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Message Board > Screenshots and Trailers > Vortex Realms (screenshots + video + demo) |
September 25, 2008, 20:17 | |
Caspah
Gladiator 203 posts |
copy paste from the game creators forum: DEMO UPLOADED! See below! Vortex Realms is my first large scale project made with Dark Basic Professional. I've been using DBP for 5 years and haven't made anything really playable until now, imagine that! It's a joint project with Raman Kleyn, a friend of mine from the Hogeschool van de Kunsten, Utrecht. We are both in our second year of the Game Design and Development course. Here's some brief background information, taken from the game design document: Code: Here's the latest version of the development log, if you're interested: Code: 30th Jan. ~ 1 hour Started a new game project with some fresh ideas and started on the menu. 1st Feb. ~ 1 hour Adapted and implemented timer based movement system from a tutorial. 2nd Feb. ~ 2 hours Finished menu system basics, started work on level editor with raise, lower and raise-to matrix functions. 4th Feb. ~ 3 hours Added wireframe option, improved editor in several respects and started blending tiles in photoshop. 5th Feb. ~ 2 hours Added brush size options, made some more editor improvements (highlighting, mouse interface). 6th Feb. ~ 3 hours Added water plane, water level function and fiddled with water shaders. Still looking for a good water shader. Added some more editor interface functionality. 7th Feb. ~ 2 hours Made several optimizations to the terrain editing for speed. Also fixed a few minor bugs and added some more editor options. 8th Feb. ~ 2 hours Added water level and randomize functions to the editor. 9th Feb. ~ 3 hours Added brush size indicator, added shift key function to hold brush in one spot (useful for precision editing). Also finally added terrain smoothing and equalize functions. 11th Feb. ~ 2 hours Added mouse control to menus. Vastly improved terrain smoothing function. Emailed ISA form, so project should soon start officially. 12th Feb. ~ 1 hour Added editor preview function. 13th Feb. ~ 3 hours Fixed a major problem to do with transparency/mip mapping on tree models. Tweaked the water shader alot, but im still not 100% happy with it. Also added skybox. 14th Feb. ~ 5 hours Stayed up all night wrestling with a bug after implementing a different water shader. Finally figured it out by switching to sparkys collision dll for the editor mouse detection resulting in a much better framerate, but still have a few problems to work out. 16th Feb. ~ 2 hours Fixed several bugs with the new water shader. Added camera tilting when using the preview mode. 19th Feb. ~ 3 hours Tweaked some stuff to do with texture loading. Added fog system and finally added object placement functions. 21st Feb. ~ 2 hours Made several important improvements to the object placement functions and optimized some code. 22nd Feb. ~ 0 hours ISA project officially started. Agreed to rewrite the project goals, I was a little too ambitious. 23rd Feb. ~ 2 hours Worked on texture mipmapping problem, still havent solved it yet. 24th Feb. ~ 6 hours Decided that the coding framework was too messy to warrant the label of 'framework' so I started rewriting it. Spent a lot of time ensuring that the old code would still work with the new framework, still havent finished that task. 25th Feb. ~ 3 hours Made some optimizations to the new framework (which still isn't complete), got camera and terrain loading reimplemented (now using advanced terrain). 1st Mar. ~ 1 hour Finally got back to work with the framework to make the editor deadline (3rd March). 2nd Mar. ~ 3 hours Further work on framework + UI, still not finished! 4th Mar. ~ 2 hours Reimplemented water, cleaned up code structure 5th Mar. ~ 7 hours Reimplemented ambient light, fog system and terrain lighting. Fixed some major problems with the water shader involving camera clipping and tearing issues. Added skybox switching. Reimplemented object functions with moving, rotating, scaling. Added underwater and color features to the water shader. I wouldn't have been able to make these edits without the pixelshader seminar, so I'm very glad I took it! 8th Mar. ~ 3 hours Spent some time reimplementing terrain editing, but decided that matrix to AT transformations were too complex to get working in the time allotted. Instead I will rely solely on heightmaps and leave full terrain deformation for another project. 9th Mar. ~ 2 hours Worked on implementing terrain painting. 10th Mar. ~ 1 hour Continued work on terrain painting, just about finished. Only need to add brush size selector & indicator. 11th Mar. ~ 1 hour Brush size selector working, havent added indicator yet. 12th Mar. ~ 3 hours Finally got the editor done, all basic requirements are in. 9 days late =/ ~ Exams and preparation for them caused me to lose some time here. 6th Apr. ~ 1 hour Started work on the load/save system. 