Blaze

Changing this again.. uhhuh.. Player is now a spacecraft. Kinda like when I started this thread and player was just 1 triangle. The new player is triangle shaped, but got like 200 triangles. I tried a cockpit for the first person viewmodel, but it looked really bad, so you get to see the weapons instead.



I've made some single handed mouse only zero gravity flight with just QuakeC. Player moves automatically forward a little bit. Pressing MB2 accelerates. If player has aimed up/down for a while, then player can hover up/down without needing to look there. After a while of looking forward, player stops the up/down hover. Same goes for strafing, and player can also circle strafe around enemies when aiming at an enemy. Circle strafe direction changes every now and then, and can always be changed with the MB2 (release, press again).

The engine kinda limits the up/down looking, so can't fly totally freely like in flight sims/etc. Maybe if I can get the engine code to compile, I might try to remove the limits. But for now I'm pretty happy about having the flight work so simple. Though when there's more than 2 weapons, the weapon changing is better done with the keyboard.

I also did the enemy flight code, based on my earlier flight code. The enemies get pushed around with some velocity. Direction for the push is randomized "intelligently" based on their enemy/goal's location. The enemies can also wander around randomly when they have no enemy.

Thought to try that simple style I used for that Doom model/texture pack thing again (and the textures from it). Looking pretty cool with the software light banding, kinda like some cell shaded stuff.

FLIGHT TESTING/COMBAT VIDEO

Well it's cool and all, but... How many times have you changed this? I'd be curious to play this one, so please stick with it!

So I see pros and cons here. The pros fall into, damn the game still looks fun and fast paced. The ship model looks great and its still minimalist.

The cons fall into the ... ship? shmup or quake game, pick one. Well after my initial thought it does open up new possibilities. You are now a mech that can transform. Since Transformers is taken by Activision, there's always the Transmorphers movie or a possible Go-Bots license to be had... or just make your own character.

That opens up all sorts of new gameplay options. Fast flying shmups, hovering helicopters. Cyber cycle courses.

With the little touch of making an always forward moving spaceship its very inspiring. The real reason why I'm throwing out the transformation gimmick is because you've already invested so much time into a game that's on foot.

Third person might be helpful to get through small areas when you're constantly moving forward.

AD_79 said:

Well it's cool and all, but... How many times have you changed this?

He's fallen victim to the Duke Nukem Forever syndrome.

I've had some depression, which has been the reason for most changes. It's not so bad now, but still, every couple months it seems I get bored of what I'm doing and want change it. Should probably work on smaller scale games or use this sort of graphics.

Player's movement does feel like it could also work for a racing game.

The transformation stuff sound remind me of this game: http://www.mobygames.com/game/metal-mutant

I thought this could been a game where player is some walking mech. But then there would be a need for animations. And I kinda got bored of animating... For now it's just going to be flight stuff.


At the moment it works in any Quake engine, even the DOS one (but is too slow in DOSBox). There's some chase cam mode in about every Quake engine, except not in the DOS, and WinQuake display the viewmodel as the player model in the chase cam. And all have some viewing issues. Like, look up and all you see is a close up of your character/spacecraft's butt. Or the viewing angle is limited to some 45 degrees, so that you don't see the butt close up.

I tried making a custom chase cam in QuakeC a year ago. It was better for the extreme up/down angles, but it had some issues with sound volume.

Also there's probably not going to be any small areas. It seems Quake engine has some serious issues with them (even when just playing Quake). I had this "ventilation maze" area earlier with 64x64 wide/high tunnels and player was little stuck when the tunnel had a corner or a drop. The only way not be stuck was to move at the very center of the tunnel.

Its all up to you Jimi, we can't tell you what to do. Its a hobby after all.

Animating is never fun, but you can always leave it for later when you have more motivation. Again, its all up to you, whatever you want to do or whatever sounds fun for you the developer.

I know that I am not alone when I say that Blaze looks like the most promising project here on Doomworld's everything else.

Jimi said:

Also there's probably not going to be any small areas. It seems Quake engine has some serious issues with them (even when just playing Quake). I had this "ventilation maze" area earlier with 64x64 wide/high tunnels and player was little stuck when the tunnel had a corner or a drop. The only way not be stuck was to move at the very center of the tunnel.

Are you talking about the Quake engine or Darkplaces engine now?
Because there are a lot of possibilities to mess up the Darkplaces engine using a combination of different cvars to create a concoction of settings that will cause problematic clipping issues. We managed to get that with Doombringer and it took some figuring out before it was resolved. Luckily I wasn't alone on that because Andrew did all the heavy lifting.

Now the clipping is perfect and I feel the game is very robust for anything I may throw at it, geometry wise. Though close narrow spaces will not be on my radar simply because that doesn't offer good game play in a fast moving FPS.

Yea, animating gets a bit boring when it's always about the same set of idle, move, attack, pain, die. Though at least in Blender it's easy to copy/paste animations from one character to another with a similar skeleton. Of course no animations or very minimal animations is still faster.

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I've experienced the issue with small spaces in every Quake engine I've tried.

