[Jan Satcitananda]

I know that the critical approach helps find out important drawbacks, but this thread isn't the right place to debate whether packs like HRP are good to have or not. I hope, everybody realizes that the hi-res stuff has its right to live as long as nobody is forced to use it. In any case, it won't outperform classic DN3D not only due to nostalgic reasons, but because of the intrinsic harmony of original Duke3D's audiovisual elements with game mechanics and the plot; this is what keeps a game consistent. Just remember what computer games exist for and why people are creating mods for them voluntarily.

When working on my mod, I'm paying attention to every technical constituent; carrying all the effects on a par with each other maintaining the overall style uniform. It's the way I selected to make a solid TC on my own with minimal usage of third-party content to make it feel original and distinctive.

[Mblackwell]

Well said Craig.

And now we'll continue to be on topic if no one would like to suffer any more negative consequences!

[Jan Satcitananda]

Well guys, the release is ready, enjoy: http://lzg.duke4.net/lnga.htm

I couldn't get it to work with the latest EDuke32 snapshot, so run the mod with versions from March. The readme file is included inside the game directory.

Any comments or critique would be appreciated. Now I guess I'm switching to the Last Pissed Time series. =D

[The Commander]

So much cool shit in this it's hard what to say, I really do like the lighting effects in this.

Now lets see who the first person is who doesn't say "why doesn't this work in Polymer/Polymost"

[CruX]

I've never been so awestruck, so impressed, and so confused all at the same time.

[Danukem]

CraigFatman, on 08 May 2011 - 07:50 AM, said:

I couldn't get it to work with the latest EDuke32 snapshot

That makes 2 major eduke32 projects that will not work with the latest version (the other is AMC TC).

Downloading now...

Edit: Maybe you could link to the most recent working eduke32.exe?

[The Commander]

DeeperThought, on 08 May 2011 - 08:57 AM, said:

Edit: Maybe you could link to the most recent working eduke32.exe?

Rev 1857 is the latest "working" one, but it seems to have weird graphical glitches and most of the effects are not seen.

I just went with Rev 1838 to be safe.

[Geoffrey]

No way dude, together with the new HRP this just made my entire month. Downloading it as we speak!

[Danukem]

@Lezing:

I just tried it, and I can confirm that this mod is full of amazing effects that will leave most of us scratching our heads in wonder. Good job! I still can't believe my eyes when I look at an atomic health, and see those lens flares moving perfectly with the animation. Also, the overhead map feature that you coded is very impressive, not to mention the beautiful crosshairs and lots of other stuff. You went in a different direction from most other enhancement mods. Typically one starts with easy stuff, like making shells stay on the ground, making better smoke sprites, etc. But you have left those things intact for now, and have taken the harder route.

I understand that it is a work in progress, but there are a few choices that leave me puzzled. The pistol firing sound is weak, and the secret area message is incomprehensible. My biggest complaint, though, is the way the mod tries to make lighting adjustments on the fly. It works well come of the time (especially when there is an explosion), but at other times it makes the game flicker even when nothing is going on. For example, when I tried playing "It Lives" this was a major issue: I could stand in one spot and the lighting would keep changing, almost giving me a headache. However, I suspect it works much better in most maps. I know you want to do some mapping now, but I hope you return to finish this mod. It is truly a technical masterpiece.

[Micky C]

If the secret area message is the same as in the videos than it's saying "Omg a secret!" in l33t (leet) speak, I thought it was a nice touch and kind of hilarious.

[Helixhorned]

There's really some wicked stuff in there, and the fact that you coded it on CON makes it even more impressive. Personally, I was most fond of the the fake cast shade (don't even want to start thinking how you managed that) and the facing mirrors. The auto-exposure and weapon flare effects can seem a bit overdone if used to their full range, but the opening in the ceiling in SCOTOPIC.map shows that there's potential for a practical application -- thinking about it, a System Shock-style mod would fit the general "tech & science" theme pretty nicely IMO. Also, I thought it was kind of funny that the custom overhead map showed every flying gib!

The culprit for the CON miscompilations is r1857, and if I had to take a guess, I'd say it's somehow related to this, which shows up starting from that revision:

lngaGUI.CON: In state `show_shp':
lngaGUI.CON:1262: warning: duplicate `break'.
lngaGUI.CON: In state `show_hline':
lngaGUI.CON:1262: warning: duplicate `break'.

In fact, backdating source/gamedef.c to r1856 almost fixes things, there's still a crash after a while of playing.

[Stabs]

def be playing around with this in mapster, these gfx effects would work so well with WGR2, whats the go with using these effects in different mods craig?

