Cyberion link said:
I would highly appreciate your will to work on No Hope with us. I put this project on hold because of the alck of programming knowledge. It took me the way to long to code... so I got very tired and bored.
Can imagine. You need just the knack for programming or you'll get bored really quickly.
Later (within few months) I'll make a 3d model of 1st level for you. Without textures of course, just naked 3D model of level with the right geometry. So you can start your tests
Also have to arrange some stuff for HL2: mod guys
So let's keep in touch. My skype is cyber1on. Email is in my profile.
Sure thing. I'll add you to my skype - do keep in mind I'm Dutch and that I won't be online during US regular hours. Also, I need to get a microphone so you can hear me too
Just a small update on the progress of the engine generically:
- Started adding menu to it. Ripped the original background image from No Remorse, touched it up a bit (removed the text), have it in OpenGL now. Need something to put behind it (some level or something, but that can wait) and need to get the font working for me to have a working menu.
- Isometric projection added, got projection methods worked out nicely now - you can switch at runtime with very little cost. There's an orthogonal (top-down, like old RTS games for the other game), isometric (C&C:TS or No Remorse style) and true 3D (like any current game - as long as anybody cares to describe the camera position & movement to me). I'm thinking about setting the Isometric one to default, to keep in touch with the original Crusader style
- Preparations for other display modes than 640*480. Not for any particular reason but I just started with that one and I've kind of hardcoded it in a few places. I've removed a bit of the hardcoding and got a bit more generic stuff going.
Todos for the next few weeks:
- Sound, in particular background sounds. Found a basic OGG player, need to integrate it (and OpenAL) into the code. This would also be usable for short sound effects such as the "click" for a selection.
- Video. Have a basic Xvid player working, need to figure out how to get an mpeg4 stream from an avi file.
- Menu navigation. At the moment the menu is dead and doesn't even have options. It should handle mouse & keyboard input.
- GameController basics. This class handles the game specifics and game-global state such as whether you're in the menu. Right now it just draws the menu and does nothing other than that.
- Font drawing or menu item drawing. Whichever comes first - the menu items are just words that can be drawn on top of something.
- Skeletal animation.
- Actually having working settings in the menu. Even if you could go to a menu item, it wouldn't work.
- Physics basics. Just the basic "object doesn't hover in air" and "object doesn't penetrate floor" stuff. I'm considering researching a few physics topics but I'm going to have to see whether they become relevant. I think they will:
- object structure rigidity. This would mean that any rigid object (like a box) has fracture points (like joints, but fixed) that are either completely rigid or completely broken. ATM I think a single point of failure would be ok - IE, when one breaks all of them break. That way, you could hit a box with a rocket and it would fly off as a dozen wooden planks instead.
- sub-object fracturing. This is the basic glass-splinter or wood-break thing that allows a single convex object to fragment according to a single high-energy impact. No clue on how to really do this, just an idea.
- Advanced physics stuff. In particular, as we'll like the AR-7 and the GL-303, explosion physics.
- Using HDR
- Pixel shaders, vertex shaders...
- Really advanced graphical stuff.
Of course,the last few items (and the stuff that isn't coupled to 3d rendering stuff) will be done a bit later, so we can have a playable demo first. I can convert the HL2 models to a format that my engine can take so I'll try to hack together a basic level for testing.
One major point of issue - does anybody have a Crusader model? or any other guy, for that matter? The running-moving-shooting stuff of a crusader is the most important part and I can't start with that until I can at least see what I'm doing...
I'll post a screenshot as soon as the menu does something pointful.