Shape of chaos

[Twistofchaos]

Hi,
I'm new to this forum, so first I'll shortly introduce myself.
My name is Stan Arts, live in the Netherlands, and am 24 years old.
I've been programming most of my life, and mostly in (Turbo)Pascal since I was about 13-14 years old.
Very enthousiastic, unfortunately at age 16-17 I got more or less stuck when windows became the norm.
Until, several years ago someone told me about the Free Pascal compiler, and that renewed my enthousiasm.

Now, I write to announce I've released a new version of Shape of chaos.
And that's my software-rendering outdoors 3D shooter.

That is available on my website, along with my DOS history of programs, and some other of my current Pascal projects.

http://www.geocities.com/tasteofinsanity81/stanspage

Enjoy, and any feedback would be much appreciated.

Regards,
Stan

[MikeS]

Looks cool Stan! The most impressive thing is that it's using software rendering. wow!

Keep up the good work, and welcome to the boards!

[Daikrys]

hi nice to see you here

i play a long time ago your shooter i like the physic
its like red faction

[WILL]

Welcome to PGD Stan!

Looks cool Stan! The most impressive thing is that it's using software rendering. wow!

Indeed! Taking some lessons from John Carmack[size=9px](referring to the original Quake engine)[/size] are we?

[Paulius]

Nice to see people doing alternative stuff, keep it up. Software rendering is cool, polys without shading are not, before hardware T&L cards all lighting was done on CPU, and it?¢_Ts kind of weird now to not see at least flat shading. Maybe you should consider mip mapping, it would look better and be faster, because of cashing. You don?¢_Tt really want high resolution for this, better stick to 320x240 and use leftover cycles to squeeze out some software video effects.

[Twistofchaos]

Thanks everyone!

Well, indeed it looks very bad compared to modern standarts, but it's not intended as any sort of serious game, just a nice personal hobby project, because i always wanted to write a 3D shooter. But i do hope more people will enjoy the game besides me.
With the graphics i just tried to put the most polygons on screen i could with having a playable framerate. I've tried doing some fancy things with them, but it usually instantly cuts the framerate in half or worse.
The graphics weren't so important to me anyway, i wanted to write a 3D world system (take a piece out of a big map, and turn it into polygons) , and do some experimenting with AI for an opponent in a terrain and make a little game out of it. (I wanted to create one smart opponent to play against. ..but then i found out putting in more of them is more fun, and then i didn't have to make them so smart.. so it turned into this.)

My 3D code is very simple and small and old fashioned, but because computers got so fast i wanted to do something with it. (John Carmack? John Carmack would frown a bit, then laugh a bit :lol: , then go off into his office comming out half an hour later with Quaked-splat-of-chaos-II, and say "I've improved that a bit, now there are 100.000 textured poly's at 180-fps, and mine also has a lightning-rod-nail-popper-gun, and zombies, that feed on those little green actionfigures of that game of yours hanging from the ceiling, although they aren't very nutricious are they, with 3 poly's a piece." and then I'll cry a bit. :cry: )

Thanks and greetings,
Stan

[HopeDagger]

Have you taken a look into Direct3D or OpenGL at all? Hardware accelerated graphics get you a lot more stuff on the screen, and with your (obvious :P) knowledge of 3D math I'm sure you could create some pretty awesome stuff. Like a sequel. :D

(BTW, awesome job on SoC. I had a lot of fun running around in there!)

[WILL]

Actaully I'm serious... If you take a look at the released code for Quake 1 and 2 you'll see some tricks that might help you out. Off-hand pre-calculation was his favorite, and it does a world of good! I remember when I ran Quake for the first time on my system[size=9px](not very powerful at the time, it was only a 486 I think)[/size] my jaw dropped. I couldn't beleive that you could actually do real-time 3D and make an engine that was so damn fast and smooth.

Now I'm not saying yours is going to be a Quake 4, thats up to you , but it's always fun to learn new things no?

Oh and another fine set of lessons can be found at Delphi3D.com (or if you look in the PGD Library under '3D Engine Development' by Tom Nyugens ala Delphi3D.

[Crisp_N_Dry]

TwistOfChaos : I really liked the terrain destruction feature. Although I was a bit short of things to shoot at. Not that I'm knocking it,I think it's an excellent example of software rendering capabilities. Welcome to the forums too Stan.

[OT]Will: I thought Quake was Pentium and upwards only. No FPU in 486 IIRC.[/OT]

[WILL]

[OT]Will: I thought Quake was Pentium and upwards only. No FPU in 486 IIRC.[/OT]

I forget, it was so long ago.

You know I've not seen a solid FPS game in the Pascal community in a while? Save the Dogfight competition. Any plans to make a modernized FPS game?