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FPSC Classic Product Chat / My thoughts on FPSC

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PiratSS
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 05:34
Well the videos didn't impress me like everyone else. I actually realised that it's time to maky my own fpsc. From what I have seen so far, everything done there can be done on dbpro Level editor, AI editor, presets, .fx files! you name it, it can be done with dbpro. And what was that? That's right, one of the demos had the little dbpro icon on the exe

So after my ggrpg(erm ~3-5 years tops), I will go and develop my own fpsc
Rob K
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 05:37
What about lightmapping, CSG, octree system and the editor written in C++?


BlueGUI:Windows UI Plugin - All the power of the windows interface in your DBPro games.
PiratSS
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 05:56
all CAN be done on DBPro with the right plugins or just skill
Mussi
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 06:06 Edited at: 2nd Nov 2004 06:06
Why don't you go ahead and make us the new unreal 4 engine, as you think it only requires skills or resources



Specs: AMD Athlon 1800+, 256 DDRRam 266mhz, 80GB HD 7200rmp U133, Geforce4 Ti4400 128mb
Red Ocktober
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 06:09 Edited at: 2nd Nov 2004 06:21
ya see... anyone who comes up with a point of view that runs even just a lil contrary to the popular, fan boy mentality of the moment, has to put up with this sort of stoopidness...

and it is stooopidness... as if FPSC is in any way equivalent to the UnReal Engine...

one would think that Pirate is entitled to voice his own viewpoint, without having to be the target of these brain dead statements...

even though i don't entirely agree with the statements made by Pirate, i think has some valid points... and the crude and rude retort to him was uncalled for and unwarranted.


back on topic...

octree - use bsp
lightmapping - use cshop or giles
editors - there aint no 3rd party editors out there??!!


from what i see FPSC is targeted at a slightly different audience than DBPro... the DBPro developer will have no problem surpassing anything that FPSC can do... but the developer who doesn't have the skillset to realize his/her creation will be able to use FPSC to create their game... and maybe in time pick up enough to advance to more advanced FPSC development, or even DBPro.

i really don't see the DBPro developer being comfortable at all with FPSC... that is unless the product is really that open ended as far as scripting, adding content, and access external libs...

... and it gets some multiplayer.


--Mike
PiratSS
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 06:13 Edited at: 2nd Nov 2004 06:13
Please tell me what's good in Unreal 3 engine? The only thing I see that's really nice there are these features:

- Nothing

And please dont go telling people that they cant create Unreal 3 engine on dbpro, because they can.

Give me anything from Unreal 3 that you dont think can be made and I will tell you how it can
Red Ocktober
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 06:22
... then i'd suggest you download it, and use it.

you'll see P why it demands the big bucks... and it gets it.

--Mike
Mussi
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 06:24
Quote: "and it is stooopidness... as if FPSC is in any way equivalent to the UnReal Engine..."


Who said that? I was making a point about not everything is possible with resources and skills.

Quote: "Please tell me what's good in Unreal 3 engine?"


I said unreal 4 engine


Quote: "And please dont go telling people that they cant create Unreal 3 engine on dbpro, because they can. "


No they can not.

Quote: "Give me anything from Unreal 3 that you dont think can be made and I will tell you how it can"


I wansn't making any comparison, but since you ask for it.

Quote: "Visual Features

64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post processing effects such as light blooms, lenticular halos, and depth-of-field.
Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions; pre-computed shadow masks; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps.
Advanced Dynamic Shadowing. Unreal Engine 3 provides full support for three shadow techniques:
Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.
Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft, fuzzy shadows on the scene using 16X-oversampled shadow buffers.
Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.
All of the supported shadow techniques are visually compatible and may be mixed freely at the artist's discretion, and may be combined with colored attenuation functions enabling properly shadowed directional, spotlight, and projector lighting effects.
Powerful material system, enabling artists to create arbitrarily complex realtime shaders on-the-fly in a visual interface that is comparable in power to the non-realtime functionality provided by Maya.
The material framework is modular, so programmers can add not just new shader programs, but shader components which artists can connect with other components on-the-fly, resulting in dynamic composition and compilation of shader code.
Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere.
Artists can build terrain using a dynamically-deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly-blended materials including displacement maps, normal maps and arbitrarily complex materials, dynamic LOD-based tessellation, and vegetation layers with procedurally-placed meshes. Further, the terrain system supports artist-controlled layers of procedural weathering, for example, grass and vegetation on the flat areas of terrain, rock on high slopes, and snow at the peaks.
Volumetric environmental effects including height fog and physically accurate distance fog.
Extensible particle system with visual editor, supporting particle physics and environmental effects."


