DF-21 Forums

[lucius]

Ok Build 9.0 is finally here! As mentioned previously, you may find some rendering issues in some levels but all the levels render mostly correctly.

NEW FEATURES

*Reticle Support
*Dynamic light support
*Bloom support
*More texture filtering modes supported, the lowest mode being no filtering at all.
*Improved rendering performance.
*Stretched textures on certain floors and ceilings fixed.
*Midi music volume decreased.
*iMuse temporarily only plays "stalk" music, until issues are fixed. This should alleviate hung notes.
*Player should be able to shoot through windows and over ledges properly now.
*Initial colormap support for Gromas Mines. Will not work properly in all cases but works pretty well for this level.
*Proper sprite sorting to help avoid black outlines.
*No more partially clipped sprites, which could occur in some cases in the past.
*Compressed BM support.
*Overbright lighting due to wall brightness or headlamp fixed.
*All levels are available if you add '-x' to the command line. Note that once a profile is saved with all the levels open, it will always have those levels open even without the command line.
*A lot of work toward the new renderer, however there are still some issues and features disabled at this point.

KNOWN ISSUES

*Some clipping errors.
*Some complex sectors are drawn incorrectly - such as in Dark Tide IV.
*Music completely stops and restarts on loop when playing on Talay - however there are no more hung notes.
*Briefings on some levels do not scroll correctly.
*Some sky textures are aligned incorrectly.
*Many missing logics and missing INF features - this is the same as the previous build.

If your screen is black, try turning off bloom.

And finally one important "hidden" feature of the build... I've done some refactoring on the code to easily allow incremental builds - even while working on the renderer. So I will focus heavily on gameplay now, starting with finishing all the missing logics. There should be atleast one build per week (if not more) from here on out.

Download it now.

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

[Gez]

Huzzah! Hip hip hip hooray! And all these sorts of things!

Thanks Lucius for all your hard work. It's been a long wait, but it's finally there.

Or nearly there. It doesn't work. :p

There's a command window that appears for a fraction of a second, telling me that DarkXL_Launcher.exe cannot be found.

As you can see, I had not a lot of time to take this screenshot!

[Dreadopp]

This is pretty awesome. I'm going to download this as soon as I get to my other computer (later today).

[Barry Brien]

Nice one. I'm really looking forward to playing this.

[Barry Brien]

It's not working for me either. The screen flickers between black and white for a minute and then my computer crashes and goes to a blue screen. It's happened 3 times. I trued re-installing DirectX but it keeps happening.

[Gez]

You might need to reinstall OpenAL then. But anyway, it won't work until all the needed files, including the launcher exe, are included in the package...

[klasodeth]

I had to settle for trying this on my secondary laptop with its lame GeForce 6150 chipset, but it is working for me.

[Gez]

It doesn't want to run DarkXL_Launcher.exe for you?

[Burning Gundam]

Congratulations Lucius. It's been a long year's wait to see the next incarnation and I must say it has been well worth the wait. I only had enough time to tinker around with the first few levels but I really like what I see so far.

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

[klasodeth]

[Dreadopp]

It works fine for me and it's very nice. The only thing I had to do to get it working was install OpenAL

[lucius]

Ok the problem is that I still have DarkXL firing up the launcher if the Dark Forces path is incorrect. I didn't quite get the launcher far enough along to release it and forgot to change DarkXL. So you just need to go into the settings file and correct the DarkXL path. I will be doing another build with the launcher fully working in the near future.

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

[Gez]

I forgot that I had it overwrite everything when I extracted it, including DXL_Settings.txt. Works now!

[lucius]

[Marley]

Just tried Secbase then a bit of Talay. LOVE IT, but...

Bugs:

Still getting trapped in ajoins - one in the first corridor in the control room to the left of the red button on the thin part of the control panel between the edge of the control surface and the pillar.

Also got trapped in the ajoin in the door opening up onto the roof where the crow picks you up.

Also got trapped outside in one of the walls - was not able to move or look around - was able to hear my blaster sound when I fired but nothing happened on screen. I quit the mission - went back to the agent select screen to load the mission again and I started in exactly the same place still stuck! Did it again and this time I started in the right (lift shaft thingy) place but still stuck! Weird...

Also on Talay I accidentally pressed R and the game froze and only stared going again when I held R down and even then it was really slow. Is the R key mapped to some developer tool?

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*ZaP*

[Marley]

Also...

No midi.

and still no sky except in the ceiling texture?

_________________
*ZaP*

[Marley]

Edit that - midi works (had it turned down in the volume control!)

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*ZaP*

[lucius]

Strange, you're getting stuck alot more then I would have thought. Anyway the fix to the collision I mentioned before should be in the next couple of builds - I'll bump up the priority if it's this obnoxious.

The midi volume was turned down - it's too loud on most Windows systems. However I will be adding proper volume controls, so you'll be able to turn the volume back up to whatever you need.

And finally, yes the sky as wall fix isn't in. I fixed it at one point but made some changes and I guess forgot about it again. I'll fix it for real this time.

Oh yeah, the 'R' key is mapped to a developer tool... oops that will be an easy fix.

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

[Gez]

I think bug reports should rather go in the issue tracker (see connection info here)...

[lucius]

[Barry Brien]

[Jimmy Chicken]

WOW.

I'm very impressed with this build. I can tell a lot of work went into this. It ran great for me and I didn't notice any serious bugs. Thanks for all your hard work lucius, this build was definitely worth the wait.

[lucius]

Thanks Jimmy Chicken.

As for your problem Barry Brien, it might be an issue with the bloom and your chipset. I'll put up a version where you can run it in "safemode" later, which will disable things like bloom (which default to on at the moment).

[This is a problem that the external Launcher will fix, I just didn't want to delay the build more to get it finished...]

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

[Barry Brien]

That would be great thanks. I just tried running it again. No joy. It causes the computer to crash each time, it goes to that blue 'dumping physical membory' screen.

[Gez]

Blue screen on Vista or 7 means that your driver is doing something very bad. Either that or your hardware is starting to give up the ghost. Applications normally cannot cause blue screens anymore; the OS can just crash them cleanly instead.

[Barry Brien]

Strange. My laptop is only over a year old. I can't imagine the hardware is dying already. I don't know much about computers at all, but I never usually have problems like this.

[lucius]

I also want to mention that there are new posts up on the blog. I also talked about upcoming Outlaws support in the latest post.

The blog homepage.
Build 9.0 Post.
Beyond Build 9.0 Plans.

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

[tnoyce]

Excellent news Lucius.

Thanks for hanging in there, and getting it done!

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Tim Noyce

[BlazingPhoenix]

[18:59] <BlazingPhoenix> YEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSssssssssss

[The MAZZTer]

Wait, since when do we have an IRC channel? O_o

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http://www.mzzt.net/ | I am a respectable admin with a respectable sig.