files in the zip file. This is an easy one to miss as Windows gives them HS attributes.

Anyway - just about to try the demo out...

[sio2]

Hope you don't mind if I give some (hopefully) constructive criticism.

1. I ran it three times and became stuck in world geometry each time. Once in the "city" and twice trying to explore the terrain. Are you using Irrlicht's built in collsion system? If so, then it's completely unusable from what I've just seen.

2. The fake bloom is rubbish, if you don't mind me saying so. Irrlicht is currently limited to 8bit-per-channel rendertargets (unless you edit the source, of course) which I would imagine doesn't help.

3. Some surfaces show noticeable aliasing, such as the road. These surfaces could do with trilinear or aniso I think.

4. Mouse seems a bit slow to turn.

5. Are you enabling multisampling? I tried PIX so I could look at the bloom rendertargets but PIX can't bring up a pixel history for multisampled targets. Also, Irrlicht's implementation of multisample is pretty lame - I'd like to choose all the up to 16x MSAA, not just switch it "on" or "off".

[andrei25ni]

Hope you don't mind if I give some (hopefully) constructive criticism.

1. I ran it three times and became stuck in world geometry each time. Once in the "city" and twice trying to explore the terrain. Are you using Irrlicht's built in collsion system? If so, then it's completely unusable from what I've just seen.

Yes it's the default Irrlicht collision system. I'm planning to do the collisions with Newton.
And when you get stuck, press "R".

2. The fake bloom is rubbish, if you don't mind me saying so. Irrlicht is currently limited to 8bit-per-channel rendertargets (unless you edit the source, of course) which I would imagine doesn't help.

Yeah, a lot of people said that too
I'll keep working on it.

3. Some surfaces show noticeable aliasing, such as the road. These surfaces could do with trilinear or aniso I think.

Yeah, you're right. I didn't really worked on that.

4. Mouse seems a bit slow to turn.

I will make a config system in the next release where things like this can be changed.



Thank you very much for the comments, sio2.

One more thing I'd like to know: the fps count.
You can use fraps to see that.

Cya.

[GameDude]

Looking good so far. I saw that there will be an album system. Is this a picture like thing or more like music. If so then what kinda of music can we expect, made up stuff, stuff by popular bands

[andrei25ni]

It will be for images. There will be a virtual camera in game, with wich you can take snapshots ingame.

I haven't really decided on the soundtrack yet, I'm still looking for nice songs. But I will definetly use more genres of music.

[JP]

First things first.. the progress bar needs to be done a bit better imo. There's no real gauge as to how far the progress bar is going to extend until it's full so a box around the extent of it would be good. And also i think the progress bar should be updated a bit more often, espectially whilst loading geometry, you could update it a small amount after each piece of geometry is loaded (if possible).

Also the bloom shader (i assume that's what it is) is rather bad (at least on my PC and i think this has been mentioned by others possibly and you said it was just an early version) but when you move the camera you get lots of changes and sort of empty spots moving around...

Is there anything you can do in this version except walking around? I know there were weapons and zooms you could do in a previous version from ages ago but i couldn't find any readme file that would tell me what keys did what!

[andrei25ni]

no, just walk in this demo.
the weapon code was lost at the same time with my hdd

Anyways, I'll release a small patch this week-end to fix some things :

o menu
o that "fake" fake bloom effect
o config.xml

Anything else you thing think could be added to the above list (and be done in 2 days ) ?

Thaks JP for your thoughts

[oc2pus]

ok, what about a linux port ?

I tried it and there are only some small changes needed

Code: Select all

 
rm -r lib
sed -i -e 's|Irrlicht.h|irrlicht.h|g' \
        CGrassPatchSceneNode.h
sed -i -e 's|#include <windows.h>||g' \
	g_Game.h
sed -i -e 's|_strdate(dateStr);||g' \
	g_Game.cpp
sed -i -e 's|_strtime(timeStr);||g' \
	g_Game.cpp
sed -i -e 's|Sleep(1000)|sleep(1)|g' \
	g_Game.cpp
sed -i -e 's|video::EDT_DIRECT3D9|video::EDT_OPENGL|g' \
	g_Game.cpp
sed -i -e 's|debug_to_file.open ("debug.txt");|debug_to_file.open ("/tmp/SupremacyErrands-debug.txt");|g' \
	g_Game.cpp
sed -i -e 's|1024,768|800,600|g' \
	g_Game.cpp

