the experiment

floppyfreak · Post by **floppyfreak** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 8:25 am

After coding for over one and a half year now (with an interruption of 8 months) and switching over from a basic knoglege of C to a subsub basic knnoledge of c++ is seems to be time to let you know about my little project. I try to write an application that shows the capabilities of irrlicht for a community- built clone of descent, a 1st person shooter veteran that was published in three versions and then never succeeded to be relaunched in up to date developments. The third version, descent3, is like the ealier versions stil played, so it survived not less then ten years now.
The main difference to other egoshooters is, that you have 6dof, six degrees of freedom in comparision to the four degrees of most games of that genre.That means you dont walk and run but fly (and bank, that means rotate round all three axes of the cam)
Watch a movie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsA0Y5mtymQ

What I have done so far (not all is shown in the example) is: Descent- like cam movements, joystick- style mouse controll, collision walls, spawned items.
Define settings in a XML- File: preferences for the player in one file, gameobjects in another file. Freely define weaponslots (where you can switch weapons) and launchers (where you can fire weapons simultaniously like in descent primaries and secondaries). But it is possible to define slots and launchers in each number and name them as you like. Define types of spawnstations that spawn random or fixed powerups in fixed plus random time. Define playerspawns. ++. Currently I set up a viewport setup custumable in the user preferences. Next step is netcode: start with a chat window. (I'll test irrnet lite).

shadowslair · Post by **shadowslair** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 9:44 am

Nice! Good luck!

Mel · Post by **Mel** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 11:22 am

Looks great, I was a big fan of Descent. The best of the lucks to you!

Graphically, does it make any culling?, or you have simply put the level to run like in Descent?

Brainsaw · Post by **Brainsaw** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 11:41 am

That's cool. Descent ][ is one of the best games of all times imho.

floppyfreak · Post by **floppyfreak** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 11:52 am

Mel wrote: Graphically, does it make any culling?, or you have simply put the level to run like in Descent?

I have experimented with culling when I started to code, but it took too much effort to implement. Now I see, that luckily irrlicht 1.6 has more capabilities with the method isCulled(), so one of the next features to implement will be to reestablish a system of segmenting levels. Little more experience with irrlicht features needed here. The Level you see in the example (made with blender and irrblend) is a onesegment chunk.
But again luckily irrlicht is faster then the descent3 engine (which was very innovative at its time)

Brainsaw wrote:That's cool. Descent ][ is one of the best games of all times imho.

grumpymonkey · Post by **grumpymonkey** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 3:30 pm

wow those are some cool ass lighting effects, reminds me of halo 2

Abraxas) · Post by **Abraxas)** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 4:43 pm

I watched the video as the TL;RD version of this thread and the first thing that popped into my mind was: MATERIAL DEFENDER.

floppyfreak · Post by **floppyfreak** » Fri Jan 08, 2010 12:30 pm

The poor material defender can show a new movie :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EpvIduidPQ
silly models (i know), some basic netcode (enet). Slowly I advance to code faster

floppyfreak · Post by **floppyfreak** » Sun Mar 07, 2010 10:58 am

I give a short presentation to the project here:
http://fly.thruhere.net/theexperiment/d ... 30501.html

Brainsaw · Post by **Brainsaw** » Mon Mar 08, 2010 6:49 am

Hmm ... I think I gotta take a closer look at your blender-tutorial. Although I'm really happy with Wings3D it is very hard to me to do proper texture mapping on the inside of caves or something (the problem can be seen in one of the new levels in my "Stunt Marble Racers" project - tube racing).