3D Castlevania...looking for help

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Post by BlackAura »

and the alternatives are....
Either KOS and the stuff it comes with (paralax and tsunami are pretty good), or some custom libraries. I have some, which aren't that good, but they do (kinda) work, and tend to work equally well on both the Dreamcast and any other system you care to port it to, which is currently Linux/SDL, although it'll probably work on Windows too. They need rewriting, and I'll probably release the updated versions when they work acceptably.

We do have a workable OpenGL-like 3D library. If you program with it in mind, the stuff will probably still work on other systems too, because it's largely compatable with OpenGL (it's a subset of OpenGL, and as long as you only use the supported features, you'll be fine).

Anyway, back the the game...

That's a very ambitious plan, DaMadFiddler. The main problem is the sheer ammount of work that'd be required (art, sound, music, models, levels, textures, programming). Might be a bit difficult to organise, and a few things might need to be cut down.

One thing I have been wondering for a while - would it be worth the effort of writing a fairly generic 3D engine, designed mostly for third person 3D work? I wrote part of one for the DreamOn contest, before we had to withdraw. If an engine like that were made more advanced, with a significant portion of the game code moved out of the engine and into various scripts, it would probably be able to serve as an engine for a game like this as well, along with pretty much any third-person perspective game, and possibly other types of games as well.

The main problem with coding 3D games, as rusty said, always seems to be the tools and the data formats. Once you have decent data formats, and you've planned everything properly, it just becomes a (relatively) simple matter or actually coding the thing. That takes time, but it's not terribly difficult if you know what you're doing, and you have a decent design to work on. The only difficult parts of the actual coding would likely involve resource management, and getting the thing running fast enough on the Dreamcast. The data formats and tools would need to be designed with all that in mind.
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Post by rusty »

BlackAura wrote:
and the alternatives are....

One thing I have been wondering for a while - would it be worth the effort of writing a fairly generic 3D engine, designed mostly for third person 3D work? I wrote part of one for the DreamOn contest, before we had to withdraw. If an engine like that were made more advanced, with a significant portion of the game code moved out of the engine and into various scripts, it would probably be able to serve as an engine for a game like this as well, along with pretty much any third-person perspective game, and possibly other types of games as well.
I think you've kind of hit on what I was I was intending to do. The problem I've seen with writting general puprose 3D engines is that people tend to get too caught up in making it "all singing and all dancing" and end up loosing sight of the facxt that it needs to be fast as well.

I'm hoping that the 3D engine, or atleast the components that make up the core of the 3D engine will be seperate. The components will be organised like this;

* Low-level PVR driver
* Vertex transform pipeline (static, dynamic and skinned geometry)
* Hierachical animation tool-kit
* Oct-tree or quad-tree collision and a basic collision API
* Gameplay event/trigger system
* Basic softbody dynamics (cloth and rope )

This kind of layout makes it general purpose enough so that it's not tied to any one game, but still be fast. I'm hoping Ian doesn't mind letting you know what I'm actually doing at the moment in respects to the game engine.


At the moment I'm actually working on a set of open-ended tools. More specifically, I have a set of geometry tools almost complete, and by the end of this weekend I hope to have a static geometry model exporting from Milkshape 3D and/or AC3D into a "plain vanilla" xml schema which in turn; will be compiled into a binary format for the 3D Engine itself.

I've already gotten 40-50% of the low-level PVR driver written (called DC Magma) which needs some testing. I'm hoping to do this within the next couple of weeks; I'm just waiting for some hardware to come my way for that.

After I've checked that my video initialisation code works, I can start testing the TA stuff to make sure we can draw 3d polygons without any problems

After that, I'll move onto some basic 3D stuff without textures.
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Post by BlackAura »

Basically the same ideas I had. That at least means they probably aren't bad ideas.
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Post by rusty »

BlackAura wrote:Basically the same ideas I had. That at least means they probably aren't bad ideas.
Warped minds think alike then :)
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Post by DaMadFiddler »

BlackAura wrote:That's a very ambitious plan, DaMadFiddler. The main problem is the sheer ammount of work that'd be required (art, sound, music, models, levels, textures, programming). Might be a bit difficult to organise, and a few things might need to be cut down.
That it is, and it's why I'm looking for all the help I can get. I already feel like I'm going things a bit backwards; usually, it seems, a homebrew programmer starts a project, and ends up scrambling to find decorative-artist/designer types to work on the non-code parts. Well, in my case, the decorative-artist/non-coder (me) person had the game idea and is scrambling for programmers :-P.

But that aside, I feel very fortunate in the people I've found so far to work on this. Rusty has some great ideas regarding a game engine, I've got a couple of very talented people working with me on the soundtrack, and while things still seem a little bit up-in-the-air regarding the models, I can do some of the more simple ones myself, and given enough time, I'm sure I can do the maps justice.