ok, ok, the datestr, timestr needs some more coding to have fine timemarks in debug.txt. But I wanted to show a proof of concept

and in main.cpp

Code: Select all

//INT WINAPI WinMain( HINSTANCE hInst, HINSTANCE, LPSTR strCmdLine, INT )
main( int args, char **argv )
{
	bool					fullscreen	= false;
	bool					sound		= false;
	video::E_DRIVER_TYPE	driverType	= video::EDT_OPENGL;

	g_game* game = new g_game(fullscreen,sound,driverType);
    game->g_init ();
	game->g_run ();

	return 0;
}

To compile you need audiere and Irrlicht, download the sources, change to source-directory.

You can download my SUSE-packages from here:
http://packman.links2linux.de/package/Irrlicht
http://packman.links2linux.de/package/libaudiere

compile the beast after the above changes

Code: Select all

g++ -I/usr/include/irrlicht -Iinclude -I. -I/usr/include -c *.cpp
g++ -o SupremacyErrands *.o -L/usr/lib -lIrrlicht -laudiere

than grab the windows bin distribution (200MB), delete all dll and exe,*.db files, change to the directory you unziped the binary distribution,
copy your compiled linux binary in and

launch the game with ./SupremacyErrands

enjoy

still to do:
* adjust the naming of some data-files (it's a mixture of jpg/JPG,...) as spelling is important on linux.
* recreate the datafiles with "/" instead of "\", some resources won't be found ...
* sound related things, /dev/dsp is blocked-error fixing ...

so if you like to have it also on linux, feel free to contact me via pn.

have fun

[christianclavet]

Hi.

I've downloaded and played yout current version.

Some remarks:

- Try increasing your collision sphere. It's too small and get stuck between polygons. A bigger size will make it move smoother and will make it less prone to get stuck.

- For the moment, can you define a key like to enable/disable your video post effect? Since it's not fully working, an Active/inactive flag key could be good.

- Your map look big, but you will need to refine the polygons from to road to touch to the ground. At some place I saw some "holes"

- Putting a bigger value on the FPS Camera rotation speed could be good. It take a big movement on the mouse to make a small turn.

- Something weird I've saw on the GUI, the mouse pointer get draw behind the menu when I start the game.

Some questions:

- Do you do something to hide the object that are not in view? Do you have developped some tricks to get a good framerate?

- Have you modeled this level yourself? How long to put that in place?

[andrei25ni]

oc2pus, thanks for sharing this info on how to compile this on linux.

- For the moment, can you define a key like to enable/disable your video post effect? Since it's not fully working, an Active/inactive flag key could be good.

It will be in the next patch.

- Putting a bigger value on the FPS Camera rotation speed could be good. It take a big movement on the mouse to make a small turn.

Will do.

- Something weird I've saw on the GUI, the mouse pointer get draw behind the menu when I start the game.

Thanks for that, I didn't notice. Will try to fix.

- Do you do something to hide the object that are not in view? Do you have developped some tricks to get a good framerate?

No it's just the Irrlicht magic ( camera->setFarValue )

- Have you modeled this level yourself? How long to put that in place?

Yeah it's all made by me.
I used Earht Sculptor for the terrain, and Deled for meshes.
It took abut 1 month.

Thanks for the feedback.

[oc2pus]

oc2pus, thanks for sharing this info on how to compile this on linux.

you can merge this into your actual source-tree.

#ifdef __LINUX__
my additions
#else
actual coding
#endif

and so the build has simply to define a -D__LINUX__ and those parts are activated.

If I find the time, I can write a little Makefile to make these things a little bit easier.

but for the moment I'm still checking why sometimes a "/dev/dsp is blocked" message is appearing and the game won't start....
If I found a solution for this I'll provide a SuSE package for it

could you have a look at this:
http://rafb.net/p/Pmb5Am25.html

this is the start protocol on linux
you see a lot of resources are not found because of the "" ...
which files I need to edit/change to fix this ?

how did you enter the "" ...
according to:
http://www.collada.org/mediawiki/index. ... in_COLLADA

you can write those URIs os-system neutral

[andrei25ni]

thanks for the info oc2pus.

A port for linux was not planned, so that it's why many of these things happened. I'll pay more attention from now on.

But my linux knowledge is very limited, so if you want (and have time of course) you can make the source code linux-friendly and send it to me to upload it to sourceforge. You will be of course in the credits.

Cya.