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BadMrBox
Bringer of Apocalypse
Joined: 26 Jun 2002
Posts: 1022
Location: Dark Forest's of Sweden
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 Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2006 2:50 pm Post subject: |
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I'm sitting at the public library and here I could get the demo to run. To bad the cpu is so shitty though.
WASD is so much better than IJKL, im glad you changed that.
I cant comment on much other as I said, this computer sucketi suck big times. It goes slooow.
But some polys are broken, in other words, the are half way into the buildnings, doors, windows. That might be something about this cpu yet again as I never experience this problem at my own cpu.
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Nephilim
Mage
Joined: 20 Jun 2002
Posts: 414
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| Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2006 6:46 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, that computer doesn't meet the system requirements for Sacraments 3D. If you're seeing tearing polygons, that means Shockwave has bumped down into its software renderer, instead of using DirectX or OpenGL, because either there is no hardware 3D support available or because of some other issue (such as someone having set #software as the default renderer). That is also why it is running so slow - the CPU is taking on the rendering burden in addition to the game logic.
I don't intend to support computers that cannot use OpenGL or DirectX for 3D for this very reason - the game is beyond the capabilities of such computers.
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BadMrBox
Bringer of Apocalypse
Joined: 26 Jun 2002
Posts: 1022
Location: Dark Forest's of Sweden
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| Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2006 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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I downloaded the new player and tested the tech demo at home. It takes awhile to load O_o.
I like the improvements but I do hope there is going to be a torch or lamp for sale because I practically see nothing in the cave.
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BadMrBox
Bringer of Apocalypse
Joined: 26 Jun 2002
Posts: 1022
Location: Dark Forest's of Sweden
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| Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 2:20 pm Post subject: |
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Long time since we had some new info now. Has something been done with it?
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Nephilim
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Joined: 20 Jun 2002
Posts: 414
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| Posted: Sat May 06, 2006 6:02 am Post subject: |
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| BadMrBox wrote: | | Long time since we had some new info now. Has something been done with it? |
Well, as you probably saw over on the off topic board, I'm working on a different Shockwave3D game for my job right now. To avoid burnout, I'm not working much on the actual 3D aspects of my personal project at night.
Which isn't to say I'm not working on the game at all. Lately, I've been doing some scribbling trying to figure out what game mechanics I am going to go with. For instance, what are the character stats, and how do they affect gameplay? Stuff like that. I actually looked at the WotC OGL stuff with an eye towards using that, but I decided against it, so now I'm back trying to figure out a non-lame system.
One mechanic I considered for a long while, which wasn't really available in tabletop RPG's, was the idea of resolving contests using ratios. Suppose you have two people arm wrestling. The chance of person A winning is equal to A / (A+B), where A is person A's strength and B is person B's strength. Basically, you pit their combined strengths against each other as a probability ratio. Simple mechanic, really, but it was never really practical for tabletop play because it's difficult to implement with a set of polyhedral dice. Computers, of course, can handle it with ease.
I'm not sure I like it, though. The nice thing about it is that you always have a chance at success and at failure - nothing is automatic - and even moderate stats can ensure some success. But that's also the downfall, since a two-year-old with a strength of 2 should probably not be able to beat Conan with his strength of 18 at arm-wrestling 10% of the time. Clearly, there would need to be some other rules laid over the top of that to make it work, and I'm just not seeing a nice, clean, elegant solution to it.
So then I started leaning towards a more additive approach, like having a contest be computed as 50 + (A-B) * 5, so that equal matches have a 50%-50% chance to go either way, and each point of difference between the contestents adds a 5% chance of victory to the stronger side. In this case, Conan would have a 50+(16)*5 percent chance of success, which of course ensures that Conan will always win the wrestling match.
The down side to this approach is the volatility. It's a lot easier to run out to 100% or 0% in this system, especially if you start bringing in skills and other factors as bonuses to these rolls.
There are things that can be done to fix some of that, too, but those had some problems, so now I'm back to considering a simple trait-based system like the one we discussed a while back for a possible compo.
On the coding side, I did start tinkering with a window system, similar to the stuff RuneLancer has been posting lately for his project, but I haven't been happy enough with any of the results to post it. Mostly, I'm running up against a design vs. technical issue - my dialog box engine (which was based on code from the original Sacraments) wants to be able to create its dialog boxes at any size necessary to display the contents, but Shockwave3D wants to have its textures as a power of 2 (since they are actual 3D textures). I *could* just bump up to the next size power of 2 on each side for the texture, but I'd rather design the windowing system so that it's not quite so wasteful of texture memory. Which gets us into visual design and how it affects the UI, which in turn opens up a big can of worms, so I took a step back and started trying to figure out what exactly I wanted in terms of UI elements.
Anyway, that's the sort of stuff I'm doing on it lately. I know, not a great update. Wish I had something cooler to show.
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BadMrBox
Bringer of Apocalypse
Joined: 26 Jun 2002
Posts: 1022
Location: Dark Forest's of Sweden
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| Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2006 7:39 pm Post subject: |
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Anything going on with this project? Long time since we had some new info now. Hey, this reminds me of on old post I made before... :)
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Nephilim
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Joined: 20 Jun 2002
Posts: 414
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| Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2006 3:36 am Post subject: |
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Heh. Sort of. It turns out that I'm using the high-level engine I was working on for Sacraments 3D for a project at work called Science Pirates, which I mentioned earlier on this board. So, the engine is maturing, but there is no new content for the Sacraments 3D game. Science Pirates is really starting to look and play great, though - we have several of the sections playable now, and the kids we bring in for our game lab sessions really enjoy it. But working on Science Pirates all day leaves me without much motivation to work on a personal project with the same engine, unfortunately.
The other issue is that, as with the compo, I think I'm going to have to pare back on project scope even further than I originally planned if I hope to release anything. In other words, tell a story that doesn't require creating so many 3D assets. In this vein, I'm also considering making the characters 3D billboard flash sprites instead of bone-animated 3D characters, since it's working so well for Science Pirates. I've been tinkering with the Shockwave3D bone exporting from LightWave, and it's just too painful to use and too difficult and time-consuming to get good results from.
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