Heretic on an 83+ to 84+SE

Got a brilliant program idea? Let us know!

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benryves
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Post by benryves »

Merthsoft wrote:Haha, that's a cool pic
Thanks :)
I'd just love to see some new screenshots of your engine - after all, it's that sort of pretty thing that sells. :D
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Post by DarkAuron »

Imagine if you patented/copyrighted this, you could sell it to some big companies and get rich quick.. just one way to look at it. Might want to do that (not selling though) before someone steals it.
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Post by Spengo »

could your engine do z collisions? I can see regular (x,y) collisions being easy, but if you can go up stairs and stuff, you wouldn't want monsters being able to shoot you from downstairs and vice versa if you know what I mean.
bananas... o.o
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Post by DarkAuron »

That would be easy too, just compare tile heights.
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blueskies
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Post by blueskies »

I love when you go on long rants like this about things you are developing or working on, or thinking about. Posts and discussions like this actually stimulate thought and motivate me to code something (which unfortunately doesn't happen often enough). :)
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Post by coelurus »

Merthsoft: As you probably figured, the pic was Ben's idea. Helps brighten my post up...

Ben: You know, time. I'll probably race this thing during summer now that things are getting serious (university, urg).

DA: What engine are you talking about, 'Heretic' or Sledge? Nobody would steal the Heretic thing, it's too simple :) And Sledge is protected by prior art and not exactly new, so there will be no troubles with patents.

Spengo: I think the best idea is to have some sort of autoaim similar to what Doom had. That is, if somebody shoots (player or enemy), the engine will let the projectile travel vertically if the pitch angle is not too great. In Doom, you could shoot enemies on ledges by just walking straight into the wall and fire but I guess that's the 'feature' you wanna avoid :)
It'd just be a sort of 'dist / height' and see if that's greater than, say, 2 => 26 degrees of autoaim. Firing vertically is pretty cool too, feels more like 3D.

Blueskies: I know, I felt the same thing a few years ago at the GDnet forums when this guy Yann Lombard started talking about his engine (you've all seen the pictures I've spammed you with :wink: ). I noticed today he posted a bit about radiosity; the info he gives shows how much more enlightened he is than the rest of the guys posting at GDnet :)
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Post by merthsoft »

I've never seen the pictures... :?
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Post by coelurus »

Here they are:
Clicketiclick
Take a look at the town scene and remember that the shot was taken in 2001. ~270.000 tris/frame, ~67 FPS on a 2100+ and Ti4600, no game can beat that. VTales, the company working on that engine (called Lyncis now, more info on VTales' homepage), has done some rather ambitious coding, like a hand-optimized raytracer in assembler for pre-processing radiosity. Not even Carmack does that anymore! I hope now that the engine can be licensed, some indie dev will make good use of the engine for a nice game :)

I did a little maths on what gfx cards should be able to do. 270.000 tris/s (using triangle lists, not even tristrips!) @ 67Hz and 1024x768 on a Ti4600 is very possible, less than 50% of the theoretical vertex processing power of the gfx card would be used. Fillrate is not a problem either, we should be able to have a depth complexity (full overdraws of things we've already drawn) of ~15-20 levels with reasonable speeds. So, using the same estimates for a 6800, we'd have like 1.5 million tris/frame @ 60Hz, 1024x768 with an allowed depth complexity of ~20-25. Where are the engines capable of this? Clearly not UE3.0, since a 1-million-poly-scene lags on a showcase video of their engine. They use some quite crafty lighting in UE3.0, but it still isn't totally acceptable that less than 50% of the gfx card is fully used, eh? :)

Anyway, we should get back to Heretic, any volunteers to develop this game? :) I'll be around and give advice, as long as I don't have to code the beast and hunt too many bugs.

EDIT: Urg, don't mind any typos please...
Last edited by coelurus on Wed 25 May, 2005 8:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.
merthsoft
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Post by merthsoft »

I remember the days of Carmacks most genuis outburst, Wolf3D, though it seems bad now, it was great for it's day, first ever first person shooter, it set some standards... I love Carmack, I want him to marry me...
Pretty pics...
EDIT: Just idding about the marrying part, and the early ID games are all great...
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Post by coelurus »

Wolf3D was just Catacombs glorified which in turn was based on Hovertank 3D, two games almost never mentioned. Wolf3D was mostly about proper sfx. I think Doom is a lot cooler considering the fact it was released only one year after Wolf3D but it was a whole lot more advanced.

Good thing you were kidding about the marrying part, he's occupied.

Were you kidding about the early iD games being great or did you just add that as a fact? :wink:

EDIT: I forgot some iD game history there! :o
Last edited by coelurus on Thu 26 May, 2005 9:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
merthsoft
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Post by merthsoft »

I loved Commander Keen...
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Post by coelurus »

Which was Carmack's first breakthrough, a fullscreen smooth-scrolling platformer for the PC which was pretty unheard of at that time.

Think of all the constructive stuff I could have in my head instead of iD history :p
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Post by Stickmanofdoom »

I myself am a huge Commander Keen fan, and I find it dissapointing how whenever iD's history is mentioned, Commander Keen doesn't get much more that a passing remark and then they go on to mention all the (great) FPS.
As for the Vtales' engine, it looks quite impressive. The heretic engine sounds like a great project, and it gets me thinking about Monochromatic 2 and the 3D-vector scene. Do you think that a 3D game that uses filled triangles is a plausable idea?
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Post by merthsoft »

Stickmanofdoom wrote:I myself am a huge Commander Keen fan, and I find it dissapointing how whenever iD's history is mentioned, Commander Keen doesn't get much more that a passing remark and then they go on to mention all the (great) FPS.
Agreed completly (can't spell)... Excpet on most of hin endeavors (up through doom?) he had the help of Romero, who first started working of the scrolling engines (Dangerous Dave) though the first one was on an apple... Dangerous Dave and the Haunted Mansion is one of my top five games, but so few people know about it...
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Post by coelurus »

Nowadays, Commander Keen feels to most people just like the other platformer. Platformers had been around for a long time on consoles so the interest had kinda cooled down. To me, Commander Keen is important because it formed iD software. Technically, it isn't as fun to investigate as the 3D games that were written later on so that's my reason to rant about them :)

The problem with filled triangles in a 3D world is the complexity of all world "management" and visibility determination. Raycasting is a robust and simple way of handling all aspects of 2.5D including area inspection (to see immediately what objects matter from a certain viewport) and the var-height routine linked to in this thread will be able to render all kinds of neat environments (stairs, ledges, pillars). 3D involves a lot more, like numerically stable transformation (no jittering! I deeply dislike jittering), viewport clipping (transform geometry into a unit cube, clip and then transform to eye perspective), fast back-to-front sorting of triangles (maybe a simple sort of a render queue would work), quickly determining a near perfect set of visible triangles etc.

I was churning on Descent a few years ago with portaled, convex sectors drawn using only lines and some methods to determine what areas of the screen that are 'supposed' to have been filled (thus white walls everywhere), but the thing went complex pretty quickly. I just recalled a cool data structure called 'Beam tree' that's built just before rendering and holds supixel-accuracy information about what areas of the screen that are filled, maybe somebody feels like looking that up? :)

Anyway, the demos showing off 3D are very confined and everything is on screen all the time. The problems arise when the entire screen is filled and there are hundreds of triangles beyond the stuff you see and behind the viewport. Also, just to make steps and ledges, the polygon count will rise tremendously and collision detection will get pretty hefty.
For now, stick to raycasting unless somebody has a pretty firm grasp about writing 3D world renderers.
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