8th Apr. ~ 8 hours Continued work on the load/save system. Worked with Ramana on implementing and scaling his models in-engine, we got some very nice results! Also fixed some problems with object loading/duplicate water planes that were driving me NUTS. Did some searching for an appropriate skybox for the first level, no luck so far. 9th Apr. ~ 7 hours Ramana finished the shotgun, so I added the weapon in first person to the game. Cleaned up entity functions, got entity loading in game working. Worked on the first level. Fixed a major bug with the collision system in the editor that was causing a crash. Started implementing a new fog system, because the current one ignores shader surfaces. (very annoying) 11th Apr. ~ 5 hours Reduced a z-fighting issue with the water. Added loading for Ramana's sword, shield and rock models. Worked on the first level. Implemented some more of Ramana's models. Rewrote the camera physics to fit in the new collision system, sliding collision works great! 12th Apr. ~ 5 hours Added X and Z rotation to the editor for the graves/reed models. Attempted to add a new fog shader, no luck. Added weapon bobbing, including proper bobbing for jumping, landing, uphill, and downhill. Added invisible barriers for the level edges. Added weapon switching. 13th Apr. ~ 1 hour Limited camera rotation on the X axis (no camera flipping anymore). Today is my brothers bday, Happy Birthday Duco! 14th Apr. ~ 4 hours Did some bugfixing work on the weapon bobbing. Added shotgun sound. Started work on muzzleflash. Cleaned up the code structure a bit, seperated code into appropriate source files so they werent clutted into long pages. This makes my life much easier. 15th Apr. ~ 3 hours Got muzzleflash working properly, finally. Added footstep sounds. Worked on the first level (its taking a lot more time than I expected). Fixed a grass color problem (had to do with ambient lighting). 16th Apr. ~ 5 hours Made some serious progress on a grass exclusion method that lets me hide grass statics when they're too far away. This should allow me to coat the entire ground in grass statics without any serious slowdown. Spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to get the method to cover the entire level, but with no luck. Ill have to work some more on this later. 17th Apr. ~ 3 hours Put in some work on the reloading/ammo system. I just got the shotgun shells model from Ramana, intend to apply it ingame soon, along with item/pickup code. Spent some time fixing the in game GUI to work with the new ammo system. Added a bullet function, working great! Collision is fast with sparkys collision plugin. 18th Apr. ~ 2 hours Added the new wall models Ramana made and did some work on the first level. 20th Apr. ~ 1 hour Fixed an incredibly annoying terrain collision bug that was causing the player to stutter/jitter when travelling uphill. I had forgotten to exclude the terrain from the normal collision check. ~ Moving house twice, the summer vacation & re-examinations kept me really busy during these months. 19th Aug. ~ 2 hours I realized that in order to meet the requirements I set myself in the project documentation I would have to give up some features such as the level editor. Instead I will focus on a randomly generated level type. I also decided that while I was recoding the level structure I could refresh and clean up the GUI code and implement the fog and bloom shaders. To make this all feasible I created a fresh coding project and started importing most of the old code. 20th Aug. ~ 5 hours Spent lots of time importing old code and making it compatible with new code. The new framework is better organized internally, and makes adding new code simpler. After a whole day of importing and compiling and testing repeatedly I finally got the game running again and loading a heightmap. 21st Aug. ~ 7 hours Re-added terrain lighting. Fixed a camera bug causing the weapon models to be mis-aligned. Fixed a terrain texturing bug that was irritating me. Added DOOM style mouselook (no vertical) for the old school players. I also added camera recoil when the shotgun is fired, I'm quite satisfied with it. Added water splashing sounds when walking through water. Fixed a long standing footstep sound bug. Still working on: Water shader bugs, water zfighting and jittery movement (most likely a TBM problem). 22nd Aug. ~ 8 hours Added weapon animations to the shotgun, added reloading and pump action sounds. Cleared up several bugs with the reloading function while I was at it. Spent an hour tweaking the shotgun to make the animations, sounds and muzzle flash line up perfectly. Worked on the GUI overhaul, including ingame and frontend. Add a timer to the loading text for informational purposes. Finally imported Ramanas item models and coded a system to add items to the game world and keep track of them. I also implemented light coronas, for extra effect. 