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lucius
DarkXL Developer
Joined: 17 Feb 2008
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 Posted: Mar 13, 2008 10:09 Post subject: |
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I'd like to keep the major updates seperate if possible. Is there a reason to merge them?
My original thought is that this is the "main" thread for now and that update threads are for issues/comments specific to that update. Maybe I should have put the script posts in the last update thread since it has to do with logics...
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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com |
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Geoffrey S
Gamorrean
Joined: 29 Jan 2005
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| Posted: Mar 13, 2008 16:34 Post subject: |
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I've no problem with the multiple threads, since it's one of the few interesting things going on here right now. But a separate section of the forums has been offered, so I'm sure stuff will be moved over if that goes ahead.
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klasodeth
Trandoshan
Joined: 03 Mar 2008
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| Posted: Mar 13, 2008 17:07 Post subject: |
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I don't want to see all the DarkXL information appear in a single thread. I always hate it when projects at other sites do that and I find myself trying to read through a 147-page thread. It's nice to be able to log in and immediately see obvious new threads in the thread list, rather than look through the thread and hope I don't happen to miss an interesting post. Sure the thread is easy to follow now, but it won't stay small forever.
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Jackson
Dark Trooper Phase 2
Joined: 24 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mar 13, 2008 19:26 Post subject: |
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Alright, I just moved the three DarkXL topics into the new sub-forum. I figure general discussion about the project can go in this thread, while conversations about particular updates can go into their corresponding threads.
(Also, I don't know if anyone else is working on any other projects, but you're more than welcome to brush the cobwebs off the ol' Showcase Forum!)
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lucius
DarkXL Developer
Joined: 17 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Mar 13, 2008 19:42 Post subject: |
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Well thanks for moving everything over and setting up the subforum. Hopefully this will solve anyone's problems having the multiple threads and I can continue to put future updates in their own threads.
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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com |
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Darth Oosha
Trandoshan
Joined: 24 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mar 15, 2008 22:14 Post subject: |
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Works for me.
mrpiddly wrote:
Just for future reference, if i were ever to attempt to recreate dark forces within another engine which would be more desirable:
A modern adaptation of dark forces with the same plot, level structure, and gameplay but with vastly updated graphics. Things like normal and glow maps would be applied to the textures, modern openGl shaders would be used, multiplayer would be included, and all objects would be 3d instead of sprites.
or
A classic adaptation that tries to recreate the original "aged" dark forces look and feel. This would provide an original dark forces feel on a modern computer.
The second option is basically what I'm hoping DXL will eventually be: a clone of DF's engine able to emulate it with essentially total accuracy, thereby eliminating the need for OS emulators, just like Aleph One does with Marathon.
The first option I don't like so much, because I think radically increasing a game's graphics detail level without making similar changes to the gameplay can actually harm it, by making it less consistent. When a game has sprite-based enemies, you can see that each enemy is basically a single thing, and you expect the engine to treat it as such; but when you see more modern graphics, you expect to be able to make headshots. Am I making sense?
ACE wrote:
I suggest when finished with the whole project you should make an artical on Digg.com thats where people (registered users) submit articals about really neat topics.
Other places I imagine would probably run the story: House of Mojo, JediKnight.Net, TheForce.Net, LucasFiles and Slashdot.
(Edit: and possibly the Dark Forces Mod website. It'd be at least worth posting about it on the forum there.)
Last edited by Darth Oosha on Apr 01, 2008 06:43; edited 4 times in total |
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lucius
DarkXL Developer
Joined: 17 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Mar 16, 2008 18:15 Post subject: |
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There's another update, talking about the beginning's of the INF system and working doors:
http://df-21.net/phpbb/viewtopic.php_t=1193
It also shows two things previously implemented but not shown in screenshots: shooting and Stormtroopers dropping ammo when they die.
Feel free to ask questions or comment 
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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com |
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Emon
Ree-Yees
Joined: 10 Aug 2007
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| Posted: Mar 17, 2008 01:21 Post subject: |
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Have you thought about open sourcing this, perhaps once it becomes more completed? It seems like something I might want to contribute to.
Further, would you consider sharing some of your methods (for example, reading VOC files, I could not get that to work for the life of me)? I might still want to do my own implementation sometime. I was doing mine with C# and Mono, targeting multiple platforms.
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klasodeth
Trandoshan
Joined: 03 Mar 2008
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| Posted: Mar 17, 2008 02:55 Post subject: |
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Emon wrote:
Have you thought about open sourcing this, perhaps once it becomes more completed? It seems like something I might want to contribute to.
