Alpha Foundation

x4861 · Post by **x4861** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 6:31 pm

This is a small demo of my on-going RPG game project currently called Alpha Foundation. It's a fantasy/sci-fi console type game.

Please note: the link is temporary, and I'll move to Irrhost as soon as it becomes available!!!

The demo is around 18MB zipped. Read "readme.txt" before launching for keyboard keys.

For some screenshots and downloading, go to:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/x4861/

Ahh, one more thing.. If you download this demo and try it, please tell me what is your FPS while being outside in town (FPS is shown on the window caption) and also how fast is your computer.

For me on Athlon XP 1700, I get ~50 FPS.

X

schick · Post by **schick** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 8:28 pm

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 11:27 pm

Great work!!

DarkWhoppy · Post by **DarkWhoppy** » Tue Mar 01, 2005 12:05 am

Nice work indeed. Although, the tree limb's leaves seem to "go through" the other branches in one of the screenshots.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Tue Mar 01, 2005 10:02 am

Congratulations. Outstanding job!

FPS drops to 20-30 FPS while being outside. I consider that very good on my test machine with Intel Extreme Graphics 2.

Have you modified Irrlicht engine somehow? I expected to be much slower.

x4861 · Post by **x4861** » Tue Mar 01, 2005 10:40 am

Thanks for good comments!
The graphical rendering of Irrlicht engine itself is very fast. I have, however, written my own scene managament and one of the things it does is testing the visibility of objects bounding box against the view frustrom before rendering. For large areas this speeds up everything by factor of 1.5-3.

Joe_Oliveri · Post by **Joe_Oliveri** » Tue Mar 01, 2005 2:36 pm

Wow good work, your screens look great!

cmoibenlepro · Post by **cmoibenlepro** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 3:57 am

Wow! I tested it and it's GREAT!!!

continue your great work!

BTW, what modeler do you use for your maps, characters? They are awesome.

I have, however, written my own scene managament and one of the things it does is testing the visibility of objects bounding box against the view frustrom before rendering. For large areas this speeds up everything by factor of 1.5-3

Could you post some code when your project is finished? It would be very helpful.

Jedive · Post by **Jedive** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 7:43 am

Which mesh format are you using? .x? The game in general looks very good, but would look much better with the use of lightmaps.

niko · Post by **niko** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 8:26 am

Looks nice. Especially because I'm just playing NWN from time to time

x4861 · Post by **x4861** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 9:34 am

I will consider making it open-source at some point of time

although I would be ashmed since this is fast-and-dirty type of project.

I'm using Neverwinter Night models and also their own native format (MDL). Unfortunately they don't offer lightmaps, so I will have to live without them.

The world is created using _tiles_ (one tile is 10x10 3d model) just like in 2d games. Each tile can be rotated & translated, and then custom objects are added into the scene. I'm using Neverwinter Nights toolset to construct levels as well

it is very advanced and flexible modeler, and they have HUGE HEAPS of custom-created tilesets and models (including animations, particle systems, etc).

However their 3d format is tricky, and from the first glance doesn't quite fit into the Irrlicht system, which is one of the reasons I created my own scene managament. The problem is with animations that can be inherited from parent objects. If someone manages to implement a good solution, that would give people a nice addition to possible content. See
http://www.wnwn.net/mdl/
for introduction of MDL textual format (they also have binary format which isn't documented, but source that can parse it is available).

rincewind · Post by **rincewind** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 9:41 am

Hi, looks very good.
I had 115 - 140 fps in the town using an athlon64 3200+, gf6600gt, 1024mb ram.

keep working on this, i want to leave the town and slay some orks

PC-XT · Post by **PC-XT** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 12:49 pm

EXCELLENT WORK!

im working on the same genre, im just using the default
irrlicht fog system.

i like the way fog implemented on your work, can u give me
some idea how does it done?

i also made some tweak on culling routine to make it fast on
many objects, but it seems yours is much better.

x4861 · Post by **x4861** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 1:39 pm

I have moved to Irrhost!!!
The new link is:
http://gamerzlite.com/dread/Irrhost/Alpha/

PC-XT, for culling, see a discussion in Advanced Help forum:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... php?t=3330
In particular, the comment by Electron. His function CPortalSystem::isNodeFrustumCulled(ISceneNode* node) has even better culling than mine (I took his approach as well

)

As for the fog, I'm using standart Irrlicht fog function:
driver->setFog(color, true, 15, 40, true, true)
but make sure that the fog color is same as background color, then it will blend nicely.

x4861 · Post by **x4861** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 1:04 pm

Irrhost is down...

so I'm moving back to:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/x4861/

Sorry for inconvenience!