Neb on 19/2/2011 at 09:59
Besides legalities, the first person who can get a Dromed window running maximised deserves cake. Lots of cake.
I'm putting out a cake bounty.
wonderfield on 19/2/2011 at 21:15
Quote Posted by Somnus
Or we could just update the graphics/textures. OTOH, I always thought there was a certain, creepy charm in the Dark Engine renderer that was absent from other games. I've never been able to put my finger on it, but it's there.
When you look at the Dark Engine from a bird's eye sort of view, it actually really isn't too shabby in the rendering department, and I think a cautious approach to adding features to the renderer (after completely rewriting it, of course) is probably the right approach. Given the opportunity, there are actually
very few features I'd add — maybe HDR with dynamic tone mapping, maybe per-pixel model shading as opposed to Gouraud shading (or maybe just approximated Gouraud shading via a pixel shader), but not much else I'd really be interesting in implementing. The games themselves really don't look too bad. They're just slow and ornery :)
New Horizon on 19/2/2011 at 23:07
Quote Posted by wonderfield
When you look at the Dark Engine from a bird's eye sort of view, it actually really isn't too shabby in the rendering department, and I think a cautious approach to adding features to the renderer (after completely rewriting it, of course) is probably the right approach. Given the opportunity, there are actually
very few features I'd add — maybe HDR with dynamic tone mapping, maybe per-pixel model shading as opposed to Gouraud shading (or maybe just approximated Gouraud shading via a pixel shader), but not much else I'd really be interesting in implementing. The games themselves really don't look too bad. They're just slow and ornery :)
Hypothetically speaking, the primary goal would be to get the source code to compile, fix some bugs, and get it to work with modern hardware. Updating it wouldn't even a glimmer on the horizon. Even if it was, you couldn't use the original art assets, they would all have to be recreated to work with all this modern eye candy. New textures + bump maps + specular, high poly models, real time shadows...and throwing those in would completely change the original gameplay, if the original maps would even work with all this new stuff...they were designed with static shadows in mind.
Updating an engine and expecting to plug the original maps in isn't as easy as it seems.
If indeed the engine were to get an overhaul, it would have to be a completely separate code branch and all new art / assets would have to be created. You would be looking at years of work.
wonderfield on 20/2/2011 at 01:30
Quote Posted by New Horizon
New textures + bump maps + specular, high poly models, real time shadows...and throwing those in would completely change the original gameplay
That's precisely why I wouldn't bother.
lost_soul on 20/2/2011 at 20:58
Some fresh guard models for T1 would be a good idea. The wall textures really don't look that bad when you're using 32-bit, but I personally would prefer to be attacked by AIs that are more than 100 triangles. :) The character animations still look great though, even today: very lifelike animation
Nameless Voice on 20/2/2011 at 21:13
That doesn't have anything even remotely to do with the source code?
Plus it's already been done - look for Daemonite's model pack.
AVATAR on 21/2/2011 at 01:03
What in the hell?
Now this is some seriously insane news to hear. I only started searching for this because me and a friend were having a discussion the other day about how SS2's multiplayer is complete shit and if only we had the source code, blah blah blah. Of course, I am no master coder and I'd never be able to fix up multiplayer, but being able to learn is the primary goal here. I've already grabbed what I could before links disappeared and have looked into things a little bit. Is there somewhere this is all being discussed outside of the forums? Such as IRC or some such? I imagine the situation is a little tense considering the legal issues involved, but I'm curious to see what the plans are and if there's any way I could help with my meager coding skills :P
Albert on 23/2/2011 at 21:25
Quote Posted by lost_soul
The character animations still look great though, even today: very lifelike animation
This is exactly what I was thinking: Why don't we make a sort of cheap mocap system to create some additional animation to flesh it out, and complement the original games? Sure, the whole mocap thing is really up in the air right now, when it comes to DIY, but alot of companies were able to pull it off with string budgets in the 90's, why can't a few devoted fans do it too? (Assuming it's even feasible to do so) :confused:
Serpentine on 24/2/2011 at 00:12
Quote Posted by Albert
why can't a few devoted fans do it too? (Assuming it's even feasible to do so) :confused:
There are a couple of pretty big repositories of mo-cap movements and such lying around the net, eg:
(
http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/)
The files are available in BVH etc, BVH is quite well supported by blender as well as Assimp which is extremely handy for writing batch conversion tools and such. It's also pretty common for what you're suggesting doing on the cheap(might want to check hackaday). If you were going to start somewhere, it'd be taking a couple of nice samples from there and seeing if/how/etc you can get them into the correct format. Blending animation and such is a bit more tricky, but some of the archives offer more detailed identification of easily blendable sets iirc.
I have some basic model/animation conversion stuff set up for TDM, but I guess it could be quite easily converted to deal with whatever format's needed here (got docs?)
jaxa on 24/2/2011 at 07:43
Motion capture = Kinect
