DF-21 Forums

[Gez]

Seems nice enough.

[Jimmy Chicken]

Awesome video! I'm really looking forward to playing this build.

[dinohog]

That was awesome. I'm very excited about the next release. Thanks Lucius, it's gonna be great.

[Marley]

Fantastic. I was unsure about the lighting on the blaster shots but coupled with the glow effect on the blaster shots it looks amazing and still very much has that Star Wars feel. Bravo!

Still not sure about the controls though - the movement still looks too "floaty". I think an option to switch off or alter the level of drift would be essential as it really doesn't suite mouse and keyboard controls.

All in all it looks amazing, thanks for all your hard efforts on this.

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*ZaP*

[tnoyce]

Lucius,

Thanks for taking the time to put that together.

Looks really nice.

Keep up the good work!

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Tim Noyce

[sheepandshepherd]

I'm impressed . . . the glow effects are definitely a nice addition, but I think the most amazing part was seeing Gromas in such high resolution. I never even really paid any attention to the mine structure before being able to look up and down like that.

I gotta agree with what Marley said though -- mouselook and faster movement make a big difference, so I'd suggest reducing the headwave a little (though it's certainly nothing close to JK's ridiculously exaggerated headwave) and also making the crouching go faster.

Really nice job with the colormap, too -- not sure how you did it, but it emulates DF pretty well and I could BARELY see those probe droids! (If you want it to look even foggier, make it blur and scatter the glow effect on lights a bit )

One bug I saw though (this happens to me with the current build too). When you were picking up the shields in the last secret door (at 4:01), the green and blue flashes lagged a bit. This happens when you pick up lots of goodies at once. The flashes get more and more behind, and eventually the entire screen bugs out. In one level I was testing, I had a hallway with about 20 blaster rifles, and after I walked through them, the screen would turn solid colors (usually turquoise, but often others like red, pink, or black) and stay that way for a while, until going back to normal a little later. I could still walk around and fire during this time, however. The solid color screen bug may be my computer's weak video card, but it looks like the lagging flashes happened in your video too.

Anyway, good work, and thanks for the "trailer" video. I can't wait for that textured map!

[The MAZZTer]

Neat.

Some thoughts:

- The music is playing at too quick a tempo! I suggest downloading the GMID2MID converter and using a media player than can handle MIDIs such as Winamp to line up the tempo.
- The ammo counter looks like it needs to be shifted to the left a bit, easiest to see when it hits 500.
- Nice map.

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[Burning Gundam]

Nice video, really looking forward this soon.

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[lucius]

There are a few other minor issues as well but it's almost "good enough" for a release. Once I can release proper incremental builds, then I can solve a few smaller issues per build instead of worrying about them all at once.

Thanks for the nice comments.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[Barry Brien]

Give yourself a pat on the Back Lucius. That's some really great work. Cheers!

[lucius]

I finished the UI changes for the build, so the lighting and bloom can be toggled. In addition you can now select the reticle that you want to use - including an "empty" reticle which is default. I was going to setup a system where you can change the color and opacity of the current reticle but I'll save that for the next build, for now you'll have to deal with the slightly translucent green color. I've also expanded the number of texture filtering levels, allowing for point sampled textures with and without mipmapping in addition to all the existing modes. This will allow people to turn off bilinear filtering if they want something closer to the original look. You'll have to redo all your controls and video settings with the new build, but I've added versioning so you won't have to do that again.

So now I have to do a slight optimization for most rotating/moving sectors and fix an oversight in my "complex polygon" clipper and the build will be ready to go (the case where interior vertices lie exactly on the clipping line). A complex polygon is one that may be concave, with any number of holes and edges. In this case the clipper splits a complex polygon into a variable number of complex polygons along an edge with an arbitrary 2D direction.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[tnoyce]

Excellent news Lucius.

I see no compelling reason the opacity setting needed to be part of this build - obviously some may differ.

I'm keeping tuned...

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Tim Noyce

[Barry Brien]

Will we still be able to kill Boba Fett at the beginning of the Imperial City level by laying a bunch of mines in front of the wall that he is behind?

[Marley]

Really can you do that?

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*ZaP*

[lucius]

More news - I fixed a problem with the Fuel Station level (you couldn't shoot and the first room ran really slow due to a small mistake - both these issues are fixed now). In addition crouch now works for a 3.0 sector height (or larger of course). This makes it possible to get inside the base on level 4 fairly. Next up are the two sector fixes and then the release.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[Gez]

[Weregoose]

[Barry Brien]

Cool, I'd like to see that. It's hilarious the way the Crow returns before the it's taken off. TIME PARADOX.

[lucius]

I'm still working on a few things, but I wanted to mention that the stretched textures on some floors/ceilings are fixed. This occurred on the big switch door in the first hallway of Secbase as well as various other surfaces in a few of the later levels. Also I've adjusted the midi volume, since midi tends to be way too loud in Windows by default. Not only will does it not have the same hanging note obnoxiousness but it will not drown out the sound effects anymore. At some point there will be UI for adjusting music and sound volume, but not in this build.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com

[tnoyce]

That is good news.

It will be nice to be able to control that in-game at some point.

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Tim Noyce

[Barry Brien]

I don't know if this is possible, but how about a decent in-built midi driver so the music actually sounds cool? The default midi driver in Vista is crap.

[lucius]

[Gez]

There are many problems with midi and modern OSes. It's considered a somewhat obsolete standard, so the support code is left to rot. E.g.

Timidity has its own problems, by the way.

[DF4GL4ever]

Is it any easier to change the default Windows midi instruments in 7 over XP? I've got the Fluid R3 GM soundfont that was easy to set in QuickTime prefs on the Mac side, but is a pain to set up to use on the Windows side.

[lucius]

I'll look at both Timidity and FluidSynth and see which one I like better. If Timidity has too many problems - which it might since I don't think it's actively maintained anymore - then I won't use it.

I do know that FluidSynth is a multi-platform software midi synthesizer which should bypass the modern OS midi problems.

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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com