GUNS - Reloaded

[savage]

Could do with something to assist in finding memory leaks too if anyone knows of anything..

http://delphi.about.com/od/toppicks/tp/aatpmemleak.htm. I've used Memcheck in the past and that was useful. Not used the other ones though.

[jasonf]

Although this is drifting way off topic, I can't get MemCheck to work using Turbo Explorer Win32.. I'll sort that stuff out later, but it may be a good idea to mention this in a general programming thread.

[WILL]

So was my last spin on the whole 'more water effect' idea feasible?

The one complication I can see is the order of opperations on the FG/BG effect. You have 2 layers to manage instead of just the one.

But it would be cool to have an animated background though.

[jasonf]

Well, animating water on the background would probably Kill the FPS with all the extra processing involved I think.. But I'm not dismissing the idea completely, I just don't think it would work with what I've got at the moment. (Unless I don't fully understand what you're proposing.. which is quite possible as it's quite late ) although the FG/BG problem isn't really bad... my engine can handle pretty much any number of layers... each with different Parallax ratios.

As a partial test of the water system I've made a South Pole level tonight. Complete with Icebergs, Penguins and Snow. It's not finished, the background needs replacing with something better but it certainly feels cold. The snow could use work too.




And Yes.. you can blow up the penguins Although I might have Linus Torvalds appear in a blimp and drop bombs on you if you kill too many

I think the water is working well here, but it could be argued that it needs to go off into the distance a bit more.. I think the effect will be in two parts if that's needed.. (this could be part of your idea Will)

I'm planning an ocean level (only on the sea surface though.. ) where the only land available are the decks of container ships. I need the water to be spot on for that.

I'm also thinking of including a Volcano level too.. I've got a nice Fire effect which can be used inside the Volcano. For an example of this effect, go here http://www.cerebral-bicycle.co.uk/li...p?cat=9&subj=3

Edit: I've just noticed that I've got Vampire penguins in these pictures I've fixed this bug now..

[WILL]

"Here at the South pole only Penguins can hear you scream" :lol: Nice.

Well my idea is made with a few optional ways to optimize in mind. (naturally )

I'll try to make a quick mock-up of my idea so you have a 'diagram' of sorts to see what I'm talking about.

But the general idea is that you would take the background texture (untouched land and water masked zone) and make 2 rendered water layers from it each seperate from the other. I'm considering that this is a non-GPU accelerated effect in the first place.

Lemme scratch up a quick diagram so you can see what I mean... Should be a few mins.

[WILL]

Ok here it is, my idea visualized:

This is what you would ideally start with: A background scene but with the water masked area that the BG water effect would be placed in.


then you would render the final background layer with it's water effect to a seperate BG layer. and of course not including the portion of the screen where the foreground water effect would show to save memory and wasted processing.



now set that aside in memory for a bit and we want to combine the game generated land and tanks + other objects at this point...



after doing that, you can use this with the ORIGINAL background with water mask and render the FG water. But only save this in the size of the strip that will become the water below in the foreground again for memory size & speed....



ok now... you can finally & simply combine all of these in their proper order...



...and you're done!

That is what I'm thinking in full. It may take a wee bit more memory than what you are currently using, but the speed should not be too much slower depending on how you manage everything AND if you keep most of this stuff loaded and blit-ready, it should be like playing with Lego(tm).

[jasonf]

Mate, you've thought about this is some detail.

There is a problem with this approach though.. I don't think my engine can support it..

The water effect is only a visual trick rendered after everything else to be reflected has already been sent to the screen.
It can only ever reflect things which are on screen and doesn't have any idea about Z order when it comes to render time. Also, it can only ever be at the bottom of the screen and at most 72 pixels high (unless I change the reflection ratio) I tried it at 128 pixels last night and it went crazy.

Any additional layers containing water will be reflected in the water block at the bottom as there's no other way (using the current design) of only getting the reflections of the sprites. This would require an additional pass through the renderable object list to render to a new off screen surface. This would increase the render effort by a third.

Basically, my Renderring system is quite simple.

The game level has many layers arranged in Z order.

I render each layer in turn

Each layer contains tiles and entities which if in the cameras view, are rendered.