Lucius had this to say on the first page of this thread:
lucius wrote:
I just wanted to mention here that I will put up all the source code when one of two things happen: 1) The project gets to a complete and stable enough state or 2) I can no longer work on it for some reason. I've had some less then stellar experiences with open source, so I'd rather avoid the issues for now and complete the project. But in order for it to continue in the future beyond that, I do understand the need to open it at some point...
So it looks like given some time it will happen for one reason or another.
Quote:
Further, would you consider sharing some of your methods (for example, reading VOC files, I could not get that to work for the life of me)? I might still want to do my own implementation sometime. I was doing mine with C# and Mono, targeting multiple platforms.
I guess we'll have to wait for lucius to say something one way or another, but I haven't seen him mention sound support in any of his updates yet. That's not to say he hasn't worked on it though.
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Emon
Ree-Yees
Joined: 10 Aug 2007
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| Posted: Mar 17, 2008 05:05 Post subject: |
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Ah, sorry, I missed that.
About sound, I may have misread, I thought he said he had some kind of VOC support. Maybe he actually said that he will support it.
I would highly recommend using FMOD for sound. If you can wrap your head around the VOC format and have some experience with audio formats, writing a VOC plugin for it should be fairly trivial.
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DownwardSpyral
Ree-Yees
Joined: 06 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Mar 17, 2008 17:19 Post subject: |
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Hey lucius. Great showing, I look forward to playing through the new Dark Forces.
Will the graphical updates allow for larger fields of play, and hopefully eliminate as many Hall of Mirrors effects?
I'm willing to offer any help as I can. If you need any feedback or testing on a 2gig Core Duo running Vista and an nVidia Mobile 7600, I can help.
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He is as clumsy as he is stupid |
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lucius
DarkXL Developer
Joined: 17 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Mar 17, 2008 17:33 Post subject: |
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DownwardSpyral wrote:
Hey lucius. Great showing, I look forward to playing through the new Dark Forces.
Will the graphical updates allow for larger fields of play, and hopefully eliminate as many Hall of Mirrors effects?
I'm willing to offer any help as I can. If you need any feedback or testing on a 2gig Core Duo running Vista and an nVidia Mobile 7600, I can help.
What do you mean by larger fields of play? If you mean bigger levels then yes, although some were pretty big already.
As for "hall of mirrors", that was caused because the engine never actually cleared the screen, so whenever it didn't render to part of the screen (too many portals, render precision problems with the wall rendering, etc.) you'd see the previous contents of the screen there. And if this persisted over multiple frames while a moving view (or with stuff moving in the view) you'd get a movement or flickering.
So the question is whether the HOM will exist at all. If I clear the screen, a cheap operation on a GPU (unlike with early SW engines), then HOM simply won't exist. This is what I do now. However if you have small holes or cracks, then HOM can actually look better since the colors will match much better then a simple clear color or skybox color.
I'm using the stencil buffer to clip to portals, so sector over sector is possible and other weird affects (see the showcase levels such as Perplexion). This may limit the number of portals to 254 assuming I just don't just allow multiple passes (ie clear the stencil buffer multiple times per frame). If I do that then the limit will be however many passes I decide to allow, so it could be 511 or 767 or whatever. The point is that going over this limit could still cause HOM, if I decided not to clear the screen, or cause black areas (or whatever clear color I stick with).
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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com |
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DownwardSpyral
Ree-Yees
Joined: 06 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Mar 17, 2008 21:48 Post subject: |
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By larger fields of play, I meant larger, wide open areas. Many Star Wars locales are large and vast, yet most of the stages in DF are limited to corridors and multiple stories to give the feel of a large space, but not giving the player that space to move within.
If I was to attempt to recreate the Battle of Hoth with DF as it is now, the engine would laugh at me. Rendering over half a mile of open space would be impossible (and unpleasant to run through). Partially in spite that DF has no support for draw distance vs view distance.
I know at this stage you are just working to make the existing Dark Forces game playable under the new enhancements, but I for one am itching to see what I can pull off in an editor.
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He is as clumsy as he is stupid |
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lucius
DarkXL Developer
Joined: 17 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Mar 17, 2008 22:37 Post subject: |
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Ok, I understand now. In DF large open spaces had several problems, including limitations on how large a sector could be, HOMing and severe view distance limitations. Many of those limitations will not exist and the view distance can be much larger. I have some other plans that could make outdoor areas even better too, but I'll save that for another day
Suffice it to say that yes large open areas will be possible.