Quote: "Animation

Skeletal animation system supporting up to 4 bone influences per vertex and very complex skeletons.
Animation is driven by a tree of animation objects including:
Blend controllers, performing an n-way blend between nested animation objects.
Data-driven controllers, encapsulating motion capture or hand animation data.
Physics controllers, tying into the rigid body dynamics engine for ragdoll player and NPC animation and physical response to impulses.
Procedural animation controllers, implemented in C++ or UnrealScript, for game features such as having an NPC's head and eyes track a player walking through the level, or having a character animate differently based on health level and fatigue.
Export tools for 3D Studio Max, Maya for bringing weighted meshes, skeletons, and animation sequences into the engine."


Quote: "Programming Features

Unreal Engine 3 includes example content and 100% of the source code for the engine, editor, Max/Maya exporters, and the game-specific code for our internally-developed games.
Extensible, object-oriented C++ engine with software framework for persistence, dynamic loading of code and content, portability, debugging.
UnrealScript gameplay scripting language provides automatic support for metadata; persistence with very flexible file format backwards-compatibility; support for exposing script properties to level designers in UnrealEd; a GUI-based script debugger; and native language support for many concepts important in gameplay programming, such as dynamically scoped state machines and time-based (latent) execution of code.
Modular material component interface for extending visual tool and adding new shader components usable by artists in the visual shader GUI.
Source control friendly software architecture, scalable to large teams and multi-platform projects.
Unreal Engine 3 is provided as one unified codebase that compiles on PC and all supported next-generation console platforms. All game content and data files are compatible across all supported platforms, for fast turnaround time between code and content development on PC, and playtesting on console or PC.
Seek-free DVD loading optimization pass for consoles, able to load levels at >80% of DVD's physical transfer rate.
Extensible content-streaming framework suitable for multithreaded background DVD streaming of resources and predefined groups of resources based on LOD or programmatic control.
Unreal Engine 3 content and code are localization-aware, with a simple framework for externalizing all game text, sounds, images, and videos. Unreal Engine 3 is based on the Unicode character set, and has full support for 16-bit Unicode fonts and text input, including importing TrueType fonts into renderable bitmap fonts. Our games have shipped in 9 languages including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean."


Quote: "Typical Content Specifications

Here are the guidelines we're using in building content for our next Unreal Engine 3 based game. Different genres of games will have widely varying expectations of player counts, scene size, and performance, so these specifications should be regarded as one data point for one project rather than hard requirements for all.
Characters

For every major character and static mesh asset, we build two versions of the geometry: a renderable mesh with unique UV coordinates, and a detail mesh containing only geometry. We run the two meshes through the Unreal Engine 3 preprocessing tool and generate a high-res normal map for the renderable mesh, based on analyzing all of the geometry in the detail mesh.

Renderable Mesh: We build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on the expectation of 5-20 visible characters in a game scene.
Detail Mesh: We build 1-8 million triangle detail meshes for typical characters. This is quite sufficient for generating 1-2 normal maps of resolution 2048x2048 per character.
Bones: Our characters typically have 100-200 bones, and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.
Normal Maps & Texture maps

We are authoring most character and world normal maps and texture maps at 2048x2048 resolution. We feel this is a good target for games running on mid-range PC's in the 2006 timeframe. Next-generation consoles may require reducing texture resolution by 2X, and low-end PC's up to 4X, depending on texture count and scene complexity.
Environments

Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 200,000 to 1,200,000 visible triangles.
Lights

There are no hardcoded limits on light counts, but for performance we try to limit the number of large-radius lights affecting large scenes to 2-5, as each light/object interaction pair is costly due to the engine's high-precision per-pixel lighting and shadowing pipeline. Low-radius lights used for highlights and detail lighting on specific objects are significantly less costly than lights affecting the full scene."


you go ahead and start writing now .



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PiratSS
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 06:28
Nothing in that list is hard. Just get a DX coder and he can write a nice little plugin for u
Mussi
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 06:39
Quote: "Give me anything from Unreal 3 that you dont think can be made and I will tell you how it can"


Still waiting .

Quote: "Nothing in that list is hard. Just get a DX coder and he can write a nice little plugin for u"


You think they have a team of 100+ people doing nothing all day?



Specs: AMD Athlon 1800+, 256 DDRRam 266mhz, 80GB HD 7200rmp U133, Geforce4 Ti4400 128mb
Red Ocktober
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 06:44 Edited at: 2nd Nov 2004 06:48
Quote: "Who said that? I was making a point about not everything is possible with resources and skills.
"

no you weren't... you were just makin a crude and ignorant retort to someone who dared cast what you saw as a dispersion on what you see as your new found savior...

