Pathways into Darkness Remake

[xilef]

I'm intrigued by the chamfers and think about them off and on, but I haven't come up with (or run across) any really good ideas yet. If you figure it out before I do, please post your solution.

Not any time soon D:
I know this, the corners where the chamfers start are 0.25 wu from the edge of the wall (I can detect that).

More people thinking about this would help!
Each square is 1x1 wu, i can detect what's around the square, where the chamfers SHOULD start, but drawing them is an entirely different story D:

Anyway, looks pretty good. What's your overall goal with the engine? Just a base anybody can use or are you creating a full game?

It will be a game engine, with editors, so newbies to the game creation industry can create raycast FPS games.
Also I have a pilot game in the works, I have 2 other writers working on that, it's a horror FPS RPG, imagine PiD play style, with a story like Dead Space, setting like System Shock, story mysteries like Marathon (Hopefully where players will attempt to work out the tr11th).

[ray]

the tr9th is this: anyone can write reams of vague bullshit

cf. france

[xilef]

the tr13th is this: anyone can write reams of vague bullshit

cf. france

Precisely.

Just got mouse-look running, it's PiD style, no mouse recentre (As it's still in OS's GUI, mouse is toggled by Ctrl and no click is needed as that will be "shoot")

Collision is 100% perfected also, with slippery walls so the player doesn't get jammed if moving at a slightly smelly angle.

MOUSELOOK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_gSZqypMHw

[TectonInd]

Just got mouse-look running, it's PiD style, no mouse recentre (As it's still in OS's GUI, mouse is toggled by Ctrl and no click is needed as that will be "shoot")

Ouch, that's gonna take some getting used to. Oh well, at least I have some Wii experience.

[xilef]

Ouch, that's gonna take some getting used to. Oh well, at least I have some Wii experience.

Don't worry, I've added mouse capture as an option (However the side effect is that if you click and move the mouse quickly to the side you'll lose focus of the game and your mouse cursor will be stuck.
It feels just like aiming on a modern FPS (Only without the Y direction)

Lets hope people don't twitch shoot with impulse when using it D:

Torch and Night Vision tests:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yf018QOtYw

[Dis]

Nice job on the engine. Your game sounds like a very original and intriguing concept, please keep details forthcoming.

[xilef]

Nice job on the engine. Your game sounds like a very original and intriguing concept, please keep details forthcoming.

I'll give a short synopsis.
You are the chief of security for a spaceship that has recently left a large space colony for refuelling. Not long after leaving, the side of the colony facing the ship explodes, everyone looking directly at it is blinded for a short time. That includes you. When your sight recovers, you see that a chunk of the colony is missing, and red biomass is smeared all up the side of the colony.
You captain contacts the colony, asking if they require assistance, which they deny. After a short period of silence from the colony, the captain makes the decision of sending you and your team to investigate.
When landing on the colony, you step over the bodies of the 10 people you took with you, and take your first steps into the darkness ahead.

My sister contributed a lot to horror aspects, for example you will momentarily hear static coming from your radio, fine tuning it will allow you to listen to conversations around you from the dead. Night vision goggles enable you to see apparitions, but for some you don't even need night vision goggles to see them.
The player will work out what is going on with the strange behaviour that the dead around them are performing, oh yes, aliens and monsters are attacking this place, so you'll need to kill them before they kill you.

Here's the new level editor:

The new map formats are much cleaner, pillars, walls, objects and zones are kept in separate grids, allowing for more textures to be used.

[xilef]

I wrote my own scripting system called object script, basically an action is defined by a header, details given under it and when activated it runs in that order.
So activating this object:
<object>
10
15
<message>
I'm sending you to hell >:c
<teleport>
2
13
<message>
Haha how do you like hell?
<remove>
157852
<stop>

This will activate the object when player is at 10,15, say a message, teleport them, say another message and deletes the object (Random number between 0 and 999999 is used), the <stop> defines the end of the file, any more objects go before the stop like:
<object>
12
14
<object>
16
24
<stop>


Additionally, the map editor now loads and edits object script, and also has an easy way of selecting object sprites from the object manifest.

[Miak]

Here's the new level editor:

The new map formats are much cleaner, pillars, walls, objects and zones are kept in separate grids, allowing for more textures to be used.

Looks pretty good. Do pillars and doors use the same texture throughout, or can you change the texture for that particular instance?

