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Messages - Bahl

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16
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you too :-).

17
Rival Species - News / Finally the list of static features is done
« on: November 25, 2012, 06:05:16 PM »
It may still be quite rough around the edges, but the map models are being loaded and... we even have a bolter! You don't believe me? See for yourself :-).



This means the following list for the models is done:
  • It is not animate[DONE]
  • It has badly mixed up texture coordinates[DONE]
  • It is not world oriented[DONE]
  • It is way too dark[DONE]
  • It has no bolter![DONE]

And this older one for the maps as well:
  • The textures are only the color of their first pixel [DONE]
  • The view distance is too short [DONE]
  • There is no skybox[DONE]
  • There are no lights[DONE]
  • There are no transparency effects[DONE]
  • There are no map models[DONE]
  • Textures turned upside down and all around [DONE]
  • Different texture scales [DONE]

So it is time for a new list! We are getting to the exciting part of the story, the dynamic parts, the game itself! So far the gamecode has been running around in the background like a headless chicken, but now it is time to let it show it's face. Since it is all about things that happen, change or can be clicked and done, I think I'll start using short movies for the progress description.
  • Things need to move! With physics!
  • We want to see what's up, a menu and a hud!
  • When can I shoot the bolter? Effects!

I'm looking forward to this :-).

18
The models were only skinned with twice the resolution, so here comes the comparative screenshot with the assault marine in his original resolution. You can probably not see much of a difference, since the skins were not created to contain a lot of details. However this does open up the opportunity for a skin makeover.



Anyways, I'll move on and get the map models imported next.

19
Rival Species - News / Re: Now even the texture coordinates work...
« on: November 08, 2012, 08:54:34 PM »
Always nice to see oldtimers return :-). But dont get your expectations too high. This is basically me trying out a new engine with the RS1 content as a playground. I do however intend to deliver if it is possible! It will take its sweet time though. Currently things are looking quite nice. The engine could improve in their lighting capabilities, so if you guys feel like voting, please follow this link: http://code.google.com/p/jmonkeyengine/issues/detail?id=510&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Component%20Priority%20Difficulty%20Product%20Milestone%20Owner%20Summary

Next thing is getting the models aligned with the world and loading the models defined in the map.

20
Rival Species - News / Now even the texture coordinates work...
« on: November 04, 2012, 10:25:32 PM »
I've finally finished the texture scaling! For illustration purposes I'm linking the old and the new screenshots:



21
Rival Species - News / The hot autumn and the asset pipeline
« on: October 28, 2012, 07:25:12 PM »
And there we had a pause again, this time due to real life occupation (running through a hot autumn at the company) but I managed to clean up the asset pipeline and set it up again to support a clean build from the repository. Now that's a tone of technical terms, but I do have a visual as well ;-). Here comes a screenshot taken from the build using a different class (the assault) to prove my point:



What you can see is that the texture scale is currently not consistent, so I'll have to work on that. But at least it comes directly from the sources so all I need to do is scale the low resolution ones up and rescale the textures ingame.

22
It took a little while longer and as a result the list of issues is down three items!
  • It is not animate[DONE]
  • It has badly mixed up texture coordinates[DONE]
  • It is not world oriented
  • It has no physics whatsoever
  • It is way too dark[DONE]
  • It has no bolter!


You'll hardly notice but the marine now uses the idle animation in this screenshot. There seems to be an issue with the JMonkey animations though: They are not vertex bound! Instead they are geometry bound which makes it impossible to have for example the elbow belong to two bones.

After the static lighting, this is the second major issues with this engine. I hope they'll fix that before I get this game ready for playing!

+++edit+++
Exterminatus beta 7 is released and you can grab your source engine 40k goodness at 40ksource.com. I reduced the shameless plug to a simple download link in order to provide you with a good overview of the good old Rival Species progress.


23
Rival Species - News / much better now
« on: September 08, 2012, 03:54:32 PM »
It took a little while, but now the list of issues is down two items :-).
  • It is not animate
  • It has badly mixed up texture coordinates[DONE]
  • It is not world oriented
  • It has no physics whatsoever
  • It is way too dark[DONE]
  • It has no bolter!


+++udate+++

Plus I've added a lovely little RSS feed button to the page and cleaned the links at the top. Another noteworthy thing might be that I'm making progress on killing the spambots on the forum. Once none of them is slipping through my filters anymore, I can activate it again.

24
Rival Species - News / it took a little while
« on: August 31, 2012, 10:00:59 PM »
... but not all too long until I collected the energy to convert the most important model: the space marine!



I'm currently using it as a fitting replacement for the blue box avatar and I have to admit, it is an upgrade. Even though you will easily spot:
  • It is not animate
  • It has badly mixed up texture coordinates
  • It is not world oriented
  • It has no physics whatsoever
  • It is way too dark
  • It has no bolter!


25
The site revamp is not completely done yet (the forum theme still shows a lot of Call of Duty stuff) but I managed to make it consistent with the web page :-).

