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Work in Progress / Under Development : Space Sim

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Silent Phoenix
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Posted: 26th Feb 2004 17:19
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All,
Our small team that currently consists of two (sometimes 3) people have been putting together a space sim.

Although we initially started the game in C++ and DirectX the speed of development was Slooooooow as their weren't any 3D engines that did exactly what we wanted. (They all seemed oriented towards the FPS genre)

Well I bought DBPro a few weeks back and already the results are comming out.

Here are two early screen shots :





The flight model is Newtonian and flies similar to the I-War games from a couple of years back. We are not setting our hopes too high at the moment and just want to get a little multiplayer space shooter up and running.

Thanks go to the forum regulars, especially to Philip (That's with one L ) , Van B, walaber and Spooky who helped me over some of the DBPro "oportunities"

Cheers
Silent][Phoenix

– and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way
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Silent Phoenix
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Posted: 26th Feb 2004 17:21
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PS : Please ignore the cockpit! (I know it's rubbish )Haven't converted my proper one to a .X model as yet. This one was just a test.

Silent][Phoenix

– and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way
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ReD_eYe
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Posted: 26th Feb 2004 18:11
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the graphics look incredible!!! can't wait to play a demo!

In the beginning, the universe was created...
This made alot of people very angry and it has been widely regarded as a bad idea...
Visit http://redeye.dbspot.com
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M00NSHiNE
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Posted: 26th Feb 2004 18:46
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yeh, this looks pretty good! How'd you do the space background?

Currently thinking of a new company name
Sticking to a project idea for once
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Silent Phoenix
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Posted: 26th Feb 2004 19:17
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At the moment it's a "massive" bitmap wrapped around a massive sky sphere.

We want to do something a bit more dynamic, but at the moment we are leaving it like this. We textured the sphere in a sightly unusual way to avoid texture pinching at the poles.


Cheers
Silent][Phoenix

– and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way
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Wik
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Posted: 26th Feb 2004 23:49
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WOW! That looks good.


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walaber
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Posted: 29th Feb 2004 12:16
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excellent screen shots!! can't wait to see more!

Go Go Gadget DBPRO!

Athlon XP 2400+ || DDR-SDRAM 1GB || Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 AGP 8x 128MB
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jrowe
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Posted: 29th Feb 2004 23:38
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Looking really good! One nark- the asteroids are all the same Modify the one you got to a few different shapes and alternate them randomly or something. Apart from that great.


For Fathers and Sons who enjoy wholy spirits.

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Silent Phoenix
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Posted: 1st Mar 2004 10:49
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They are not asteroids, they are self replicating nandroids from the 7th Dimension that have mimicked asteroids in an effort to conquor the universe.......... errrr no. Actually they are asteroids.

I will put some more types in their, also the texture i'm using for them is pretty rubbish as well.

Cheers
Silent][Phoenix

– and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way
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Philip
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Posted: 1st Mar 2004 15:06
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Not the self replicating nandroids again! The little b****** get everywhere. Can you believe they actually completed the crossword of my newspaper this morning AND drank my pineapple surprise? I was quite outraged.

More seriously, first, I'd like to say a few words of encouragement to Silent and his team. Its already looking good and I'm really looking forward to the end result!

Secondly, being a somewhat artistically challenged hibernatory mammal, my attempts to produce a background starsphere image as good as the one you are using have come to naught. I'd be really keen to find out what software package you used to produce the image.

Thirdly, how about adding a lens flare? I've posted complete lens flare code which works well for a fully 3d game like a space sim. See: http://darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=22019&b=6 Be sure you use the code in my SECOND post because of the slight error in the code in my FIRST post. In other words, read the whole thread carefully otherwise you'll get the same error as BatVink.

Philip (brought to you today with one L and the number 71.4)

What do you mean, bears aren't supposed to wear hats and a tie? P1.3ghz / 384 megs / GeForce MX 5200 128meg / WinXP home
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Silent Phoenix
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Posted: 1st Mar 2004 16:13
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@Philip (with one el)
I disovered this morning, upon opening my fridge, that not only had my hamper been completely emptied, but an entire galon of juice had been consumed. Again my only conclusion was that my house, had once again, been invaded my Self Replicating Nandroids.... If only we could rid the universe of this menance once and for all. I also suspect they were responsible for one of my prized hats going missing last week.