[xilef]

Looks pretty good. Do pillars and doors use the same texture throughout, or can you change the texture for that particular instance?

Earlier today I made it so you tick an edit sector checkbox and click on a sector to change textures.
Here's different textures demonstrated:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5nEMkgK4RM

[thermoplyae]

for something that looks so similar to xml, it would have been easier to conform to that standard and use a preexisting xml parser. oh well!

[xilef]

for something that looks so similar to xml, it would have been easier to conform to that standard and use a preexisting xml parser. oh well!

It only looks like xml because i used the triangle brackets, if I used percentage signs you wouldn't have said that at all.
I assure you it behaves nothing like xml

[thermoplyae]

xml is pretty much too flexible to say no to, unless you have some complex, time-saving syntax. can we see a (longer?) example that shows why being xml-conformant would have been inconvenient?

edit: as an example of the sort of thing i'm thinking of, xslt

[xilef]

xml is pretty much too flexible to say no to, unless you have some complex, time-saving syntax. can we see a (longer?) example that shows why being xml-conformant would have been inconvenient?

edit: as an example of the sort of thing i'm thinking of, xslt

I just don't see how changing the way it LOOKS will make anything faster :/

[thermoplyae]

language design is not really about making things faster so much as making things usable and, if not intuitive, familiar.

[xilef]

language design is not really about making things faster so much as making things usable and, if not intuitive, familiar.

My editor has a push-button to generate script feature, removing the need to understand it for basic users. Just that if an advanced user has some small changes that need to be done, they don't have to reloaded the editor to make them, they can edit the script directly.

[Miak]

Has there been any progress since the last update? Just curious.

[xilef]

Has there been any progress since the last update? Just curious.

Yes an optimising re-write.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw6kJNMqTE0





I had to swap out the pixel-editing for this new method (Increased the FPS from 40 to 60 for me), with this new method comes other benefits, each texture now has a number of copies of itself, each one progressively darker, with each distance, the picture is swapped in or out. I can use this to edit the dark images so they have glowing lights, I can also give enemies glowing eyes in the dark, or make items light up.
I further optimised the rendering by having the renderer stop when it goes beyond the farthest light-level, it looks seem-less currently, but I'll have to watch out for it when expanding the engine. This locks the frame-rate for wide-open areas, so it doesn't drop below 30.
I'm expanding this so lighting is controlled in the same way, so a cube of map could have the image brightness of 4 amongst the darkness, which would be good for illuminating corridors.
I also had to drop the GDI+ hybrid, I'm looking into using direct draw again but apparently simple drawing a 2D image is a complete nightmare. Dropping the GDI+ hybrid moved my frame-rate from 60 to 125 but reduced the rendering quality significantly.
For poor-CPUs, there is now an option to drop the floor rendering (Like in PiD), which takes my frame-rate from 125 to 200 in closed-in environments and to a maximum of 333FPS in open environments, with the floor-rendering dropped and the torch turned-off there's quite a dark feeling to the environment and you have to stick close to the walls to navigate.

Key-input delay is now solved, mouse-look is improved also.

[Kurinn]

Somehow I was reminded of D&D: Warriors of the Eternal Sun, and felt really sentimental.
When the battery for the cart's memory died, I cracked it open and soldered leads for an external battery holder so I'd always have it.
Then when my Genesis died, I finally went and downloaded the rom, and beat the game again.

This is bad, I might start playing it again, even though I've discovered just about every mundane niche and secret within that game.

[chinkeeyong]

Is there an in-game map function?

[xilef]

Is there an in-game map function?

There was one in PiD, so yes there will be one with this engine, however i'll make it slightly different in functionality.
As it's sector-based mapping, I can easily render a top-down view of the level.

I just tried out SDL, but framerates are really poor

[irons]

Xilef,

Spammers target this thread particularly often. I'm locking it for now, but if you want to post in it again, send a message to $lave or me so we can unlock it.

[irons]

Re-opened at the behest of Xilef.

[xilef]

I'm working on angled walls again:


I came up with several methods, this is the most promising however the way it's coded it sticks to the screen and other walls and texture calculations are really weird (Y texture is easy, X texture is harder)

[Hopper]

Nice work, Xilef! Good to see you're making progress, I for one enjoy seeing what you've got working and hearing about the techniques you use.