The General Babblings of Chris Wild
Technology
No, not the thing your dad can’t do, or even the thing you can’t do as you realise that you are in fact turning into your dad; but actual bonafide coding a DVD! I’ve been doing some of late, oh back to the days when you can’t do anything… about 16, 16 bit registers and that’s it! No memory, no graphics, no sprites, no sound… 16 registers a video footage! nice! 🙂
DVD
DVDEvery now and then I check my web stats to see how people get to my site and from where… looking at the search engine keyword list is always amusing. As I have so much content of varying stuff, I often generate strange hits… but how about this one last month.
“i always respect the dead by wearing a condom”
That hit one of my pages!
Here are some screenshots showing the new UI. One also shows of the new sun. We’ve played around a lot with the effects layers. There are now different suns and moons depending on the time of day etc.
Another update on DDR, I’ll try and keep these frequent…
I had a large batch of graphics from Jure today. And the results as you would expect are stunning. The new skies really make a difference.
We all know how much impact the initial dawn shot has in Doomdark’s; it was so different than LOM but that Red and Yellow colouring was so atmospheric.
After much messing around with the Dawn shot myself I felt I was going to be in big trouble trying to recreate that feel. Some of you may remember me asking in the group if I could drop that look… to be told emphatically no!
Anyway, I’m glad to say; Jure hit the nail on the head and the result I found to be breathtaking. I’ll try and upload a screenshot soon.
The new haze effect is really working, and I know how two styles of moon, night and evening/day. I also have a separate sun to drop in as an overlay this time rather than having it painted onto the backdrop.
Anyway, more later.
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!