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25-01-2005, 07:49 AM
Hi all ! (beware : huge post)
(This post is long so you'll apologize my mistakes :D)

I've got some time so I'm gonna talk about my actual project.
The project is called Sanaloria(as the name of the topic says) and is a FPS made with Delphi and DirectX. The staff of the game is for the moment composed of two people : my best friend and me. The work is pretty well shared ;) He makes the graphics and I program the whole.

Some history
The project began in early 2000 when Snakeye(my friend) asked me if It was possible to build a 3D world with Delphi. At that time, I was learning 3D IM with DelphiX and thought everything was possible and easy ^^. So we began a 3D World "explorer" called Lost Universe.

In the end of 2000 we realized that we had too much expectations for the engine and we began to remove some features of the specifications of the project. Step by step we focused onto only one world that would be the "main" world : a strange planet in Andromedia : Sanaloria. The name of the project quickly changed to Sanaloria :)

So ... If we have only one world ... Why not making it complete ? Why not adding life to this world ? And Why not making a game, with an interesting plot on that planet ?

We started to write documents describing the planet, the life on it, why humans had to come here and what they were planning. Step by step we went into a complete scenario (I'll describe it later ;)).

Here's for the little story :)

About the technical aspect I now work with Delphi7 and DirectX9
Snakeye works with Lightwave (I don't remember which version ^^;; ) and Paint Shop Pro for the textures.

Now let me describe :

The Scenario
October 1953 : The NASA, during the space rush, sends an encoded message to the globular cluster M13 describing Earth's position, describing humans, and life more generally. At that time, no one could imagine what consequences this message will bring to mankind.

January 2775 : The space human fleet(SHF) is fighting again'st an unknown force. The cliche is quite big. Stupid aliens are attacking the planet Earth an no one knows why... One thing is sure ... Humans are losing the fight. How can they react towards such a powerful fleet ?

Orders are clear for the SHF : "Do not allow them come near earth !"

Government is panicking ... The SHF is losing the hand to some lost brained aliens ... What could they do ? What should they do ? The decision of launching in space a new generation of bomb is taken in spite of the lack of tests of thoses bombs. The goal ? Sacrifying the SHF to destroy the fleet ...

Mission complete : Space Soldiers have shoot the bomb and destroyed the fleet.
Little drawback : That new kind of bomb called AMB (Anti-Matter Bomb) was a bit too powerful, causing 2/3 of earth destruction.

Exode decision is taken on March the 23th of 2775 : Two month after the destruction of earth, the still living people has to flee because of a change in Earth trajectory due to the explosion.

Makind settle into Andromedia one year after (thanks to Worm holes :)). A solar system (BI-26T) hidden in a Nebulae provides a good refuge for the weakened mankind. After some scouting it seems that the third planet of that system provides rich ressources. Whereas the other planets are barely settleable.

The story begins 4 centuries later.

Being raised without parents, you have always been somebody very calm and cold. That's why you're the perfect murderer. And that new contract seems to be very juicy. Your orders ? Kill the Sanaloria Mining Corporation(SMC) Chairman during the inauguration of the new mines near KaraA_ Tsukov Mounts.

It don't turn out the way you wanted it to, and you're being jailed after killing him ... Too bad, judges recognize you as the murderer of more than 20 people and you finish off where the worst criminals are : in the deeps of Sanaloria : Deep Mining Section.

Here is the place where you work 20 hours a day without being paid under 50A¬?C and high pressure ... But your jail time will be really shortened with the sudden death of every human in the DMS ...

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I won't tell more ;) After that, it becomes spoilers.
What we wanted to put in that game was all we liked : Mythology, Science/Science Fiction, Metal(Music), Big guns, Action and Reflection.

Now a little more concrete part : Some screens :)

First some "software rendered pictures" :

Here is the main folder :
http://dxavatar.free.fr/Images/Rendu%20Logiciel/

And here is Sanaloria's Wall paper :
http://dxavatar.free.fr/Images/Wallpaper_Sanaloria03_1024x768.jpg


Before linking any engine pictures here are some info about it :

The engine is called MAGI . My expectations about this engine has been reduced over the time and we have lately defined the final specifications of Magi 1.0 :)

Here are some :

Models will be rendered with 4 levels of Texturing : Diffuse; Bump; Gloss and Self Illumination, everything will be done with Pixel and Vertex Shaders 2.0.
Scripted events will use Python for Delphi project.
Special effects will be composed of : Particle Systems, Lens Effects and Skydomes (not that much but in the end what we want is something working ;))
Scenes will be displayed using Octrees and Portals for indoor scenes.
Tools will be made to build complete scenes (I'm currently working on a Particle System Editor).

Now I can give some pictures about the engine.

Here are particle systems(with the first screens of the Particle Studio) :
http://dxavatar.free.fr/Images/Particles%20Systems/

The work being accomplished on shaders(I will soon upload better images) :
http://dxavatar.free.fr/Images/Shaders

We don't have really cool scene shots for the moment but I'll update the post when I get new screens :)

For french people who like to read the complete background of the game, you can find it on www.sanaloria.fr.st (you'll be able to see some 2000-2003 pictures of the project(ugly ones ;))

That's all folks ^^
Sorry for making such a long post but hey ^^ We like our projects or not :D

Bye
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Robert Kosek
25-01-2005, 05:03 PM
Sounds neat. Freeware, shareware or commercial?

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25-01-2005, 06:35 PM
The game and the engine will be Freeware and Open Source (under GPL License) :) But I will release the source code when it's completly finished :)

We do this for knowledge and passion ^^ Not for money

Robert Kosek
25-01-2005, 07:12 PM
Cool. Will you have a demo soon? Or did you post one already?

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25-01-2005, 07:56 PM
I will probably release soon a tech demo since every special effect is finished :)

If everything goes well we should have an Alpha version of the game (with a little level) on June ^^ But It'll depend of what happen in our lives :)

Robert Kosek
25-01-2005, 08:02 PM
Understood, life happens.

So far what I'm seing in the screenshots is UT quality, and you've cut back on features? I'm not sure what you could cut back on and still have it look that nice! (complement)

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26-01-2005, 12:18 PM
You know some childish expectation ... Like real-time rendering of Metaballs (which is possible but very expensive in a scene ^^;;;), Volumetric effects, really huge scenes and a lot of eye candy effects :)

Some of them are implementable in the engine but ... Is it really necessary ? ;)

At a time I remember I wanted also to integrate Radiosity in my renderer (with precalculation of lightmaps after loading ...) ... But in the end this is really no use :). Simple PPL is way more sufficient and harder enough to integrate to a well designed scene :)