On the background note. We used a piece of software called Universe (http://www.diardsoftware.com/) and good old fashioned Paint Shop Pro.

To avoid pinching of the texture at the poles, I created a modified Sphere object.



Basically I am cylindrically mapping the middle portion of the sphere and planar mapping the top and bottom. This avoids those nasty (the universe is ending) pinches at the top and bottom.

Cheers
Silent][Phoenix

PS : I have looked at your Lens Flare code, and will give it a go at some point.

– and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way
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Philip
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Posted: 2nd Mar 2004 07:40
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Wooo... that Universe image software looks great! I shall eagerly download it this evening. I have looked before on the internet for software that creates star scenes with no joy so I am much indebted to you for this tip, Silent.

I am wondering if it creates good textures for planets as well. I've looked on the internet for software which creates imaginary planetary textures but have not found anything suitable. At present I am, therefore, using freeware images from NASA's archives.

The cylinder and planar mapping idea is a stroke of genius. To date I've just slapped a texture over a boring old spherical object created from DBPro's make object sphere command. The texture was basically a bunch of white pixels representing stars created via point rnd(256), rnd(256) wrapped around a for/next loop which iterates 300 times. So, in comparison to that, any kind of image from the universe programme will look infinitely better.

So, much appreciation to you for directing me towards Diard software.

Out of interest what scale are you running to? How big are your planets' diameters in units? Mine are 2000 for non-gas giants and 5000 for gas giants. The sun is presently at 15,000 ish.

Philip

What do you mean, bears aren't supposed to wear hats and a tie? P1.3ghz / 384 megs / GeForce MX 5200 128meg / WinXP home
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Silent Phoenix
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Posted: 2nd Mar 2004 11:06
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@ Philip,
Currently my main planet is HUGE, I think it's around 1,000,000 units away (Can't remember it's size but at that distance it's has much Hugeness ascosiated with it ).

This is a temporary fudge. When I started writing the software I just kept moving the planet further and further away, to see when DBPro's Z-Buffer handling fell over. I will modify this soon.

I'ts a shame DBPro doesn't allow you to set the rendering order for objects, so you could render 'pretend' planets first, then the local stuff. Would avoid all the worry of the Z-Buffer and objects disappearing inside planets. That's the one thing I noticed with the excellent Star Wraith games, the planets were tiny (looked about 15km across).

Also, I don't tend to like the default texturing UV map for the native DBPro spheres. They tend to stick the middle 30% of the texture over 70% of the model. Leads my planet textures to look bloated in the middle.

If you wanted the sky sphere model, I could send it too you.
I'm going to start work on planetary textures soon, so if there is something in particular you would like, just ask.

Cheers
Silent][Phoenix

– and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way
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Arkheii
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Posted: 2nd Mar 2004 11:19
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1,000,000 units away... kinda like a Far Cry level. You using fog there? I wouldn't wanna fly towards Jupiter only to find out that half of it seems cut off. Oh, and z-fighting in space, lol.

BTW it's looking good. Gonna be the next Star Wraith?

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M00NSHiNE
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Posted: 2nd Mar 2004 11:42
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It would be great if you could see an infinite distance, then your planets could be really far away, yet still be visible like they are really. That would be cool, but scale woulds have to be set perfectly, and DB cant see that far.

Currently thinking of a new company name
Sticking to a project idea for once
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Silent Phoenix
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Posted: 2nd Mar 2004 12:46
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We would love to write something as good as star wraith but at the moment we have still got our feet firmly on the ground.

We are trying to write a semi-realistic space combat simulator that uses a Newtonian flight model (lots of sliding about).

We are trying to produce reasonably realistic weapons as well. For instance we will not be using lasers for the following reasons. Lasers are inherintley greedy systems (you don't get much punch for your buck). In a culture advanced enough to have space craft fighters, they would have to have fusion type technology, the power of this would be better appied to plasma accerlator and particle beam type weapons. As these have mass, as well as energy, they would cause much more damage than just light. Other weapons will include larger magneto-coil rail guns and larger bore gaus-cannons.