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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com |
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The MAZZTer
Death Star
Joined: 25 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mar 18, 2008 02:32 Post subject: |
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HoM flickers because one old technique of quickly updating the screen is to use double buffering... two buffers are used, one is the actual screen and one is unseen to the viewer. While the screen is shown, the next frame is drawn onto the unseen buffer. Then the buffers are swapped (in functionality) so the screen updates and the next frame can be drawn on the other buffer.
Flickering occurs when a section of both buffers is not updated when swapping, and they have differing contents. So those same two frames of content that isn't being drawn over is continually swapped.
Thought I'd share that tidbit. 
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lucius
DarkXL Developer
Joined: 17 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Mar 18, 2008 03:04 Post subject: |
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Double buffering is still used. In modern games the back buffer is usually cleared before rendering. In Dark Forces (and Doom, Hexen, Quake, etc.) the back buffer is not cleared. If a section is not rendered to, then that is where the HOM will occur. You are correct that if it is rendered to in one frame and not the next (or vice versa) that will cause flickering. The fact that the frames (back and front buffer) are out of sync by one frame also causes the flickering, since the contents are different. At the end of the day if you clear the back buffer then HOM cannot occur, which is what I was trying to say before.
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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com |
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Darth Oosha
Trandoshan
Joined: 24 Sep 2003
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Tsophika
Gamorrean
Joined: 14 Jan 2008
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| Posted: Mar 22, 2008 16:43 Post subject: |
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Here's a question Lucius -
How are you interpreting the layered 'levels?' If I remember correctly, there is an instance in JABSHIP where one level intersects another in 3D space. You walk up a curved staircase into a hallway, but the hallway actually passes through the celing of the stair shaft you came up.
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lucius
DarkXL Developer
Joined: 17 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Mar 22, 2008 22:08 Post subject: |
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Those work fine. The game tracks which sector everything is in, including the player.
For collision rays, it walks through the sectors based on adjoins crossed. For object collision: the "2D" movement is handled using swept circles versus the sector walls, for the sector the object exists in and the object can only pass through to other sectors when crossing an adjoin. For hieght the objects are essentially cylinders and checked against the sector base height and ceiling hieght (or second height as appropriate). So if two sectors overlap, the objects are only colliding with the sector they are in, which also handles triggers and all that correctly too.
For rendering, again it starts from the sector the player is in, adjoins are treated as portals and the adjoined sectors are rendered but are clipped by the portals (using the stencil buffer to avoid actually having to clip the geo in software). Of course this is a recursive process, for each sector rendered you have to render it's ajoins too. However visible screen areas are tracked, which also get clipped by the portals so that a portal hidden behind a wall does not get rendered. By carefully controlling stencil inc/dec and stencil testing it's possible to handle N-1 portals with only the intial clearing of the stencil buffer, where N = 255 for 8bits. Of course the total number of portals supported would then be N*M-1 where M is the number of stencil clears allowed each frame.
This system allows levels like Perplexion to work and I'll have to test Jabba's ship completely but it should work there too.
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BlazingPhoenix
Ree-Yees
Joined: 22 Mar 2008
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| Posted: Mar 23, 2008 14:24 Post subject: |
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This looks great, I hope you can get a working version out soon enough, I really would like to play Dark Forces again..Might as well try to get DOSBox to work in the mean time..
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lucius
DarkXL Developer
Joined: 17 Feb 2008
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Nottheking
Kell Dragon
Joined: 29 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mar 26, 2008 09:02 Post subject: |
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Woah, woah, woah, WOAH! Hold up!
So I leave and forget this place for another few weeks, and then something significant like this happens? What's up with that? I thought the rules said that such a thing wasn't allowed to happen here... :p
Anyway, I must say that I'm impressed by your work, as well as your alacrity in doing so. It's something I would've liked to have done myself eventually had no one else taken care of it, however I'm still a bit of a programming noob, so tackling such an ambitious project is perhaps a bit out of my league at this time... So I'm happy to see someone else taking it.
At any rate, to go over some subjects that caught my interest...- First, I couldn't help but notice that the PNGs you uploaded, for some reason, were saved as FOURTY-EIGHT-BIT images... Ostensibly as 16/16/16, though the actual color information stored in them, of course, is 24-bit. (8/8/8 ) That likely was responsible for a bit of the lost space. Additionally, PNGs are lossless image formats, (some converters I've seen had glitches, but technically weren't lossy) and such is a bit unreasonable for screenshots; in those cases, a ~70% quality-level JPEG will handle such a thing fine with a tiny fraction of the space necessary. PNGs are best reserved for things where losslessness is key, or images that need 8-bit or lower color depth. (i.e, old Dark Forces screenshots)
lucius wrote:
Can I ask you guys a question: what kind of computer systems do you run? What kind of video cards? I'm planning on making this require atleast shader 1 cards (GeForce3, GeForce4 TI, GeForceFX or better; Radeon 8500 or better) and I'm wondering people who are interested will be able to play.
