Author Topic: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)  (Read 5184 times)

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Offline Aardwolf

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An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
I have been working on a new project recently. It is set in the FreeSpace universe, and does not (necessarily) introduce any elements that are not Canon. The plan: 2D FreeSpace 2. Sounds good? Great. Sounds bad? Well, maybe. I haven't had a chance to work on it for a week, but I will be able to get back to work on it tomorrow.

It is written in Java.

Plans and Goals:
  • Moddability - it should be very easy to mod.
  • Canonical-ness - no elements not present in the original FreeSpace campaign, FreeSpace: Silent Threat, or FreeSpace 2 will be included in the main (unmodded) version.
  • Animation - all effects and models, because they are two-dimensional, can be animated

I have other ideas, but I haven't made up my mind on many of these issues. I do, however, know that I will need a little help: with FRED2_Open, I have lost the red color of Shivan textures, and the Yellow of the Hatshepsut, and I need screenshots of FRED2 showing various ships from top view, facing right. Background should be disabled, along with grid. For each I will need two images: one showing the texture (show model) and one showing a black silhouette on a white background (MSPaint applied to a screenshot with wireframe). The first should be a .jpg file, and the second should be a .gif file. Try to fill as much of the screen with the ship as possible. Use the same camera angle and ship position for both.

Here is a list of the ships with animated textures that I will need (still) screenshots for:
  • Hatshepsut
  • Dragon
  • Mara
  • Rakshasa
  • Ravana
  • Cain/Lilith
  • Nahema
« Last Edit: August 05, 2006, 10:02:31 pm by Aardwolf »

 
Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
maybe you should team up with this guy instead of us having 2 separate projects going for the same thing.
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=41382.0

  

Offline Aardwolf

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
I have now looked at the screenshots of this game, and from what I have gathered (I am not able to download it yet) it is a shoot-em-up. My game is different: it is basically FreeSpace from a top view, with an external camera, and less data on the screen. Also, it will have more action going on and less plot, I suspect, but this can be changed in user-mods, if I get around to making it moddable (I plan to, I just don't know how easy it will be).

The ship is in the bottom center of the screen in my game. So far, I have gotten the screen to rotate around the player, I have added a fireball that moves around a la "pong" to test animations, and there is a Sobek that you can shoot at. Explosions work when you hit it, and they are animated.

Right when I get back home (I am currently in a hotel, today is the last day of my vacation) I plan to replace the current explosion anim (from Soldat) with one from FreeSpace.

Our games seem to be too different, and since I don't know Flash, I can't really help on this project, but if the creator is interested in assisting me, or if anybody else is, please PM me. First, however, note that I almost always program alone, and have limited teamwork experience.

 

Offline Aardwolf

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Yay, screenshots of the preliminary work are now available! It's too bad photobucket shrinks large files. Alas, there is little I can do about this.




As you may or may not be able to tell, there is a decent fog effect, and you can zoom in and out. Also, you can move forward and backward, as well as shoot. Fog, however, does not work if you zoom all the way out, so for some of the shots it had to be disabled. Execution load time is approximately 40-ish seconds, because it must load a large number of images of varying sizes, and will eventually have to load even more. I also plan to increase the screen size from 640x480 to 800x600. Very soon. Like, as soon as I finish posting this, soon.

Comments?

Edit: that chain of explosions is a fireball (pong style) added to test animations.

Edit: I overestimated the load time. Severely. It's only fifteen seconds. Tops. But it feels longer than that.
« Last Edit: August 06, 2006, 11:36:44 pm by Aardwolf »

 

Offline BS403

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
sweet :yes:
http://woogleville.myminicity.com/

Homer: Aw, twenty dollars! I wanted a peanut!
Homer's Brain: Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts.
Homer: Explain how.
Homer's Brain: Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
Homer: Woo-hoo!

 

Offline Aardwolf

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Thanks. It's still in its very early stages, however. I won't be able to add tables and moddability for a while. In the meantime here's another screenshot showing the Herc about to take four hits from a Shivan Alouqua. Oddly enough, the cannons that launched these blasts were mounted on the Sobek (see above images).



Weapon-ship collisions are working properly, but a slow weapon can run into the front of your ship and explode on you (annoying) and there is no damage. Next task: convert Descent style physics to FreeSpace style physics, or something like them. If I feel like it and I don't find something more important/interesting.

Why does photobucket suck? Why did my 800x600 image get shrunken down more than my 640x480 images? I can live with being a pawn if the game makes sense!
« Last Edit: August 07, 2006, 05:08:06 am by Aardwolf »

 

Offline Backslash

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Why does photobucket suck? Why did my 800x600 image get shrunken down more than my 640x480 images? I can live with being a pawn if the game makes sense!
:lol:  That silly take made my day, thanks.  I can just totally hear Alpha 2 saying that.  "We're sticking our files out here!  We deserver a straight answer!"

First, why not imageshack?

Second, where'd you get that explosion animation?  Or is it just the one we're used to, but the perceived sharpness of it being at a low resolution combined with your blending methods that make them look a lot more awesome than usual?

Your FRED2_Open problem sounds like you don't have glowmaps on.  Try adding -glow to the shortcut target.