Sorry to bore everyone
Silent][Phoenix

– and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way
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Philip
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Posted: 3rd Mar 2004 07:22 Edited at: 3rd Mar 2004 07:26
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@Silent

Thanks for the offer mate. I'd be really interested to see your modified sphere object. I don't suppose you could email it to me at philipyoung@netvigator.com?

Anyway, your comment about the distance and size of your planet leads onto a topic that has been bugging me. If the planet is 1000000 units away then, as you say, it must be huge. So you must also have a very long camera range to see it and the starsphere must also be even larger (because otherwise the starsphere may "cut through" the planet).

I'd always understood that one can't let the distances and sizes of objects get too big otherwise one needs a 64 bit computer as opposed to a 32 bit computer. Hence that is the reason why I am not letting my camera range and starsphere get larger than 12m and 24m respectively. This obviously has a limiting effect on the size of all my objects (hence the dimensions for my planets which I gave in my post above) and it does tend to mean, as you say, that my planets look a bit small. My "work around" is story based rather than technical. I'm going to say in the manual that ships can't get too close to planets otherwise the gravitational field causes their engines to explode due to some fictional physics effect which plagues engines in gravitational fields.

What are your views on this topic? Any ideas about how to circumvent this problem and have more realistic distances and sizes of planets?

There must be some kind of solution because David Braben's Frontier games had realistic sized planets in them - I imagine theres some kind of clever mathematical fudge that can be done if only one knows how.

Philip

PS: Is your quote from Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos?

What do you mean, bears aren't supposed to wear hats and a tie? P1.3ghz / 384 megs / GeForce MX 5200 128meg / WinXP home
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Silent Phoenix
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Posted: 3rd Mar 2004 11:20
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@Philip,

I think the problem with draw distance is all to do with the precision of the Z-Buffer. I beleive the Z-Buffer was devised a long while ago for CAD Applications where only objects close to the camera were rendered. The Z-Buffer is ordered strangely, with most of it's precision being used very close to the camera.

Frotier got away with it because it was written in software and could render what the hell it liked to the screen in what order it wanted.
I suppose one way to get round it would be to render the planets first then paste the other stuff over the top. I don't think this can be done in DBPro. We had something running like this in C# / DX9 but i'm not going back to those days . I'm sure I-war 2 did this double render for it's planets and then local stuff.

We are not allowing ships to close to planets either, because to render the planet detail as well would quadruple the game programming. We are saying it's a limitation of the hyperspace drive system, getting too close to a gravity well causes a singularity in the drive (your ship becomes a trail of elementary particles stretching half way across the sysem. Ouch )

Wouldn't worry too much because planets are big and space is BIGGER, from the distance we get to the planet, you would have to travelling very very very fast to see a change in the planets size. People will try and get bored very quickly.

I'll send you the files tonight. I'm at work at the moment.

PS : Yes the quote is from HPL's The Whisperer in Darkness.

Cheers
Silent][Phoenix

– and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way
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Silent Phoenix
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Posted: 3rd Mar 2004 11:28
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PS PS I don't know how DBPro handles the Z-Buffer but it's a lot better than other engines we have tried where artefacting took place much closer to the camera.

S][P

– and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way
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Philip
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Posted: 3rd Mar 2004 15:02
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Yeah that all makes sense. Anyway, I must not hijack this post. It is an opportunity for you to show off your progress to date and not an opportunity for me to blather on about Space sim game based issues. Sometimes I need to remind myself to curb my enthusiasm!

Philip

What do you mean, bears aren't supposed to wear hats and a tie? P1.3ghz / 384 megs / GeForce MX 5200 128meg / WinXP home
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Silent Phoenix
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Posted: 4th Mar 2004 11:29
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@philip
Hope you got my email.

Cheers
S][P

– and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way
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Philip
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Posted: 9th Mar 2004 17:36
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I did indeed. Sorry about the delay in responding Silent. I'm a pretty hopeless correspondent. Mostly I tend to post on here rather than answer email.

Philip

What do you mean, bears aren't supposed to wear hats and a tie? P1.3ghz / 384 megs / GeForce MX 5200 128meg / WinXP home
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