Castle Adventure

[Nitrogen]

Yes, I'm still developing it...

After the Chrome project finished, I finally got some time to do some more work on CA...

So I finally got Vertex Buffer Objects working, and wow! these things were perfectly made for my program... I've actually got too much FPS... Dont know what to do with all the speed!

So right now I've got the hero walking around, and colliding with the world. Which is fully textured and lit, and the hero has dynamic lighting on him with simple shadows...

Now I'm looking to do some objects he can interact with plus intergrating some LUA script into it.. Sounds like fun!

If you want to try it out:
http://www.sulaco.co.za/nitrogen/CastleAdventure.rar (5.7mb)

And a screenshot:
http://www.sulaco.co.za/nitrogen/scrshots/CA180206.jpg

[Traveler]

Looks great!

I dont have that much time, but i'll give it a quick go when I get home!

[Huehnerschaender]

Don't know what to say!
This is greeeeeeeeeaaaat!!!!

Keep on your work! This one gave me a very very big WOW!-Factor!

[aidave]

pretty good so far

i get 60-70 fps on my system

[Firlefanz]

Hi!

Could you please give some more infos on how you are doing it and what you are using?

Screen looks great! :D

Firle

[Traveler]

I've tried it on my laptop (mobility radeon x700, 128MB) but I'm afraid fps came no further than 20fps. Character movement was very erratic.

[Huehnerschaender]

btw, I got 900 FPS when standing still at start position.... Running with the character gave about 500 FPS.

[jdarling]

Well, as can be expected its results on the Dell Laptop were lets say less then optimal. I recieved about 10 fps and couldn't control or even start to enjoy it. Amazingly the graphics card didn't drop a load, but it came close.

Specs for Dell:
XP Pro SP 2
P3 1ghz
384Mb Ram
Dell Radeon Mobility (ATI) running in software mode, this card is so old it doesn't have a model #

On my other test system the performance was excelent. Close to 400fps steady (avg about 397). Control was smooth and playability was quite good.

Specs for Test 2:
XP Home
AMD 64 3000+
1Gb Ram
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with latest Hydra and Catalyst drivers

I do have one comment, or irritation. I want to be able to skip that startup screen, its ok the first time around, but after that it just plain gets on my nervs to have to wait for pretty graphics to go by so I can play :). The camera movement was excelent and well done though.

[Nitrogen]

Arr!

Could be that your laptop doesnt support VBOs' ?
I'm having lots of problems with the character smoothness at low framerates.
When you make him walk forward does he slide along the floor for ages until he finally stops?

Getting the physics to work right at any framerate is pretty tough...


Thanks,
Basically nothing that fancy..
Here's the level editor which is pretty complex at the moment...
http://www.sulaco.co.za/nitrogen/scrshots/CA1.jpg
http://www.sulaco.co.za/nitrogen/scrshots/CA2.jpg

Basically the level is just a grid of 3D tiles (the list of avaliable tiles seen at the bottom of the level editor)

I opted for a flat world with no elevation to keep things simple, dont know if it was a bad choice YET...

Then each tile is lit using Vertex Lighting, nothing fancy like pixel shaders or lightmaps.. But the vertex lighting has shadows at least!

That's all there is to it at the moment, you can read a bit more about it here: www.sulaco.co.za/nitrogen/ and see some earlier shots..

Now I'm looking to get cool stuff like levers, switches, gates, doors...
For that I'm going to have to plan out an Entity class pretty well.. So I've gone through a few pen and paper designs already...

[Nitrogen]

Oh about the start up screen...

You dont think I sit through my own start up screen every time I debug do you? :) Click the mouse and it skips...

And thanks about the camera! It was more of a hack than anything else and turned out suprisingly well!

One of the most complained about things in 3rd person games is the camera, and I'm glad that you're happy with it!

[Traveler]

Could be that your laptop doesnt support VBOs' ?

Not sure if you're asking me or jdarling, but I doubt my laptop doesn't support VBO's.

Right now when I move the character, it sort of floats.

Let me know if you want me to test again with a newer version.

[savage]

I get about 10fps on my Sony Vaio laptop. The intro screen is not really viewable as lots of frames are skipped.
In game looks quite nice though the character would either move forward automatically almost floating and if I pressed forward he would sprint forward and go through the walls.

Is the physics your own or 3rd party?

Btw, have you played Fate? It's a cheap $20 diabloesque hack and slash that is very professionally done. Their camera works very well. Might be worth downloading the free demo ( www.fatethegame.com/ ) to see how it plays and works.

[savage]

I've also turned you post into a new item.

[jdarling]

I get the same functionality on test 1 (dell w/o any hardware) as Savage does on his Sony. I didn't get a chance to test it on the other 6 test boxes I have lying around (and I'm not sure if I will have time any time soon:(). As I said on my other laptop it runs perfect (or at least I think it runs perfect:)).

