For about...oh say, a few months on and off, I've been working on a first person shooter engine in DBP with Newton. I've played a lot of so called "first person shooter" games on these forums and to be honest, I've been sick of the quality, ESPECIALLY the controls compared to industry FPSes. Things like crouching, going prone, jumping, swim physics, grenades, recoil, none of these things work smoothly, or exist at all, in DBP games. It's these simple things that I feel are the core of engines. Smooth controls, good reactions, etc.
So I decided to make my own.
The Ray Engine: The Super Mario 64 First Person Shooter
I decided on using a Mario 64 level because well...I had it. A friend of mine figured out how to dump raw level data out of an emulator, and I spent a LONG time cleaning it up in 3ds max to get into DBP.
NOTE: This game is lacking something very important, a focus. It's only Mario themed right now because that's the only idea I have, I don't entirely plan to develop it into a full game. I'm just "working" on getting the engine done right now. I haven't touched the code in about two months now.
Showing Newton water physics with boxes in a Mario 64 level.
Showing the gun firing, a slightly prettier shot than above.
It was a wonderful day when I got the sky and water shader to work together peacefully in my engine. (You should see the clouds, it's like looking into the face of GOD)
A screenshot demonstrating my VERY unique grenade throwing system. This is an unique system to any game I have encountered, as it allows you to throw a DUD grenade. Holding down the LEFT mouse button increases the power of the throw of the grenade, and holding down the RIGHT mouse button pulls down the pin. It offers a unique combination of the ability to prime your grenade as well as throw it to whatever location you wish at the same time. You'll notice that in the picture one grenade has a pin and the other does not. The grenade without the pin will explode, the other will not.
A simple, prettier overview of the world.
An explosion showing the force of the grenades. There's a very cool system where if one grenade gets caught in another grenade's blast, it creates a millisecond delayed chain reaction. You can also SHOOT grenades on the ground and they'll blow up. Boxes react accordingly as well with distance and mass.
Currently the game runs at 60 FPS (capped at 60 FPS) at 1280 x 960 x 32 on my system. The FPS dips down to like 45 if there's more than 30 grenades on screen at once.
This engine has, among quite a many other things:
SMOOTH crouch, prone, and standing switches
SMOOTH (not jerky) gun recoil
Complete swim physics
Fully functional grenade / shooting physics
Normal running / jumping etc
Recoil based on stance
Implementation of shaders (water, dynamic clouds, etc)
Working lens flares (see the middle of the above overview picture)
There are still some bugs in the engine, and some that I don't think are fixable (problems with Newton) that constantly slow down my progress. If you've ever made an FPS in Newton then you know how hard it is to get slopes and stairs to work right. The only way to be able to climb stairs in Newton is to remove all friction between the player and the world, which means that if you're standing on even the smallest of slopes you'll slide down it.
Also, until Newton is updated, I'm stuck with the problem that a lot of grenades go through walls because they're so small. Three's no real easy fix to this.
Short of mass begging, don't expect a demo any time soon. There's still a great deal of things this engine is missing, such as the ability to lightmap levels (3dWS has gotten so gosh darned
expensive and Gile[s] has yet to actually work right for me with rendering and importing), there's only one weapon type (semi-auto pistol, I want to add things like projectile based weapons, automatic weapons, and sniper rifles), there's no enemy system whatsoever, and I really want to think up a way to implement a hotspot system. Plus the Blackout FPS seems to be overshadowing me, which is always discouraging, lol
I made this post because I have time to kill between classes at college right now. I'd be interested to hear people's feedback, critiques, etc. And just to spark some general interest, when this engine is released in oh say...10 years.
You can view the full progress of the Ray Engine at my forum:
http://www.delvarworld.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32 (man how hard is it to add some PHP to parse links around here...sheesh)
So...yeah!