I'm currently using a Radeon X800XT. (Shader Model 2.0 extended) As for the usage of SM 1.x, what features do you think you might implement into the game? Off of the top of my head, I presume you may implement perhaps a Phong-based lighting model in order to replicate the sort of effect the original game's lighting achieved. And perhaps it might include some special filters. But what do you have in mind?
I do agree that this project should *NOT* be open-source at this time... To be honest, I consider open-source work to be fraught with problems, and I've become largely disillusioned with the whole idea on a grand scale. Once you're DONE with it, I could see releasing the source code in order to ensure that should you be unable to be around in the future, someone else could take it up. But even then, I still feel that development should be left to one person, or a small, closed group.
Darth Oosha wrote:
* Option to turn off anti-aliasing or/and render in 256 colors, for that authentic "1995 game" experience. (I'm not sure what the comparative difficulty of those two things would be.)
* Option to disable cheat codes, possibly using a text configuration file in the game folder. Alternatively, no cheat codes, with the option to enable them.
* Option to use a Halo-style checkpoint system instead of lives.
* At least one new extra-hard difficulty setting. Or possibly two different difficulty axes; one for changes affecting the player and one for changes affecting enemies.
My own answers for them:- I don't know of a single PC game that forces anti-aliasing to be "on." Chances are it'd probably be easiest on Lucius if it simply relies on the rendering device entirely for anti-aliasing, so it'd just be a matter of not having your card settings set to force AA. As for 8-bit color mode, that would likely be the more difficult to accomplish, though it could be done. A close similarity could be gotten from disabling texture filtering, though lighting would still utilize other colors.
- Not even quite sure why this would be necessary... To me, it's a matter of simply not using them. It'd be like adding an "are you REALLY sure you said "yes" to the last question?" question. But ah well, I digress.
- Dark Forces already has such a function through the use of "safe" sectors. Simply give the player infinite lives, (which is something I might recommend be added to the "extended"s scripting capability, that to edit such global variables) and there you go.
- I'm not too certain on this, to be honest. Some levels (*coughmyowncough*) already come with pretty high difficulty levels.
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Wake up, George Lucas... The Matrix has you.. |
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The MAZZTer
Death Star
Joined: 25 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mar 26, 2008 13:49 Post subject: |
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Hey, PNGs are good for abso-freaking-lutely anything, except for photos. PNGs are especially good when you have a low number of colors or large areas of solid color in an image (IE screenshots). And I already told him about his silly PNGs that were bigger than BMPs.
Yeah open-source is horrible. That "Firefox" thing is a bust. So is OpenOffice.org... and that "Linux"? Please! No one believes that most web servers run on it along with that "Apache" web server software! Don't even get me started on "PHP" or "TrueCrypt" or... I think I'll stop there before I list every excellent application I've used.
I find AA is good for screenshots but just slows down gameplay. I tend to leave it off. You can't really tell when the camera is moving.
You don't want to render in 8-bit color. It would just screw up Windows most likely. Better to render in the desktop color depth. If you want your shadows and flashlight and such to look authentic I'd be surprised if you could do that with DirectX and OpenGL... at least easily. Probably would need a software renderer to properly render 8-bit. Don't worry about it. If I want authentic 1995 experience I have DOSBox.
It would be nice to, instead of having lives, have an in-level saving system (THIS is a must, even Doom had this!) and have safe points be (one-time maybe) autosave spots. That would replicate a checkpoint system very nicely.
More difficulty could be tweaked by adjusting the AI so you don't have to add extra level data. Not sure if DF does this any already, other than adding more enemies, which isn't really the same.
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lucius
DarkXL Developer
Joined: 17 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Mar 26, 2008 18:08 Post subject: |
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Yes I know about the PNG problem. That's what I get for using the basic windows "PAINT" program to save screenshots. I simply saved the screenshots as PNG and uploaded them to Photobucket. It appears that PAINT does a really crappy job with the PNG files so I'll save future screenshots using a different tool that has compression options.
