Just a quick update on Doomdark’s Revenge.
Work has been usually slow, however the graphical changes that Jure and I are making are increasing the visual appeal all the time.
I fixed a number of issues with the tunnel rendering code and this is now almost complete. Just to give you and update on the issues; they are one of view angle. In DDR we took the decision to only allow N E S W view points. This is in keeping with the original in that only movement is allowed on these axis. However we extended this to the UI in order to avoid looking in directions that are not valid.
A point of interest that came up during testing is that of the old DOOM 2d sprite view. ie: Whichever way you look, the sprite faces you. This is the same for the original LOM and DDR. We have kept this mechanic on the landscaping view, however we found that applying this technique in tunnels really jars. The problem is in simplicity that if looking north along a tunnel, there is a stone pillar on your left. When you move up the tunnel and look south it should be on your right. When this is not the case it looks just plain wrong… however your mind seems to except this in the landscaping view, ie: You should see the back of a keep etc…
We added coded haze between all the landscape terrain scales. This has a big impact on the visual quality of the graphics.
Jure is currently working on all the time states skies and floors etc.
I think most of the landscape graphics are done now, and all the dynamic stuff to give multiple terrain variations works really well. Jure has worked hard on this area; the amount of work put into the forests is amazing. You really won’t feel like it’s a tile forest anymore.
I would be interested to hear people’s views on 3d cards. I am considering taking TME over to use 3d hardware, not in a real 3d way but harnessing the power of the GPU to help process the increasing graphical workload. I know that older machines do not all have the luxury or 3d cards, but I would be interesting in hearing from anyone interested in playing LOM and DDR who do not have 3d support or have very old support.
I have had a number of talks with Matt Davies ( sorry can’t remember the correct number id!
Can you make your code detect the presence of 3D cards and use the processing power if it’s available? No idea how easy/hard/feasible that is, way too low level for me! 😉
Yes I can, however it is more of a case of one way or the other.
I would like to have 2 versions of the frontend rendering code however if know one actually needs the generic 2d support…. it just makes life easier.