[Nitrogen]

Oops.. Should have formatted my main post a bit better, had I known you were going to put it on the home page! :shock:

Cool, I'll have a look at that Fate game and see if there's anything I can gleen from it!

Thanks guys for testing it for me, it looks like either it works bloody well, or it runs terribly! Maybe some minimum system reqs. are needed...

[RaveniX]

I tested on my Asus Notebook with good results...

Specs:

AMD Hammer 64 3000+
1GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9700 with Dedicated VRam
Windows XP Home with SP2

Average framerate of 380fps. The framerate seems steady throughout.

The character animation doesn't apear smooth. Not using interpolation? Despite this the animations work as they should. Turn/Walk etc...

The camera is in a good position, and doesn't anoy the hell out of you like in some games. :)

The collision is good too so far, although the slide angle needs to be more sensitive. Just my opinion though. I don't like coming to a dead stop when i bump a wall. I guess it depends how realistic you want it. But I always find it's better for gameplay and flow when you can slide along a wall instead of stopping dead in your tracks.

In all, a nice little project you've got there. Keep at it! I know it's very easy to become distracted and have your time sucked up by something else. :)

Is this just a mini project or are you evolving it into a game?

Btw, how are you handling lightmaps? Is it 1 map per tile or are you mapping a single lightmap over the entire area. Just out of curisoity how would I go about generating lightmaps for all objects in my scene? I'm basically using a terrain that is decorated with static objects. Trees/Rocks/Buildings etc... I need the lightmap to be cast on the terrain and on the individual objects ( self-shadowing ).

[savage]

You didn't answer the question, is the physics yours or 3rd Party?

[Traveler]

Cancel my previous posts.

I just tried the sample again. And somehow it ran a lot better. Smooth as can be. I think my laptop was doing something in the background the last time. I dunno. Sorry for the misinformation. :oops:

[Nitrogen]

No problem..

Savage: sorry, forgot about your question! I think Physics is a bit of a big word for it, but yes I did write the collision code myself, that's why the hero has the annoying habit of getting stuck on the corner of the tiles sometimes..
But he's definitely supposed to slide along the walls... It's just a simple AABB - ray test, but it also has to choose between each side of each AABB in the general vacinity, so it gets confused sometimes...

Ravenix: I dont really use lightmaps, its vertex lighting, and its stored on a per-tile basis, so for each tile, I've got an array of colours, one for each vertex. These are loaded into a Vertex Buffer Object and drawn... I've tried my hand at lightmap generation and got little results for my efforts.. See www.sulaco.co.za/nitrogen/projects.html
Pretty much the only way you can do shadows in lightmaps (AFAIK) is to use ray-triangle intersection tests. They're not fast but there's not really any other options.

Right now it's purely a hobby project, something to keep me busy, and something that will look good on my CV/Portfolio when I eventually get a job! :) However this also means that RL and studies take preference over it.. If it fades into the background for a few weeks/months, fear not it's still there, just on the backburner!


Oh and I rewrote the animation and 'physics' handling on the hero, so now the animation is as smooth as cream :) I could post the update if you like, but I'd prefer to get it to the next stage of development before uploading it rather than getting stuck releasing small fixes every time...

[RaveniX]

Glad to hear the animation is fixed... No worries i'll check back from time to time to see when you have released another update. I don't like releasing small fixes either. :P

I tried vertex lighting but it's highly dependant on triangle count for precision. Which isn't suitable for my purposes. I'll have a look at your lightmap demo and see what I can come up with. Thanks for the info... :) Some interesting projects you have on there.

Have you done anything with skeletal animation? Or still stick with the MD3 Morph animation?

Btw, where are you hoping to get a job at?

Kind Regards,
RaveniX.

[Nitrogen]

The animation is what I'm busy with at this moment...

It's just going to use a standard hierarchial list of 'bones' each with it's own position and rotation, which affects all of the child 'bones' linked to the parent bone..
But it's not full skeletal animation since each bone is a separate mesh by itself and not a morphed set of vertexes from a total mesh. In this way I hope to do things like doors, levers, secret switches etc easily since this works very well for non-organic style animation.

Then I'll leave the monsters to use MD3 type animation, so they can have the fluidity of morphing animation..

True, vertex lighting is VERY dependant on triangle count, but I figured that my game would have quite a high triangle count from the beginning.
The only place where you really notice the lack of definition in the lighting is when you have a hard shadow or sudden change in the lighting environment. In my level editor I added in soft shadow calculations which make the scene look *almost* as good as lightmaps, but it's very slow to calculate...

I'm not looking for any jobs soon since I've still got at least 2-3 years left of university to complete..

[WILL]

Hey, I wanna play this already! :P

Hows the game doing at this point? Anywhere near a completion point?