Well, Jean Yves put up beta 0.2 of Midnight/Mu yesterday. Fantastic night of frantic gaming ensued. I was up till 2am playing my games and trying to keep up with the forum. It’s a large step forward and almost there now, so hopefully not long before it gets an open release.
Doomdark’s Revenge
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!
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This Blog…
To start of with an answer to Jean Yves, (Creator of the fantastic Midnight/MU for those of you that don’t know) Ice-Blog will be my general ramblings page. I will no doubt mention all things midnight and Midnight Engine, however I do also have the problem that there is a Yahoo Group that is better placed for such things, so expect duplication.
I started writing a piece about the current and future state of The Midnight Engine, but then found myself struggling with the concept of this being the wrong place. So I should be sending it to YahooGroups. However, I can set this blog service up to receive updates from me from a POP mail box. That could be interesting in that any messages I send to the group could be BCC’d to that mailbox, which would automatically make them show up here… I will try that later.
I can’t tell you too much about the other Blog, I may allow some people to read it over time, but it’s a TOP SECRET project! 🙂
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The Midnight Engine
Some of you will already know, that Jure is back on the project. We have been reworking all the graphic handling of the engine for ddr. We are creating everything in 24bit with alpha, and using a patch system to allow images to be made on the fly. This allows for every graphic to respond to its environment. The upshot is large variety in the landscaping and tunnels. Here are a few screenshots.
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The Midnight Engine
Well, it’s be a long time coming, but I placed a new pre-alpha version of the Midnight Engine on the site. I have re-written a lot of the engine to allow it to be easier to use by other developers. The frontend is now all 32 bit with alpha’s. The start of a DDR scenario is with the product, but just to allow artist to start developing graphics. I will update as I add all the little features.