23 Aug. ~ 4 hours Imported and revamped the old statics (grass) system, its looking much better and the performance is vastly improved. I also updated the water shader, took out reflection (its swamp water) and gained about 10 frames per second. Also added tree generation. I struggled with the performance hit, havent quite figured out how to gain back the lost fps. 24th Aug. ~ 3 hours Decided to decrease the grass and tree density in favor of fps, because I just couldnt get them to perform at a reasonable speed together. Added the tree line silhouette to the edge of the level, next up: walls. 25th Aug. ~ 4 hours Added perimeter walls and pillars, also with collision boxes. Optimized some system code to keep everything neat. Added rocks and gravestones. Added zombie animations and a test model. 26th Aug. ~ 5 hours Added a zombie for every grave. Worked a lot on enemy AI, got the grave exit animations working well, only I'm still having some trouble getting the collision working right while the zombie is exiting. Also got aggro and idle states working correctly. I ran some performance tests, unfortunately my laptop couldnt handle anything but the lowest settings. 29th Aug. ~ 5 hours Added enemy attack AI with animation. Spent hours trying to get enemy collision system working, after several sessions of trial and error I settled on using sphere sliding. The speed hit seems reasonable, but a lot of tweaking is still required to get the desired smoothness. Fixed some glaring timer based movement bugs, resulting in much better animations for the zombies and the shotgun when the FPS are less than the desired 60. I also added some new sounds: Swamp ambience, a zombie growl and a zombie attack (the latter two are stock DBPro sounds, and are just placeholders). 30th Aug. ~ 6 hours Improved grass smoothing. Took advice from a tester who suggested lowering the resolution on some textures for a small but noticeable FPS gain. Spent a lot of time on weapon impacts and particles. Added water ripples, blood particles and spent some time debugging them. Added weapon reloading when pressing R, as opposed to only when the clip is exhausted. Added extra zombies and fixed a bug that popped up with the new reloading. Had to drop the blood particles when I realized they were causing an incredibly irritating bug with the fog. Im glad I have the TGC forums to go to, otherwise trying to find this bug myself would've driven me insane. ~ School started! 6th Sep. ~ 6 hours Started work on adding the flaregun to the game. Got everything working technically, still need to add some graphical polish. Also need to replace flare-bullet with actual flare. Removed some of the auto generated scenery to increase framerate. Made the zombie lunge faster and added camera recoil when being hit. Added a damage indicator, now I just need to find a sound. Added aggro on hit to AI routine. Added a screenshot function (very handy!). Fixed some minor AI bugs. Added player and zombie damage sounds, and switched to 3d sound system. Implemented a hardcoded sword thrust, it's functional but needs a lot of polish. 9th Sep. ~ 2 hours Worked on implementing a better particle system, I got quite a lot done considering the amount of time I spent. 10th Sep. ~ 9 hours Further refine particle system, blood and flare smoke is now working properly. I'm not100% satisfied, but this is more due to DBPro's shortcomings than my own. Added max particles variable, reminding me I need to update the config options. Fixed several minor bugs in the weapon logic. Improved flare gun accuracy. Perfected the water impact. Next up is dirt! Also touched up some particle artwork. Finally added a working melee attack. It was much easier than I expected, I could have taken care of it ages ago easily. Added an exit feature to the level generator. 11th Sep. ~ 1 hour Added Ramana's fixed weapon models. Implemented flarebox item. Implemented zombie death animations and second skin. ~ Took a break from coding to focus on school, which is really keeping me busy. 19th Sep. ~ 3 hours Added shield defense animation and logic. Looking for an appropriate blocking sound. Worked on implementing a nicer loading screen with a controls layout. Improved loading text and added debug text function. 20th Sep. ~ 1 hour Worked on the title screen. Tweaked the shield animation. 22nd Sep. ~ 2 hours Added burning zombies and flare explosion. 23rd Sep. ~ 7 hours Tweaked loading screen, flare explosion and flare smoke. Also tweaked the sword and shield delay. Finally added player death. Also added item spawning and dropping. Added vortex cube item. Added item pickup effect! Tweaked item drop and spawn chances. For some reason I was unable to get the vortex graphic loaded in game... The problem is bizarre and it's 1:30AM so will leave it out for now. Made a gigantic improvement to the framerate while experimenting with the terrain size, I'm very happy! It seems to have broken items drops from the monsters though, so I'll have to investigate it some more. Added a player health burn when above 100. Continued tweaking item spawns and drops, also tweaked some player logic. Added an objectives key and the appropriate function. The only thing missing is the completion logic/win screen. 