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lucius

XL Engine Merger Update

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More progress. I fixed some issues with vertical adjoins, turned all the "teleport" water (Duke Nukem 3D style water) into vertical adjoins with translucent surfaces (optional, can be displayed as opaque) and added support for the surface palettes. This will turn the grass and some of the leaves gray in the first level, make the water textures look blue, allow for yellowish lighting around light sources and so forth.


Vertical adjoin issues fixed.


Slopes and surface palettes.


Translucent water and sloped vertical adjoins.


The entire first part of this level is covered by translucent water.

Next up - proper sky textures, depth cueing/fog, sprites and voxel models. And there are some texture alignment issues that still need to be fixed. Once all the rendering for BloodXL is complete, I'll get the Outlaws stuff loading and rendering as well (though that will be complete much quicker since the new features such as slopes, vertical adjoins, translucent water, etc. are done already as shown above).

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Looks pretty good so far, nice to finally see a Blood port.

Is it possible that the XL engine will be able to have custom games? As in new games made from scratch using the engine.

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Sodaholic said:

Looks pretty good so far, nice to finally see a Blood port.

Is it possible that the XL engine will be able to have custom games? As in new games made from scratch using the engine.

Yes the engine will support any number of games (they are not hardcoded anywhere). Games are dynamically loaded DLLs (or the equivalents on different platforms) with associated script files, to add a new game a new game DLL needs to be added.

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Wall oriented and floor oriented sprites are now working. There are still some tweaking to make the light levels look correct and occasional sorting issue - but the oriented sprites are pretty much complete. Next up are camera oriented sprites, sprites with multiple sides (like enemies) and transparent/translucent adjoin textures (for things like the windows). And of course skies (which is pretty obvious looking at the last shot I'm sure).

After that I'll get to tweaking overall lighting/palettes and enabling depth cueing. I have a method that should allow the lighting to match the original pretty well even with OpenGL rendering. (There will be a software renderer later to allow for a more exact match if desired).

Once the rendering for BloodXL is complete I'll get Outlaws working as well - now that the necessary feature additions are in-place and working. Then I'll get all the projects rendering correctly in the XL Engine post-merger code base, which involves some refactoring for DaggerXL and change over to the improved sector rendering system for DarkXL.

The merger should be complete in a couple of weeks, with DarkXL and DaggerXL back up to where they were before plus some additional features and enhancements and BloodXL and OutlawsXL minimally playable (i.e. - levels function but only one enemy type and weapon type). At that point the XL Engine will be available for Windows, OS X and Linux.

Click on the images to see the full size version.



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This looks fantastic! While I noticed the light levels in the Blood shots didn't quite look right, I'm glad to see you are already addressing that. The idea of playing Blood on a modern OS really excites me. :)

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Sky support and mask/translucent wall support:



Next up camera aligned sprites - that should really make the levels look better. :)

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So I implemented the fixed function version of depth cueing. I have a plan to better emulate the effect of the color maps when running in hardware, but it turns out it's a little too expensive for fixed function (i.e. 3 textures on every surface). Given the point of fixed function, I decided it'd be better to use the built in fog hardware and save the improved color map support for cards that support shaders.

The vast majority of people will have GPU's that support at least basic shaders (SM 1.1+), so the lighting and depth cueing will look better for most people. But first I'm going to get the fixed function render, which I've been showing so far, complete before worrying about putting shader support back in.

You can see the fixed-function depth cueing here:
[Before / After]


Another screenshot for fun:


All the basic rendering elements are in place, so the next step is to go through and fix bugs - such as occasional alignment issues with floors and walls. Once the rendering is robust I'll get the other projects rendering everything again - which should go much quicker since most of the engine work is done. :)

Finally once all the projects are properly rendering using the fixed function path, I'll add the shader path back in - with improved lighting and color map support - and then move on to getting the gameplay ready for the release.

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Outlaws stuff is also coming along now as well:

Before the dual-adjoin support was added. Note though that is shows basic level geometry, textures, sky and slopes.


After dual adjoins were added.


I've recently added masked wall support and all the levels can be loaded. Next up is to get the sprite data converted and rendered - objects are being loaded but are current ignored except for the player start. Once that is done I'll finish up the rendering for OutlawsXL and then start getting the gameplay and initial multiplayer pass in for the release.

Here you can see masked walls (used for windows):


This game uses dual-adjoins a lot in order to create 3D geometry from sectors, as you can see from the images below. Unlike Dark Forces, 3D models and secondary sector heights aren’t used. Instead even things like 3D staircase railings and fences are made out of sectors.

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This will be just a small update, but OutlawsXL now supports objects. It parses the Item definitions (.ITM files) and sprite files (NWX).



Next I will fix various texture alignment issues, properly parse vertical adjoins – which the engine already supports as seen from previous BloodXL posts and make some final Outlaws rendering tweaking.
Once that is complete I’ll start on level interactivity and get the multiplayer going.

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Nice. I didn't realize you had an update thread here.

Looking forward to the Dagger progress the most...

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Kaiser said:

Really excited to see progress on BloodXL

Touche', hopefully it will even bring somewhat of a resurgance in the Blood modding scene.
True theres been a fair few solid mods for it but nowhere near enough in my opinion.

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I put up a new blog post talking about the networking and level interactivity work. You can read it here.

In the post I also show a first look video, which I also show below. Click on the link to see in HD.

The game is running in “Bloodbath” mode, which basically means that all the Bloodbath weapons and items show up but that enemies are not represented. Note that this is still early work in progress and there are still numerous issues that need to be ironed out. However, hopefully you’ll agree, that BloodXL is progressing well and is nearly ready for the release.

BloodXL - Bloodbath Mode - First Look

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The XL Engine now has a page on ModDB. :)

I'm still working on getting the release out and fine tuning things like the proper player physics and motion in BloodXL and OutlawsXL. Hopefully I'll have another, improved, video to show soon. :D

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Damn, I wish I could find my copy of Outlaws. :/

Nevermind, it's looking good anyway and I still have Dark Forces and Blood to play in this. Keep up the Good work Lucius. I've been having a blast playing DF with the XL engine.

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I have my Outlaws discs, waiting for the day I can play it again at normal speed. My Dark Forces is long lost, though :(

After fighting my CD drive to read Disc 1 I found that the Outlaws installer apparently won't run on 64-bit. Will copying all the files to a folder work?

Either way, not sure of the actual playable state of the game from the website I downloaded the XL Engine and was sad to see Outlaws greyed out still.

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