Wanton Hubris

I was hammering on the last arena this week and I was trying to come up with a decent medieval theme. It just wouldn’t click! I rebuilt the damned thing twice and it always looked shoddy to me. So I switched it out for a copper theme and it’s going much better.

The thing is, I’m doing this final arena as a floating level. This is causing my VIS times to get a little ugly but still manageable with careful brush work. Again, it’s a good challenge. How to keep VIS reasonable when the level doesn’t have any good walls or dog legs in it? I guess we’ll find out.

As I build the arenas for Qonquer, I find that I’m really enjoying the challenges of level design at this level again. I use Quake in it’s pure software form in the engine that id shipped. This means I have to worry about r_speeds and all of the fun that comes with that.

Quake can only do about 800 polygons before it starts dropping polys and you see entities flickering. It’s been a great challenge for me to design within this constraint again. I shell out an area with basic shapes and then start adding detail until the r_speeds monster slaps me on the wrist and says “enough!”. There’s a great feeling of satisfaction once you’re done tearing up an area and redesigning it so that it runs better and then that moment comes when you’re hovering at about 780 and you decide, “OK, that’s enough”. And you’re done.

I love it. Modern engines don’t care much about polygons anymore and throw 5,000+ triangle meshes around like they were nothing. It’s nice to get back to my roots. It’s fun and it keeps the mental wheels greased.

Programming is funny sometimes. Qonquer spawns minions that will fight for you as the game progresses. They target other monsters and wage war on your behalf. However, they don’t really have the ability to handle zombies which have to be gibbed. Easy enough, I thought, I’ll just make them ignore anything with classname == “monster_zombie”. Well, that would have been simple except for the 1/2 hour debugging session where I finally figured out that I’m dynamically spawning monsters into the arena but not setting their classnames correctly. Once I fixed that, my code for ignoring zombies magically started working. Woot!

My latest project is called “Qonquer”. Basically, it tests how long you can hold out against ever increasing waves of enemies. There are many details to explain and lots of work left to be done but I figured a status update was in order. Below are some shots of the initial combat arenas I’ve been building.

I’m hoping to be done in the near future!

Sorry for the quiet lately, but I’ve been working on something in QuakeC! It seems cool so far but I’m not going to talk about until it’s done and ready. It’ll be probably another week of work as I need to get some maps together before I can release. The code also needs a little more massaging before it’ll be ready.

So that’s where I’m at!

Very cool portal engine someone is doing using Ogre3D as a base. The videos are killer!

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2008/02/stop-press-portalized-open-source.html

So many possibilities!

I’m churning away on the guts of ToeTag as I want to have a full WAD editing system in place before the 1.0 release. It’s going to allow you to open and edit WADs with the same freedom you can open and edit MAPs with. It’ll look like a giant texture browser but give you all the power you need to import new textures, export existing ones, etc. It’ll be great!

I need to refactor a bunch of stuff first though and although my code structure is helping me out in many ways, I didn’t account for absolutely everything the first time through so there’s a little pain. Not a ton, but enough that it’s taking more time than I want it to. Oh well!

At any rate, screen shots will be posted once I have something working.

I definitely want to extend this as well to include PAK file editing. Shouldn’t be too hard once the WAD editing is in.

And ToeTag marches forward. Version 0.9 is out!

ToeTag

One of the new features is the ability to set the rotation pivot anywhere in the world. Check it out!

The “Merge” option on the CSG menu was using a lame routine that didn’t work fully and screwed up quite a bit. So I sat down and tried to come up with a new one. What I’m doing now is:

1. Generate a list of unique vertices in the selected brushes (creating a vertex cloud).
2. Loop through all of those vertices and generate a plane for every possible combination of 3 vertices.
3. Check each plane and if (a) the normal is unique among the planes we’ve saved so far and (b) none of the vertices in the cloud lies in front of that plane, the plane is kept.
4. Use the resulting set of planes to create a new brush.

And nobody is more surprised than myself to find that it works! Here’s a movie of it in action. Just think of the optimizations you could do to your levels with a tool like this:

::Click to Watch::

This version will ship sometime over the weekend!

The new version of ToeTag plods fowards steadily. I’ve added a bunch of stuff to this one, not the least of which is some pretty cool filtering. Filtering means that you have a new control on the toolbar that will allow you to filter out of the view any entities which are editor specific (lights, triggers, etc) as well as filter out based on skill level. So using this you could take a look at your level, as the player would see it, on Hard/Nightmare skill. This lets you verify that you’ve set your skill flags correctly without having to play the game over and over or meticulously go over your entities and checking their spawn flags. Here’s a movie of it in action:

:: Click to Watch ::

In the movie, you’ll be looking down at the final room of E1M2 in the 2D viewport. I first turn off editor only entities and then step through the various skill level filters so you can see which monsters and such appear on each skill level.

Should be useful!