24th Sep. ~ 3 hours Added completion logic with exit distance. Increased item grab radius. Fixed key press bug when winning or losing the game. Gave the shellbox item less shells. Fixed a vexing timer based movement bug. Increased the zombies attack damage. Added a configuration option for doom look. Added cheat code, for cheaters. Added sounds for shield block, sword swing, burning zombie, zombie damage and item pickup. Total time ~ 199 hours DEMO UPLOADED! It's available on rapidshare.com, if you prefer another file host, please let me know and I'll do my best to upload it soon. There is a LOT of important information in the included readme.txt, please have a look before running the game. VORTEX REALMS DEMO 1 (rapidshare.com) I have recorded one video so far, it is available on youtube in low resolution and on rapidshare in high resolution. Please note that this video is already quite outdated and doesn't represent the features present in the current build: Low Quality High Quality Here are all the screenshots I've released on this forum, in order from newest to oldest. [Edited on September 25, 2008 by Caspah] ____________ "clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. here i am, stuck in the middle with you." ~Stealers Wheel |
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September 25, 2008, 23:15 | |
Dennis
どこかにいる 2097 posts |
More than impressed! It looks like fun. ps: do you still have the div doom source too? [Edited on September 25, 2008 by Dennis] ____________ Kwakkel |
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September 26, 2008, 00:00 | |
Fiona
games are terrible -9616558 posts |
That looks awesome, amazing work, and the dev log is great. I should be doing that. ____________ laffo |
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September 26, 2008, 01:12 | |
Caspah
Gladiator 203 posts |
Have you guys tried the demo? Let me know how it runs if you do. @Dennis: No I don't have your doom source. @Fiona: Yeah, the devlog is quite an interesting read (for me anyways). I look back and think WOW why on earth was I doing that right then. Also you can see I have absolutely no life when I spend 7/8/9 hours some days developing the game ____________ "clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. here i am, stuck in the middle with you." ~Stealers Wheel |
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September 26, 2008, 09:36 | |
Fiona
games are terrible -9616558 posts |
Quoting Caspah: Also you can see I have absolutely no life when I spend 7/8/9 hours some days developing the game :F You're not the only one ____________ laffo |
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September 26, 2008, 12:19 | |
Eckolin
Quite Whiskered 388 posts |
Runs fine. ____________ Maker of Games... Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Need help with coding? I probably wrote something similar. |
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September 26, 2008, 14:01 | |
Fiona
games are terrible -9616558 posts |
That's going pretty fast for Ecko's PC.
____________ laffo |
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September 26, 2008, 16:14 | |
Woody
HEAD BLACK MAN 722 posts |
You had to post this just when I had a ton of pages of my thesis due tomorrow didn't you. I had to pull an all nighter working because of this game. Because of YOU. It's awesome, especially the sounds. My computer was really chugging to process this, though, and it's a beast with a beastly graphics card. Is it possible to get through the gate? ____________ boredome is the bitter fruit of too much routine |
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September 26, 2008, 20:05 | |
Caspah
Gladiator 203 posts |
@Eckolin: Yeah, thats the water plane using Vertex Shader 2.0, so i'm guessing your video card doesn't support that @Woody: Heeheehee. Nah it's not possible to get through the gate, once you kill 20 zombies, grab the vortex cube and find the gate it should say level complete and end the game. [Edited on September 26, 2008 by Caspah] ____________ "clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. here i am, stuck in the middle with you." ~Stealers Wheel |
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September 27, 2008, 18:27 | |
Dennis
どこかにいる 2097 posts |
I'm installing the font now... - 2 mins later - I tried to play it but my directx is not up to date. I'm updating it now... - 10 minutes later - directx 9c installed. Trying to boot. Says my directx is not up to date. gives up. ____________ Kwakkel |
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September 27, 2008, 19:14 | |
Caspah
Gladiator 203 posts |
http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/directx.html use that direct x update ____________ "clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. here i am, stuck in the middle with you." ~Stealers Wheel |
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Message Board > Screenshots and Trailers > Vortex Realms (screenshots + video + demo)