I’m battling with the netcode. It works and doesn’t work. It’s the most difficult thing I’m doing, my brain hurts from thinking about it. I feel like a network simulator in my head constantly playing it in my thoughts.
The network code will be 100% reliable and from the tests I’m doing it seems that it is going to be really smooth. I have a little program that helps me with this.
I wish I had this when I programmed and tested Soldat net code : QoS
Amazing times for making games nowadays. It seems like we’re inventing some cool stuff everyday for the game now. Today we came up with a method of making 3 effects from just 1 file. Not only for backgrounds but for all sprites in the game.
The effects are:
The last one is new. It is a graphical area that is not affected by shadows. In simpler words it is stuff that glows, like little lights. For example eyes of an infrared helmet.
Graphically this game is looking astounding. What really excites me is that this is not the end cause we just started thinking about particle effects (like smoke and fire). So that will come next.
Also I managed to get network code working today. It was a tough battle but I made it. Looking at it again there are some problems with it and I need to reprogram it a bit. I made too much deviations from the original idea by Carmack. Its best to stick to the genius.
As a reminder my post about the netcode: Pump your state!
Today I made complete collisions for bullets. Now they pass through platforms and stairs unless they are shot at. This means if you mouse aim before a platform, you will shoot at the platform. If you aim further it shoots further.
I made colorizing/saturation and blur filter as a postprocessing effect. I think Link-Dead will use heavily this kind of stuff. Think Saving Private Ryan.
I started working again on netcode cause it broke after switching physics engines. I have to fix it and make the game work over network again so we have a walking shooting multiplayer game!
A bit less work done in the last days. I don’t fell that motivated to work hard because only one thing left to do to meet the deadline of having a walking/shooting guy is making crouch animations. That’s easy and they are just placeholder animations. I’m waiting for Sigvatr to come up with new gostek graphics.
4 days left. I got the old animation code working with the new one today. I changed a lot in the engine in the past months but the animation system will remain cause I’m quite happy with it (see videos on this blog). I partially completed our goal of having a running/shooting gostek by the end of the month. But there is still a lot of tweaking to be done to make it look good. Also all he does is just run, I want him to at least jump and crouch.
That was easy cause I already had code for it. The interesting part I have been doing also right now is the lighting and pixel shaders. While Sigvatr is polishing his normal mapping skills I completed the unified lighting model for Link-Dead. That means that the normal mapping pixel shader interacts with my shadow code. This means totally realistic lights. If you liked the videos I made some months ago with the light and fog, wait to see how this works with Sigvatr’s graphics and real-time 3D looking lights and shadows and effects. I’m really excited about this game.
It seems that adding the pixel shader lighting with normal maps didn’t work as I expected. Basically there are two systems that draw on top of each other producing a result that can be described as dark shit (you may notice that we have a very strict descriptive technical language in our team).
So I faced a problem similar to what John Carmack had when he started coding Doom 3 – How to have a unified system of lighting and shadows maps?
I thought about it for a couple days and I got the answer. The problem is I don’t have any pixel shader graphic programming education so it seems I am reinventing the wheel every now and then. Like inventing something called Projective Texturing. So the lights and shadows should work fine now with normal maps if everything goes as I predict.
Btw. we have set a deadline for having a running/shooting gostek by the end of this month (read post above).
I ran into some problems. There are some bugs with sprite flickering. I don’t know how to fix it yet, so until then my Untagged bar on the right might rise. Unless I find something else to do. I have to start working on animations for the dude.
In the meantime Sigvatr is polishing his normal mapping drawing skills.
Updated Box2D to newest code = working raycasting = working hitscan shooting weapons
Played around with creating debree from shots and bullet shells from weapon. Looks great but Box2D needs to be seriously optimized for this to work with hundreds of objects (if you played with my TestBox you’ll see it crashes when you throw a lot of balls). I have to think about this.
Normal mapping works. We’re officially using normal mapped sprites and backgrounds for Link-Dead. I still need to fix some bugs concerning this.
Sigvatr is working on weapon graphics and a completely new gostek. We didn’t like the previous one because I quote: “he looks like a robot made of poop”.
Haven’t done anything real today.
I played a bit with shaders. I’m trying to think of a way to use normal maps and specular maps without having two maps (cause there is a need for more memory).
If you don’t know what normal and specular maps can do in a 2D game, in simple words: it is a way to shade 2D sprites and maps so that they are affected by lighting. There won’t be anything ‘flat’ in this game. Specular gives the impression of metallic objects. So all metal objects on maps and players (like weapons and armor) will shine. All these effects will be visible, especially with moving lights, such as when shooting.
Raycasting still doesn’t work, but fuck that I’ve got tons of other cool stuff done yesterday and today.
Finally after months of work we have realtime lighting with shadows while shooting with muzzle flash effects. It looks brilliant. Never seen a 2D game look this good.
And this is not all, because I’ve only just started working with pixel shaders. I think we’ll make heavy use of normal mapping, specular lighting and other awesome shader techniques.
If all goes well Link-Dead might be as good as this – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVFkGqG9-4Y