Did some experimenting on it. 64 may be ok for a 56 tall player.. but 60 is no longer ok.. like if you had a 64 tall room, then add some 4 unit tall lamp to the ceiling.. there's something sticky under the lamp.

Also a 56 unit tall player does not fit into a 56 unit tall room. Minimum is 57. And a 32 wide player needs minimum 33 wide corridor to fit through. No idea if Doom like gliding is possible.

Maybe the "ok to move" testing in Quake engines is a bit over sensitive...

Just finished all the Main Weapons, Support Weapons and HUD graphics.

This is the Plasma Cannon. Fires a lot of plasma bolts that do a lot of damage. The HUD is just fully lit up, and the weapon/missile/etc icons are on the sides. The first little number in the upper part of the HUD shows the currently targetted enemy's hitpoints (percentage) and the second number shows the distance to it (16 units = 1 meter). The other two numbers don't show anything yet. Maybe one of them could show how many enemies are somewhere nearby.


Here's some Smart Mines that home into enemies and maybe confuse Missiles to hit them. Player can also drop some Combat Drones that are a pretty good distraction for enemies. They can fire Lasers and Rockets, and follow player.


Then we have the Auto Cannon that is like the Shotgun of the game. Also just happened to take the screenshot when I fired a Missile. Missiles can home into targets. There's also Nuclear Missiles that do massive damage, also don't look straight into the nuclear explosion, and don't try to hide behind a wall. In the second pic is the Super Disintegrator F*****g Beam Weapon. Somewhere between all the explosions is a blue beam that goes through everything and has an explosion at the end of the beam. It does more damage the longer you hold the fire button, though eventually it may overheat.

Here comes a new video. It shows a powerup for the Laser Cannons, a Plasma Shield powerup, homing missiles and a new enemy that drops mines. All player's Main Weapons generate heat. When they're too hot, they don't fire. Support weapons can be fired any time. Environment and explosions can affect the heat levels too: dive into lava and you get hot.. dive into water and you stay cool longer. Player can double click + hold the "Move" button to activate Turbo move (also generates heat).

Water Facility - VIDEO

WinQuake seems pretty bad for heavy action. Just have a dozen enemies around firing at player, and boom it's "packet overflow". Well at least it doesn't crash the game, but it's pretty annoying when sounds are no longer played, and everything's kinda lagged. I was able to do some kind of workaround with limiting how many enemies can be in the level at the same time and how many projectiles they can fire.

When player destroys an enemy, then there's room for some more. If it's a large level, then enemies may need to be removed/teleported away when player is no longer there, so the enemies would always be around player. Or maybe use some monster blocking invisible blocks, though this wouldn't work so well on some big areas with long range visibility.

To compensate for the lack of large enemy masses, I increased the hitpoints of the enemies to make them more dangerous even if they're alone. Could probably increase their projectile speeds and damages too. Projectile speed increase would also make the projectiles hit something faster and allow the enemies to fire again sooner. They're quite challenging already.. it took me like 10 tries to complete the level in the video (though I was kinda sleepy when recording it).



Looks like I'm keeping the Doom texture replicas... But no plans to make more replica textures. Majority of the textures should be fresh/original.




All the item models are complete. Enemies can drop the smaller ones. All have some glowing parts to make them easier to spot even in darkness. There's 6 powerups. Most of them are limited time, and picking up the same powerup again adds to the time.

The powerups are (middle pic, in order of appearance):
Automatic Repair System: repairs player's armor for 30s up to 250 points.

Heat Shield: decrease all heat levels 50% when picked up, weapons cool faster and heat slower. Allow moving in lava and acid without taking any damage. 25% damage protection. Lasts 60s.

Super Shield: protects from all damage 100% (75% in DM). Malfunctions in water (but works in lava and acid). Lasts 30s.

Laser Amplifier: improves the Laser Cannons to fire more realistic kind of laser beams with faster fire rate and damage. Lasts one level.

Plasma Shield: protects from all collisions to walls/enemies, creates no self-damage explosions every 2s or when colliding with something. 50% damage protection. Lasts 30s.

Cargo Module: double/increase max ammo capacity and give some ammo. Permanent upgrade.

I can't trust my eyes, this game has been remade again, now as a Descent clone.

In the video, you sucked at avoiding spike bombs so badly that I was convinced they're actually collectible items until some time later.

I was also getting a slight motion sickness from a lot of sudden movements happening there. I hope it won't be so bad for an actual player.

The all-colorful environment and objects are nice, however I often had very hard time distinguishing types of objects from each other (for example items from enemies), which I find unfortunate.

Wish you good luck with making this project good and finishing it.

I could alter the fullbright colors in the items to be different than red. The idea for them was to use about the same colors as the projectiles they fire, etc.. I improved the palette, so there's a better fullbright color selection now.

But even if people mistake the items for enemies and their initial reaction is to fire.. well, there should be plenty of ammo around (when they eventually dare to go get the items), so a few wasted shots shouldn't matter much.

As I got the new palette done, I decided to try out the new colors with some new texture/level themes. These are: Ice, Jungle and Pink.