Castle Adventure

[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. ops:

[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.

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.