  4E4, first screenshot | 
Posted - 6/29/2005 12:48:55 PM | Not much to see yet: i'm generating the city, using some random elements for a bit of variation.
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| 4E4: i'm in! | |
Posted - 6/28/2005 5:28:44 PM | Greetings all,
I have decided to participate (minus unexpected events) to the Four Elements GDNet contest.
I've been hesitating a lot due to my lack of time and dedication. I already have a few projects running; the most important one (my space engine) is going well, but Minas Tirith is currently asleep, and my third project (a Lands of Lore remake) has some legal issues with the copyright holders, Electronic Arts (so it's on hold). This means that i should effectively have some time for a small "summer project".
I already have an idea for the game, but i won't spoil it, because i believe it's pretty original and fun. The game will take place in a modern city and will feature robots and zombies only.
Tomorrow i will talk to some people at my company to get the rights to use a city model into the game, in exchange of some free advertisement. If they agree, it should likely fill 95% of the game content.
I will be using my own engine (only a part of it is space/planet specific, but the engine also supports all the standard features: vertex & pixel shaders, per-pixel lighting, shadow maps, complex scene graph, etc..). Some features are missing but i will add them for the 4E4 contest; which will indirectly benefit my space game.
I intend to win (if i can finish the game, that is).
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| GTA: San Andreas | |
Posted - 6/27/2005 6:01:29 AM | I finally got my box of San Andreas (in English/French) this week end.
Wow, this game is awesome. Technically it has some problems. I heard the game is not very well optimized, but i can play at 30-40 fps at full details on my pc, fair enough. Many textures, especially on the characters, are ugly. It's lacking a lot of effects (no normal mapping, few pixel shaders). On the other hand, the amount of details is fantastic, and the world is completely seamless. The gameplay is very open ended. Haven't had so much fun since a few years.
The scenario hem hem.. i can definately see why the game is forbidden under 18. The beginning of the game, especially with the gang wars, is.. special. Swearing, cursing, insults, racism.. it's not something i particularly enjoy. But the scenario is getting better now (i just arrived to San Fiero) so all's good.
I didn't find the game very hard so far.
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| Misc. stuff | |
Posted - 6/22/2005 4:36:43 PM | I was reading the news about the solar sail, and it made me think to an image i saw on the net the other day:
I tried to get my hands on GTA San Andreas, but unfortunately the only boxes available now are in Flamish, and i want either a French or an English one. I'll probably get it in the next days/weeks.
I'm also wondering if i should buy Battlefield 2. I enjoyed the demo a lot. I'm looking forward to doing stunts like this in the game :)
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| MMORPG idea | |
Posted - 6/15/2005 2:31:14 PM | I was browsing MMORPG.com today and i had a small idea. DISCLAIMER: i haven't given a lot of thoughts to this idea, i don't even know if it's good. What about recycling content between different servers of a MMORPG ?
Imagine this: most MMORPGs consist of multiple virtual servers, which are all instances of the same world but with different players. They are copies of each other.
Now, using the same content & design, what if different servers proposed different worlds ? The cities, the NPCs, the monsters, the items, would all be the same.. but spawned at different locations. The world map would be different. A city that was in the west coast on server A could be located on the east coast on server B. The cities/dungeons would have exactly the same design, they'd just be located at different places.
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| Time for.. an update.. yes! | |
Posted - 6/14/2005 5:39:31 AM | I just realized that i've never posted screens of my "old" planet engine (it's from 2003) on this journal. So for posterity, here they are:
I'm looking forward to reimplenting these scattering effects in the new engine (soon i hope).
In the last weeks i've been working on more physics. I realized things are not as simple as i initially thought.
Bear with me, it's not easy to explain. Basically, all my bodies are dynamic and hierarchical. You have planets, orbiting stars, moons orbiting planets, and space stations orbiting moons/planets. All of that in "accelerated" real-time.
So, in world space coordinates, the position of a specific planet is always changing - up to 1000 kilometers per second. Internally i store all my coordinates in 64-bits floats using the kilometer as the unit. The server controls how bodies are moving, and the client interpolates and predicts the movement using dead reckoning. It's all good in theory for one unique body.
But when you've got a hierarchy of bodies, the movement of one body should affect another's. What i mean is, if a space station is in the gravity field of a planet, translating the planet by +500 km in space should also translate the station by +500 km in space. If you don't do that.. the station will end up motionless in space while the planet it was orbiting goes away. Hence the motions of bodies must be somewhat "linked" together.
It gets even more tricky when you add imprecision due to networking. Let's say that your latency varies from 0 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds. Sure that's not a lot and no big deal.
Wrong.
In any other game, that wouldn't be a problem. But due to my time acceleration and huge speeds of my bodies (we're not playing with kilometers per hours here, but with kilometers per second), it can lead to huge errors.
A simple calculation: if a planet is moving at 1000 km/s in space, a latency of 10 ms leads to an error of 10 km in the body's position.. after one second!
Imagine what would happen with real Internet latencies.
Frontier, the classic David Braben's game in the 90s, probably solved the first part of these issues... except he didn't have to deal with networking, which made his life easier. I do not have the same luck..
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