Irrlicht Engine

I'm new to this community so first of all, hi everyone. I wanted to show you this project I started a week ago using C++ and Irrlicht. It's a little homage to Space harrier and After Burner, and both code and graphics are made made by me. Even though it's still very early in development, everything is temporal, I think I've enough to show and get some feedback, you can download it here:

http://usuarios.lycos.es/auralei/Star.htm

I'm interested mostly on the controls and the performance, the enemies have a very dumb pattern and are just there to test the weapons.

A video on youtube provided by MasterGod:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzTvrQyMnR0

A few screen shots:




As these are the Irrlicht boards I guess I'll rant a bit about my experience with it (skip it if you want ). I'm not new to game development, I've been programming games as a hobbyist for years, but this is my first game using Irrlicht. I've found the experience mostly painless, the code is clear and simple enough to change what you need and the features are good enough for my needs. There are bugs and it lacks some important things but that is the case with every single engine out there, even commercial ones, and simplicity is often not valued enough.
I used milkshape for the models (I'm a terrible modeller) and paint.net, artrage and terragen(skybox) for the graphics. I use my own routines for the particle systems (explosions,smoke trails..) and I added a postprocessing framework (based on the fabolous code by TheGameMaker!).

Holy Moly! Looks amazing.. *Downloading right now*

Edit:
Just.. omg.. respect


p.s
MUST be noted on irrlicht's main site....

I think it might be because of the post processing but i just get a black screen with the gui on it.

Can you please:
1. Release the source?
2. Do you use any physic lib? (Although I don't see the need for)
3. Which libs except irrlicht do you use?
4. If you made your own particle system I'm sure most of us would like to know how you did it.
5. How does your AI works?
6. How did you make infinite water (sea) ?

I must say it again, A Mazing..

lostclimategames wrote:I think it might be because of the post processing but i just get a black screen with the gui on it.

I can confirm this as well. Its a blank screen. My fps is around 71 on the title bar. I can see HITS, SCORE on the top right corner of the screen and LIFE on the bottom left corner. After some time the blue life bar keeps decreasing, but besides this nothing else happens for me..

Thanks to those who have already tried it. Those who are seeing a blank screen it's because of the post-processing, to execute this game you need a card capable of using GLSL shaders, thats GF5700FX and above and ATI9500 and above. I can not make a version without post processing because it's not the only thing that uses shaders, all materials use them, most notably the sea and the robot. Also use always the latest drivers! but you already knew that.

To MasterGod, those area lot of questions! ok

1- I'm not going to release the source, but I'm going to answer any question you have about any particular technique

2- I'm not using anything other than plain irrlicht 1.4

4- there is nothing special about how particles are handled, they are billboards, I keep track of the position of each one and update them each frame. I don't use irrlicht particle system because it's complicated to achieve the effect I wanted with that, so I do it manually. Also I use a good sprite sheet for the particles (you can see it inside the robo.dat file, which is a zip)

5- There is no Ai and there is not going to be, this type of games use predefined paterns for the enemies. The test enemies you se in the demo work like this

- there is a game process that generates enemy process (ep) randomly
- each ep is assigned a position very far from the camera and a target destination close to where the player is
- each frame I move them closer to the target position
- when they are within a set distance from the player I rotate them a little and move them to the sides in adition to their previous movements. At this point they decide(randomly) if they shoot or not
- an ep disapears when goes behind the camera or is destroyed
thats it!

6- there is more than one way to go about that, in my case is simple because the camera is fixed, it can only look one way.
what I do is create a plane in milkshape(1x1) and multiply it inside the game until it reaches the far plane of the camera, this plane doesn't move, instead I move the texture, you can do this two ways with irrlicht.
As I use a shader for the sea(bump mapping+fog) I added a simple param to the vertex shader to displace the texture coords a set amount, so each frame I send the shader how much I want the sea to move.
The other way, without a shader would be to move the texture using the texture matrix of the material, something like this

Thanks Killua for answering all my questions and it's nice to see something done very simple yet very nice indeed.

absolutely amazing work Killua!

Instant playability, simplistic but very beautiful use of camera movement and particles, and the shaders really help things out

I'm with MasterGod: this HAS to be given a spot somewhere where everyone will see it

I can only think of 2 things which could be added to improve it:

1- sound (and music)

2- a sky which changes to help give the impression of progression (either day/night, or just clouds which swoosh over)

(oh, and maybe a text-file or onscreen indicator telling us what the controls are )

keep up the great work, I'm really looking forward to seeing how you progress with this!

very very nice game ^^
can i oly known how you make a game like this?
or better, a teorical explanation of this kind of game?
i don't remember what kind of shooter is this ^^'

i played the game, it was pretty good.

are you planning on adding levels?

keep it up and keep us posted with updates on the game.

GF5700FX? a GF5200FX can also use them... thats what I was on and I constantly am using shaders in the games I work on.

Superb tech demo, thanks for sharing it.

If there's anything specific about Irrlicht that could be fixed to help you out, please do let us know.

lostclimategames wrote:GF5700FX? a GF5200FX can also use them... thats what I was on and I constantly am using shaders in the games I work on.

you are right of course, I use a GF7900GT and it works for me so maybe nvidia is not suporting glsl properly on the 5xxxFX line or there is a problem with the render targets with the 5200, it's impossible for me to test it.

rogerborg wrote: If there's anything specific about Irrlicht that could be fixed to help you out, please do let us know.

really? this sure is a nice community. I'm sure the team already have a good list of features to add and know the direction they want to take the engine, and I'm a newbie with the engine anyway. I think the engine is very nice already, you can do any type of game you want easily (easily being a keyword here) putting some effort. Maybe it doesn't have spectacular features(shadows and complex multipass materials) that attract people starting game development but I think that with a little experience it's easy to realize how valuable is what this engine offers.

i played it on a radeon 3850, the water rendered pretty good.

the tower was black, don't know why.

will test it on the radeon 9550 and 9000 later.

checked it out on a friends computer. definately a nice start. It has a real feel for speed. very fun. I would recommend tho that even if you dont render a reflection on the water, to at least take a copy of the player model and render it upside down under water so it at least looks like a fake reflection. overall very nice though.