Looks like fun.  I say this as a coder as I see the potential.  Early stages, but fun to mess with.  How long have you been working on this?

Heh, this inspires me to play around with the VIEW_TOPDOWN control a bit...

 

Offline Aardwolf

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
The explosion animation is exp05.ani, from the sparky_fs2.vp file in the retail version. I added another small screenshot to my last post, and as you can see, there is a Mara in it now. I should however mention that none of the ships (other than the player's) move yet, and only turrets and the player's ship are capable of firing. It's also slowing down considerably once I have in the battlefield a Sobek, Orion, Hatshepsut, and two fighters (Mara and Herc); this may be due to the large size of the images after stretching, or the collision detection subroutines. There is a lot of optimization that I could probably do, but that's the sort of thing I'm not very good at. I can make games, and I can make them fun, but I don't have a very good idea of where it is the fun in the games gets replaced by lag.

Thanks, anyway. I stayed up all night, and well into the morning, but I got a lot done.

 

Offline Snail

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
What would make this FreeSpace minigame different from FreeSpace 2D and Desktop FreeSpace would be the ability to control capital ships.  ;7

 

Offline Aardwolf

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Desktop FreeSpace? Wazzat?

 

Offline Snail

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Some extremely old game you can find at game warden. It was extremely basic and had only Mara fighters for enemies. It sucked in many ways but it was still quite fun to play when my internet had died.

Oh, call Apogee say Aardwolf (Sorry I had to say that).

 

Offline Aardwolf

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Oh, something like this? (This is based on your description, not on the game, which I haven't seen yet.)

www.geocities.com/akenhbosch/playable/final/SO2.jar

I made this one. I said in another thread that I had "come across it," but I lied.

 

Offline Snail

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
no, something more like this http://www.game-warden.com/desktopfs/.

 

Offline Aardwolf

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Additional screenshots have become available, illustrating new, dazzling features! See for yourself:




The first shows a lot of bullets coming from the Sobek (even though it only has four turrets) and the second is a picture of the Sobek exploding. Explosions of large ships continue indefinitely, and player bullets cause lag, but other than that, it's really coming along.

Edit: Now available as well: a preliminary screen capture video. I hope I hadn't gotten your hopes up higher than they should have been. If you like it, though, that's great. I'm gonna keep working on it, either way, though. Video:

http://s93.photobucket.com/albums/l77/Aardwolf001/2D%20FreeSpace/?action=view&current=2DFS2.flv
« Last Edit: August 07, 2006, 02:26:56 pm by Aardwolf »

 

Offline Mars

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Could you post it in somthing other than flash please? I don't think Flash for Linux in Firefox works for this.

 

Offline Snail

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Great, but I don't get why the Sobek uses Shivan Alouqua cannons. :yes2: :) :yes:

 

Offline Aardwolf

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Sorry if you can't access the video. I don't know any other sites. I mean, I looked on ImageShack, and it has some good things, but for video, I didn't see any really good options. I know it's not perfect, either.

Why alouqua? Because I wanted something I could tell apart from my hand-drawn Prometheus. The stats, I realize, are way off. The continuously exploding Mara has been fixed so that it only shows one poof and then vanishes behind it, and I plan to make the capship explosions terminate with a big shockwave soon. Missiles are also going to be added soon. No new screenshots yet. I was out and haven't been working on it. I was getting a pizza. Well, actually three pizzas, but I only ate five slices. Yum, pizza!

Edit: Six slices.
« Last Edit: August 07, 2006, 05:29:18 pm by Aardwolf »

 

Offline Snail

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Debris would be uber cool  :nod:

 

Offline Aardwolf

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Now that I have implemented missiles, worked out a very simple AI which I can apply to missiles and ships, and have figured out an annoying bug, I can take a brief break to... ask for suggestions for what area to develop next.

Be specific, and if you know programming or can sort of understand how I did what I've done so far, tell me how you think it could be implemented.

As for debris, I like the idea, it would help with final explosions of ships, but I don't know exactly how I would do it. Does anybody here have any suggestions? I could model each piece as its own image (breaking the ships into chunks), but that would be slow and inefficient.

For those of you who know Java, I am using the java.awt.* libraries, as well as java.awt.image.* to create rotating images. Specifically, I use AffineTransforms to rotate the camera, and the ships. I am doing a LCS(Local Coordinate System) to WCS (World) to CCS (Camera) approach. It is working quite well at the moment, although it can get quite slow sometimes when there is a lot of action on the screen. I don't know if it could be improved by having a faster computer or whatnot, but I don't really have that as an available option.

The missile I'm using is from a screenshot in fred of interceptor.pof, which i replaced the fighter01.pof model of the ulysses temporarily with. It looks pretty good, IMHO. I will post screenshots soon, possibly after I add shockwaves. However, the shockwaves I use may need to be from the retail version (I can't seem to access the .eff and .dds files in the .vp's with anything I know of). Maybe I will use the FS1 shockwaves instead.

 

Offline Mars

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Re: An Ambitious Project (may need help eventually)
Sorry if you can't access the video. I don't know any other sites. I mean, I looked on ImageShack, and it has some good things, but for video, I didn't see any really good options. I know it's not perfect, either.

Meh, life goes on... looks good so far  :yes2::yes: