Alright the posts above really going to prove quite a nice point here..
I Said,
"I would just suggest some searching of the NVIDIA site, under GoForce."
This was interpreted to,
"Goforce based on nFinity? Oh please. I bet I'd give the nVidia staff a few good laughs if I mailed them the url of this thread. No obligation?"
I Said,
"Didn't feel like continuing work on this, I ended up interested in something else."
This was interpreted to,
"funny about you discontinuing Zelda: The Shadow Pyramid because I have an IRC log right here from #darkbasic where you swore it was released... just not on Apollo."
What exactly does this prove?
That people are seeing what they want in what is being said.
I did not say the GoForce was the nFinity, just to check the site.
I did not say that I did not release Zelda:LOTSP, just that I lost interest.
People said about the unofficial update 5.21 (note above I said 5.23), that all I did was edit String Tables.
Well feel free to call me a liar about it. Cause legally speaking, if i accept the allegation then while I discredit work i 'may' have done, this would also mean i've done something illegal.
But then on the other hand:
Quote: "There is a very good reason most of these functions aren't exposed yet, when people start trying to use this they'll soon find out why - just don't come to us asking why "feature X" doesn't work."
The functions in my DLL with the exception of Lightmapping, worked how they were ment to, without crashing. So that has to be one bloody good string table I added!
Quote: "angel of darkness was the 6th tomb raider game.. it sucks beyond belief, worst TR game ever.. Half-life zero is probably half-life condition zero which came out with one of the special editions of half life. just another series of levels and a few new weapons.. the M4 was awesome"
Tomb Raider : The Angel of Darkness. It was the best TR game in the series, but the engine was buggy as hell. Even worse than some engines around here.
It's a cool guess, but no. Not what my signature was (is) refering to. I choose not to answer questions about things now, saves me being mis-interpreted by those who dislike me again.
Half-Life Zero, again good guess with CSCZ. Not quite right. Half-Life Zero, started as a Modification for Half-Life.. in a similar strain to Resident Evil Zero (hense the title), that told the story of the day before Half-Life. It then evolved into a DBP Project, the idea was pretty cool and fun to work with; then came up the legalities question. So rather than being shut-down with it, decided to take it another route.. releasing a game that had the characters from Half-Life Zero, or one of them proving some background story for what was going on. Yet proving an entirely new story, something that while hinting towards what happened in HLZ, not specifically tieing it into the HL-Series.
As such Deliverance was created. Using the Resident Engine, named after Resident Evil as that is what gave me the idea in the first place.
Things have evolved and grown up, moving due to new ideas and new engine designed. I must've recoded the engine from scratch a dozen times in the last year; but it has been in development alot longer than just Late-April like alot of people would believe.
Deliverance still uses it, but a Visual C# w/DirectX9.0c version. A demo is still planned, but not for the DBP community as why would I release Deliverance into this community using another language?
This said, I still want to make the Resident Engine worthwhile in DBP. I've hit alot of snags and bumps along the development of it.. Each time I fixx one bug, or work around it. A new patch was released that would fixx something else but then make a new bug to work around. When dealing with a complete engine, that is thousands of lines of code through hundreds of included files.
This hits pretty hard, especially when you have a number of 3rd Party DLLs that also stop working the way they should as they also contain code from certain DBP parts that have been fixxed as it is easier to integrate certain features that way.
This past month I decided that Resident need something. Even if it is something very simplistic or such, just to prove to myself that this technology is viable. Not just for my system, but on a wider scale.
The problem with alot of engines, is the fact that everything has to work neatly. If one part is bugged and unchecked, this can compound without realising it. Particularly on an Engine of this scale.
The physics is integrated into the animation and materials, the materials are integrated into the shaders and textures. Every single aspect of the engine relies on another, in order to bring out a far greater potencial.
Worlds are not simply loaded and forgotten about; the mesh are loaded into the level, then each section is loaded as needed. The smaller sections allow better culling then materialing happens in order to cut down the shader demand.
The goal from day one has been to have something that looked, like it could stand toe-to-toe with Half-Life 2 or Doom 3. Not just in graphics, but dynamics and size. A project that could show that if you wanted to create a truely professional looking game, you can!
A big part of this isn't just making the engine, but creating the artwork to back it up.
You can't take the characters, worlds and textures from Tomb Raider 1, throw them in a new engine and immediately get stunning results.
Adversely is that DarkBASIC Professionl while it does alot, doesn't do everything in terms of rendering, timing, etc..
While over E3, the Engine was being rapidly developed *specifically* to do a single job; i found each thing i added and worked on would cause a new set of problems if i began to make the engine too specific. There was atleast 4-5x more work in making it for a specific task than generalising. I went through 84 builds in one weekend, just to try and come up with something that wasn't buggy. In the end I decided it was best not to release something, if it wasn't going to cooperate.
Game Saves were wrong, Tokamak when the game slugged would allow things that would normally collide to miss each other.. so you'd have a dog in the mid-jump through a door unkillable but still able to harm you. You has instances where shaders would cause DBP to run out of memory and everything would go white and slow to 2fps; without DSystemMem, it is a pain in the ass trying to figure out what you have left and without Flush Video Ram (which at the time I thought worked) there was no way to get rid of things quickly.
In my opinion, these are bugs would've given anyone who tried it a field day taking apart the engine.
I mean to people like, Mouse, Jimmy and Empty.. not to mention the RGT members who'd seemed to join in. The game would've been a minefield for them to say 'well this doesn't work' or 'this happen then'. The build-up of the engine was far too much for me to realse something that was literally a week-old beta of an engine that itself was still an alpha.
As far as I'm conserned TR:AOD is a perfect example. As this respresents what the Resident Engine is like, while sure it is playable to a point... It was untested on Radeon Hardware, and it has some random bugs that one time you'd run and everything would be fine, the next and everything screws up.
While from most peoples pov, having something is better than nothing; as far as I'm conserned this only applies in a life/death situation. If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing properly.
If something is ready to be demonstrated, it is because it is worth trying, not because it is better than nothing at all.
Unfortunately, I did stop working on the engine for a while; during the time that damn IDE was in development. Really wish I hadn't now, this said.. new things such as Walabers Netwon 1.3, have breathed new life into the engine.
I really do hope to be able to provide something with it.
Currently a complete re-write (Engine 14) is underway, now if I use it or another forum member does.. doesn't matter to me.
What does matter is that this does get used.
Actually a problem has come up that perhaps a few of the more, experienced members could help resolve.
I'm trying to think of a way for someone to compile 'additional' code. Basically so I can create an engine SDK that allows them to edit the engine and compile the results so that the engine can use them.
Much like Half-Life's Client.DLL, I have an idea of how to do it, by taking the 2 _virtual.dat and appending the code, as it would work like a 'missing peice' with all the data and such for that are. What if baffling me is how-to intercept the DBP start sequence so to append the data, and also where to append it.
I've not been able to successfully achieve this yet. I've had partial results though.