...As far as things getting cut, I suppose a lot of that really depends on a combination of Rusty's engine and how many people end up helping with models and maps (which I suspect will be the worst time-consumers in this effort). There has been a fair amount of concern regarding my proposed cuts (see the other Castlevania thread in this forum for details), so I want to make it clear that I will do everything I can to preserve the inverse castle (although this may mean twice as many maps to make, unless we somehow find a practical way to have the engine do a realtime vertical flip of all the maps and still have all the physics work properly...I think it will probably be easier, in the long run, just to go ahead and make the extra maps instead) and at least one of the familiars (most likely the bat). But the factors that will determine game alterations or cuts really have yet to be established. And for the time being, at least, Rusty is probably the answer-man in regard to what's feasible in this respect.
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Post by DaMadFiddler »

Hooray for run-on sentences. :-D
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Post by sappel »

You also need to find good 3D animators, because that's one of the hardest things that has to be done.
I also like to know what program you want to use to create 3D models, I prever 3D studio max, but if you got some other program in mind, just say it
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Post by rusty »

sappel wrote:You also need to find good 3D animators, because that's one of the hardest things that has to be done.
I also like to know what program you want to use to create 3D models, I prever 3D studio max, but if you got some other program in mind, just say it
One of the things we're having to keep in mind is that not everybody has access to 3Ds Max (licensed or pirated) and even for those that do; we can't be sure which versions they'll have as there are signiifcant compatibility problems with the 3DS Max SDK between versions.

But there will be support for large modelling packages such as 3DS Max and Maya, through the 3DS file format.
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Post by sheng »

rusty wrote:
sappel wrote:You also need to find good 3D animators, because that's one of the hardest things that has to be done.
I also like to know what program you want to use to create 3D models, I prever 3D studio max, but if you got some other program in mind, just say it
One of the things we're having to keep in mind is that not everybody has access to 3Ds Max (licensed or pirated) and even for those that do; we can't be sure which versions they'll have as there are signiifcant compatibility problems with the 3DS Max SDK between versions.

But there will be support for large modelling packages such as 3DS Max and Maya, through the 3DS file format.
I have access to 3dmax R3, 5 and 6. I don't own them but I can use it in school. Any way modeling isn't the problem right now. The main problem is Getting tested done of the engine (sorry haven't read above yet, is there a engine?) To get the model to display and moving as it should is hard too. Anyway here's a sample of my work been run in a game engine:
Image
Image
Image
Image
This model is been made on 3dMax 3
Dream on
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Post by sappel »

your models look awesome :D I wish I will ever become as good as that, just one question: How do you create those unrendered images in 3D Studio Max?
This is the best thing I've made till now:
Image
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Post by DaMadFiddler »

So it's Wednesday morning now...I hinted at releasing a couple of music tracks this week. I've been very busy the last couple of days searching for a new job, which--coupled with the fact that one of my housemates brought "Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles" home the other day, has resulted in my not getting things mixed to my satisfaction yet. Shooting for an early Saturday-morning post, with two (or *possibly* three) audio tracks from the game. But there will definitely be new material very soon; I've got several things in that almost-finished-but-not-quite-ready-yet state.
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Post by sheng »

Ok, not much people seem to be wanting the help out this project, hum... may be it's too hard or something. Anyway I'll do what I could, so here's a model I'm working on:
Image
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Image
Image

Have fun ! :D
Dream on
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Post by sheng »

sappel wrote:your models look awesome :D I wish I will ever become as good as that, just one question: How do you create those unrendered images in 3D Studio Max?
I been playing about with 3d max for a long time, so you'll find a way to do things. Any way your models look good, when I started I only did a snow man which is much simpler! :wink:
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Post by Quzar »

i might be able to provide some help with gruntwork coding. i have never done anything with 3d but i can do pretty nice simple 2d things including text and low level kos framebuffer graphics.
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Post by DaMadFiddler »

The person to ask about any codework would be Rusty. I'm pretty sure that he wants someone else to handle the sound; I don't know what else needs to be done in that respect, since we're still at a very early stage (although I suspect things like enemy AI, ingame menus, and VMU code probably won't be his cup of tea either).

As for modelling/animation, I'll get the necessary info for that next time I talk to Rusty about the engine. A few people have been inquiring about this, so I should probably get it posted up somewhere.
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Post by Quzar »

well, im just offering myself up, so if ever, just contact me =P
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Post by impetus »

we've gotta lot of Ians running around here devvin stuff...
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Post by DaMadFiddler »

It's a conspiracy :-D.

...I actually went through most of public school with three other Ians in my core set of classes, and all this after my parents named me "Ian" to be unique. In retrospect, though, it's not very; it's either the Celtic or Gaelic (I forget which) translation of "John," with Sean being the other. [begin pointless rant] Other translations include Juan, Shaughn, Johann, Ivan, and several derivations thereof.
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Post by Ian Micheal »

Yeah Same here I was called Ian because you cant make a nick name out of it.
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Post by impetus »

oh yeah, Peein' Ian? :rumpshaker:
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