Each entity can have its own render function for things which need a bit more work (like the water effect). They can manipulate their own textures etc.. but basically render themselves to the target surface.


To implement the background water system would mean that the mountain layer would have an additional entity which would be a version of the water effect.

This effect would be different to the current water effect, it would need a sky texture to reflect off.. (trivial) it would also need to make a pass over the background image to create the reflection of the mountains, rendering only to the masked area and alpha blitting the clouds for that line. (expensive)
All of this is do-able and would make at least a nice layered reflection of the cloud layer with a rippled relfection of the surrounding mountains..

but the current water block problem would still exist. The water block would be reflecting things which already had a reflection in the other water block. This is because it is reflecting everything, not just sprites as it can only work on the final image because my engine doesn't use any compositing so to speak... Things ae just drawn in place over the top of other things.

If I can think of a better way to do this, I'll revisit it. But I'm fairly happy with the effect as it stands at the moment, especially since the game is 2D and rendered entirely in Software I'll spend a little more time trying to get it looking a bit more authentic, but I've got a lot of issues left to solve and I don't want to get hung up on this too much.

Oh if only I was using a 3D engine with a real terrain engine and shader powered water

Does this explain how I'm doing things?

[WILL]

Yeah, makes sense. This idea might be a bit intense for a software rendering engine. Now if you where using OpenGL.. well. You'd be laughing.

Maybe something to consider for 'Guns 3: Overload' or something.

(oh instead of the sky texture though, you can always just pick a single sky color and feed it that instead something light gray and flat. Like a misty fog color)

If you did your rendering in layers though (much like I've shown it's entirely possible, the only downisde is that you'll have to repeat copying the original background twice along with about 3-4 extra buffers to make it work.)

[savage]

Any more news?

[jasonf]

Sorry everyone, I've not posted any news in a little while. I got the feeling that I was becomming a post whore so I only wanted to post when I made significant changes. moreover, something to see

Here's what's new.

The Tutorial mode. The player can choose to enable the tutorials when they begin a new game. This takes them through the basic usage of the tanks from the relative safety of the mothership hangar. In the first tutorial, The tank gets to shoot at unarmed drones to practice their targeting. The second involves flying to checkpoints to reach a destination to practice flying. The Third has much more targets and fuel canisters. I'm going to introduce a couple of additional tutorials to teach the player about shields and extra weapons.

I've upped the destructive power of the exploding fuel canisters. Now they are a thing to be feared.

I've designed 4 extra weapons.

1. The Mini-Gun, a large animated spinning weapon of death. Sending rapid fire munitions towards the enemy at great speed.

2. The Heat gun, a Large beam weapon which cooks the enemy and melts scenery.

3. The Missile Launcher, It's big, it's chunky, it spits out homing missiles. The missiles will follow the mouse cursor, their destructive power will be matched only by their danger. They follow the mouse so it is possible to blow yourself up if you're not careful.

4. The Beam Gun, another beam weapon, more plasma beam than heat ray. It uses energy quickly but I'm toying with the idea that it damages shields.

For the heat gun, I'm toying with the idea of using a "War of the Worlds" effect (the original WOTW.. not the Tom Cruise version), the heat ray sparks and sound from the martians. But I'm worried I'll get sued.


So I might just go with a barely visible heat blurring effect (simple to do) It's not a laser, so there'll be no beam as such, it's just focussed heat. But it would be hard to see.

One thing is for sure, these extra weapons look too big for the medium tank so the Heavy tanks will be along soon. All weapons will be available to all tanks, but they will take punishment in forms of movability and fuel usage. The extra light tank, which will be really zippy, will hardly be able to move at all because of the weight of the heavy weapons.

The SuperHeavy tank will be strong enough to carry 2 of the heavy weapons for extra devastation. Although it will be limited to using 2 of the same type of weapons.

I've fixed a load of bugs and the last MAc build showed that the performance changes I'd made were having a positive effect.

I've still got to implement the Earth military, I've got graphics for tanks and apache helecopters, but I'm not sure how best to implement them.. do I make them like drones which fire or do I give them some AI?

Still lots to do.. I'll report back later.