Other than that, thanks for the response. I think I will support fixed function hardware, I was originally going to stick to shader hardware to make things simpler but it's not necessary. If your GPU doesn't have vertex shaders, those will be emulated on the CPU and if it doesn't have pixel shaders then it'll fall back to fixed function. In that case you may not get all the extended features but all the geometry/gameplay features should work (such as the Classic mode, slopes, scripts, etc.).
As for 8bit mode, I'm currently not planning on worrying about that. I don't think people really want banding in the lighting/shading, they just want it to look like they expect. I think having a smooth, high quality image will help make the game look better even if everything else is the same.
As for difficulty, I think the base game would need a higher difficulty. Adding mouselook really does wonders for a person's ability to control their character, which makes them more accurate and better able to dodge. On one hand this eliminates some frustration - I think it will also make the game easier for many people. A higher difficulty could make the AI a bit smarter/more aggressive/more accurate, it wouldn't involve having more enemies or changing pickups.
As far as AA/filtering, there will be in-game controls for those settings.
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DarkXL....http://darkxl.wordpress.com |
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Burning Gundam
Kell Dragon
Joined: 28 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mar 27, 2008 02:14 Post subject: |
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Yeah, of any added features mentioned, I'm more excited about the mouse-look feature.
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I don't think outside the box... I customize it. |
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The MAZZTer
Death Star
Joined: 25 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mar 27, 2008 03:02 Post subject: |
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I thought it was general knowledge that most of the included Windows programs generally do a poor job of their intended functions. Wordpad... Paint... Sound Recorder (which has been further gimped in Vista)... even Notepad could just use a little MORE... and arguably the bigger components such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player too.
Try out IrfanView. About the only major thing it lacks is proper transparency support (right now it only supports 1-bit transparency, and only when saving... the transparency info is lost when opening images). It also has some options for various image formats... and it even has an insane plugin for tons of PNG internal options... I don't even use that, the general PNG saving is good enough.
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DF4GL4ever
Gamorrean
Joined: 15 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Mar 27, 2008 06:31 Post subject: |
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I've heard about this GimpShop flavor of the Gimp that replicates the feel of Photoshop (useful to ppl like me). http://www.gimpshop.com/ Haven't gotten to try it but it might be worth looking at too.
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Darth Oosha
Trandoshan
Joined: 24 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mar 27, 2008 06:37 Post subject: |
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Nottheking wrote:
I don't know of a single PC game that forces anti-aliasing to be "on." Chances are it'd probably be easiest on Lucius if it simply relies on the rendering device entirely for anti-aliasing, so it'd just be a matter of not having your card settings set to force AA.
I can do that? I'll have to read about that, I guess, unless I'm confused and you're talking about something other than wall textures.
Nottheking wrote:
Not even quite sure why this would be necessary... To me, it's a matter of simply not using them. It'd be like adding an "are you REALLY sure you said "yes" to the last question?" question. But ah well, I digress.
For that matter, why implement player death, when players who want to challenge themselves can just manually revert to last save after their health hits zero? To me that makes about as much sense.
There's also the matter of levvels where cheating can break the script and make the level unbeatable; those should definitely have the problematic cheats disabled by default.
Nottheking wrote:
I'm not too certain on this, to be honest. Some levels (*coughmyowncough*) already come with pretty high difficulty levels. :P
Another reason to allow film data in saves, IMO; that way, any accidentally impossible level will automatically come with a worthy reward for beating it.
The_Mega_ZZTer wrote:
You don't want to render in 8-bit color. It would just screw up Windows most likely.
For the record, Aleph One does (and Outlaws and Windows Marathon 2 probably did) a pretty good job of it in software.
The_Mega_ZZTer wrote:
If you want your shadows and flashlight and such to look authentic I'd be surprised if you could do that with DirectX and OpenGL... at least easily.
AO does that too (with OpenGL), unless you mean specifically making it look like 8-bit mode.
lucius wrote:
As for 8bit mode, I'm currently not planning on worrying about that.
Fair enough.
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The MAZZTer
Death Star
Joined: 25 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mar 28, 2008 02:18 Post subject: |
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I'm sure it's possible by simply switching to 8-bit mode and crossing your fingers, but I bet it would look ugly, gray, and washed out.
The OpenGL and DirectX devs don't sit around all day asking themselves how to make, for example, pixel shaders look their best in 8-bit color modes. I doubt the teams have cared about 8-bit color modes in any capacity since the 90s.
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klasodeth
Trandoshan
Joined: 03 Mar 2008
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| Posted: Mar 28, 2008 04:15 Post subject: |
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Well, considering that hardware manufactures haven't supported 8-bit color modes for quite some time now, emulating 8-bit support would require more effort than simply using modern color depths.
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