On other news, the level rendering is coming along and now includes rendermodes, yay! Now what should I choose next... ligts or sky? Anyways, here comes some eyecandy (I'm sticking to the established pattern of showing the original besides the current state in JMonkey):




+++udate+++

As you may have realized, I've switched on the lights and updated the screenshot above with a more recent version of my efforts! By this time around, the list of open issues has been reduced and the current state is as follows:

  • The textures are only the color of their first pixel [DONE]
  • The view distance is too short [DONE]
  • There is no skybox[DONE]
  • There are no lights[DONE]
  • There are no transparency effects[DONE]
  • There are no map models
  • Textures turned upside down and all around [DONE]
  • Different texture scales [DONE]

There were some major issues with the lighting so that I couldn't really complete the step. JMonkey currently rerenders the complete scene for each light. Which means with the current amount of lights on Fortress that it will play at roughly one frame in ten seconds. They will of course fix that but I'll have to wait for that before I can progress with rendering. In the meantime, you can support the case! If you have a google account, then I urgently suggest you take a look at this list: http://code.google.com/p/jmonkeyengine/issues/list?cursor=jmonkeyengine%3A510 and click a star on issue number 510. I've already posted mine, but some more attention might help ;-).

So what is next? There is one step remaining in the list above and that is actually a whole new chapter: Loading models! I may turn silent again for a while until I answered the main questions concerning that and resolved the basic functionality. In the meantime, I'll try and improve the website and hopefully free us from the plague of spambots so that I can let you loose on the forum again. Until then, you can still comment on each news post ;-).

26
Rival Species - News / And there we climb to the next branch
« on: August 12, 2012, 07:54:52 PM »
I seem to have come into a nice habit of getting things done these days :-). So here comes an update on the scenic content conversion with a screenshot for comparison. From all the issues collected before, I managed to finish the following:

  • The textures are only the color of their first pixel [DONE]
  • The view distance is too short [DONE]
  • There is no skybox
  • There are no lights
  • There are no transparency effects
  • There are no map models
  • Textures turned upside down and all around [DONE]
  • Different texture scales [DONE]
   
   
So in summary, basic map content conversion seems to work now and the next step will be adding the bells and whistles! And now the stage is open for the screenshots:


   
   
   

27
Rival Species - News / Gimme moar food!!!
« on: August 07, 2012, 11:10:48 PM »
It took only a few days to achieve a fix for the first issue mentioned i the foregoing news post. And I intend to use these news as somewhat of a blog as long as I have only very few 'readers' (and little to show off). So here comes an update that obviously fixes the textures.. and adds a new problem :-).

As you can see, texture drawing quality will be higher than in HL1 and I will be able to use increased resolutions wherever the original resources are avialable. As you can also see, I still have new issues with
  • Textures turned upside down and all around
  • Different texture scales

But it is still an enjoyable progress! And for reference purposes I'm throwing in a screenshot of the same view with the good old HalfLife engine:



28
Rival Species - News / Re: Let's feed it to the monkeys!
« on: August 06, 2012, 07:21:33 PM »
At least it opens up for the possibility :-). Meaningful could be using it for high quality levels. But the models would need to stay in one reasonable quality. Most likely I can finally make use of the original resolution of their textures and maybe use some shader technologies at some point?

29
Rival Species - News / Let's feed it to the monkeys!
« on: August 04, 2012, 05:21:12 PM »
Ah well, you might have recognized the recent slowdown in development and events... and practially everything ;-). To be more precise, this mod has been dead since about two years (and walking dead for years already then). But that doesn't mean I will stop doing things with it! Haha, nooo, I can still feed it to the monkeys!

So since about a year I'm occupied with that, feeding the core game logic costed about half a year. Afterwards it was time for the scenic content and just these days I had a break through in that area :-). Here you can see the results of it:



So what is that you may ask? Well, that is the JMonkey engine! And the most important thing was to read the HalfLife map files into the format of that engine. For that, I needed to do some old school math and it took a while.

So what's in it for you? If you are an old times player and fan of Rival Species then you will possibly recognize that this is the first line of defense in the map called Fortress. You can also see that its latest rendition is far from complete:

  • The textures are only the color of their first pixel
  • The view distance is too short
  • There is no skybox
  • There are no lights
  • There are no transparancy effects
  • There are no map models

All that will keep me busy for a while, but why is it worth it? On the IRC channel of our only remaining clan Ordo Xenos, old time player Razielk received an answer to that question:
Quote
<]OX[Razielk> so what are the benefits of this new engine?
<Bahl> the benefits are for once that it is being updated
<Bahl> which means it keeps up with recent developments
<Bahl> the HL1 engine is static...
<Bahl> the second thing is, I can modify or read whatever bit of code of it that I need
<Bahl> the third is, it is in Java which has better tools freely available and more software technology to use in combination
<Bahl> that's roughly it ^^

30
Rival Species - News / Re: Alpha update
« on: March 31, 2011, 07:58:14 PM »
Aww c'mon, you should try the alpha as base:

http://www.rivalspecies.com/files/rspecies_1265.zip

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