Quote: "Why don't you go ahead and make us the new unreal 4 engine"


... you don't know enough about the UnReal 4 Engine for you to say what is or isn't possible to do with it... how it's done, or how it was done...

... so you couldn't have been making a qualified response at all.

you were just trying to be a smart a###, but you wound up looking a lot less smart, and a lot more rude and crude...

--Mike
Mussi
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 06:52 Edited at: 2nd Nov 2004 06:53
Quote: "on what you see as your new found savior..."


I never said that, and I never tought that.

Quote: "... you don't know enough about the UnReal 4 Engine for you to say what is or isn't possible to do with it...

... so you couldn't have been making a qualified response at all."


Well yeah, but there is one thing you do know, it should be better than the unreal 3 engine, was just making a point.

Quote: "you were just trying to be a smart a###, but you wound up looking a lot less smart"


I was not, just trying to make him see the problems himself.


If you want to go into further discussion please mail me



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Red Ocktober
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 07:03 Edited at: 2nd Nov 2004 07:03
... no further discussion required,
it's obvious that you already see the error of your ways...

time to get back on topic...

--Mike
Rob K
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 07:16
Quote: " Nothing in that list is hard. Just get a DX coder and he can write a nice little plugin for u"


LOL


BlueGUI:Windows UI Plugin - All the power of the windows interface in your DBPro games.
Richard Davey
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 07:52
Quote: "I actually realised that it's time to maky my own fpsc. From what I have seen so far, everything done there can be done on dbpro (snip) And what was that? That's right, one of the demos had the little dbpro icon on the exe"


Considering it is using the same underlying base technology, why does this surprise people so much?

You could not make FPSC in DBPro as it stands today, not without creating your own DLLs to handle the vast amount of extra functions, but you could come quite close, certainly.

But then FPSC isn't really aimed at DBPro developers anyway.

There are quite a lot who will find it useful for quick level creation (because no other mapping tool works like it), but if you're already happy with your giles, NG, EZRotate, etc set-up then there is no reason to move away from it.

If you want to make your own FPSC style tool then all the best, you've lots of new things to learn about, but none of them are impossible.

Cheers,

Rich

"I am not young enough to know everything."
- Oscar Wilde
Red Ocktober
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 08:31
Quote: "There are quite a lot who will find it useful for quick level creation (because no other mapping tool works like it), "


... yes, this looks like one of it's most appealing, and usefull aspects.

--Mike
Richard Davey
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 09:13
Quote: "yes, this looks like one of it's most appealing, and usefull aspects."


I know that, for me personally, it's the biggest draw of it. I'm pretty terrible at 3D modelling so map editors that work on a poly level, where you have to hollow out cubes just to make rooms etc, really bore me to tears and treat me like a CAD package more than a game making tool. But to drag out walls, slap in corridors, import my objects, add lights, doors, etc and then light map it all and export the level. Ahh.. bliss, I can actually get on with doing some coding for a change.

Cheers,

Rich

"I am not young enough to know everything."
- Oscar Wilde
DMXtra
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2004 18:24
Since FPSC is writen in DBPro. I am sure as DBPro technology expands so shall the FPSC technology and since it uses Directx 9.0c and can use shaders I am sure more interesting things will be worked on and added in over time.

Honestly for something that you can load models in, use CSG with the models or prefabs to build your own levels and then use lightmapping with full on octree system with built in collisions and portals and then the ablity to paint textures, apply .fx files or bumpmaps and then load into DBPro isn't bad at all.

Paying only $49.95 us dollars for is a steal in my opinion.

I like the fact that I can build my own games with this or load it directly into DBPro if I need more control or do third person games.

I think you will see a lot more creativity in the community and then there is DarkSDK. (C++ SDK using the DBPro engine), wow!

Dark Basic Pro - The Bedroom Coder's Language of choice for the 21st Century.
Jiffy
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Posted: 4th Nov 2004 15:32
I know this is going back a while but I just wanted to add my opinion.

PirateSS - Sure, ok, you can say that all of that stuff can be done in DBPro, and sure enough, most of it can. But it would take a heck of a lot longer to make, and it darn right wouldn't be as understandable. FPSC is made with people who aren't great coders in mind - and still have a range of scriptible aspects. The point is - would you rather:

A - Make a good 8 level FPS in a week or two or

B - Make a good 8 level FPS in 2 to 3 months.

Once again it seems off topic now, but I only decided to post now.


--James

Last night I was looking up at the stars and said "Where the hell is my roof?!"
Chris K
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Posted: 5th Nov 2004 02:48
Don't forget that FPSC is cheaper than DBPro as well.

So it's -

- Make a good 8 level FPS in 2 to 3 months.

OR

- Make a good 8 level FPS in a week or two and buy 2000 penny sweets

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