[Danukem]

DanM, on 08 May 2011 - 03:39 PM, said:

def be playing around with this in mapster, these gfx effects would work so well with WGR2

Not so sure about that. WGR2 uses 8-bit art, but it needs OpenGL for the fonts and skyboxes. Also, WGR2 has its own custom palette, and a lot of stuff would have to be changed to make it work with the LNGA palettes.

It should be possible to port some of the LNGA effects to OpenGL, though. The two effects I would be most interested in are the lens flares and the coloring on the screen edges when picking up items or taking damage.

[Stabs]

DeeperThought, on 08 May 2011 - 03:51 PM, said:

Not so sure about that. WGR2 uses 8-bit art, but it needs OpenGL for the fonts and skyboxes. Also, WGR2 has its own custom palette, and a lot of stuff would have to be changed to make it work with the LNGA palettes.

It should be possible to port some of the LNGA effects to OpenGL, though. The two effects I would be most interested in are the lens flares and the coloring on the screen edges when picking up items or taking damage.

The damage indicator would be great for any mod i think, the Two effects that interests me are the skys and ROR, particularly the sky / sun effects but i think that is Palette based

[Jan Satcitananda]

DeeperThought, on 08 May 2011 - 10:38 AM, said:

@Lezing:
My biggest complaint, though, is the way the mod tries to make lighting adjustments on the fly. It works well come of the time (especially when there is an explosion), but at other times it makes the game flicker even when nothing is going on. For example, when I tried playing "It Lives" this was a major issue: I could stand in one spot and the lighting would keep changing, almost giving me a headache. However, I suspect it works much better in most maps. I know you want to do some mapping now, but I hope you return to finish this mod. It is truly a technical masterpiece.

This is because of the way of exposure metering. =) If you type "setvar DEBUG_EXP 1" into the console, you'll see that the game meters the brightness at random points in the middle of the screen. In circumstances with differently lit objects in the view, it will keep fluctuating up and down as bright or dark surfaces happen to meet the light meter rays. A way to fix the issue you mentioned is to change the pattern of AE metering points to a regular grid. The number of rays can't be increased without a considerable performance drop; Build's hitscan function just isn't fast enough for "ray tracing" purposes; and there's no function to get color of specific pixels on the screen.

Helixhorned, on 08 May 2011 - 02:15 PM, said:

The culprit for the CON miscompilations is r1857, and if I had to take a guess, I'd say it's somehow related to this, which shows up starting from that revision:

lngaGUI.CON: In state `show_shp':
lngaGUI.CON:1262: warning: duplicate `break'.
lngaGUI.CON: In state `show_hline':
lngaGUI.CON:1262: warning: duplicate `break'.

In fact, backdating source/gamedef.c to r1856 almost fixes things, there's still a crash after a while of playing.

I can see only that the line contains a break statement going directly after the case (telling the game to perform no actions), but the game keeps crashing even when I put a command into that case and resolve the warning, so I doubt that it's related to the problem.

DeeperThought, on 08 May 2011 - 03:51 PM, said:

It should be possible to port some of the LNGA effects to OpenGL, though. The two effects I would be most interested in are the lens flares and the coloring on the screen edges when picking up items or taking damage.

It's possible to "extract" them as standalone effects, but it's not an easy task, since many effects use shared routines and resources. Also their versions aren't final in the yesterday's release, so maybe it's too early to do this...

[Stabs]

CraigFatman, on 08 May 2011 - 07:20 PM, said:

This is because of the way of exposure metering. =) If you type "setvar DEBUG_EXP 1" into the console, you'll see that the game meters the brightness at random points in the middle of the screen. In circumstances with differently lit objects in the view, it will keep fluctuating up and down as bright or dark surfaces happen to meet the light meter rays. A way to fix the issue you mentioned is to change the pattern of AE metering points to a regular grid. The number of rays can't be increased without a considerable performance drop; Build's hitscan function just isn't fast enough for "ray tracing" purposes; and there's no function to get color of specific pixels on the screen.


I can see only that the line contains a break statement going directly after the case (telling the game to perform no actions), but the game keeps crashing even when I put a command into that case and resolve the warning, so I doubt that it's related to the problem.


It's possible to "extract" them as standalone effects, but it's not an easy task, since many effects use shared routines and resources. Also their versions aren't final in the yesterday's release, so maybe it's too early to do this...

iam just playin around with the effects atm and iam wondering about the RoR, do you make the top half and bottom half seperate, put that mirror wall on the see through bits, give those walls a hitag that matches the M and drag the top and bottom halfs on top of each other?

[Jan Satcitananda]

Feel free to play around with the test maps. The RoR used in some of them is not documented yet, but I can write some its principles:

• The effect is controlled by MPASS effectors placed on the map.
  
• Causing the sprite to block movement (B key) will make the view point constant (use with skyboxes). Also this flag activates the starfield (see LANUIT.map).
  
• Sprite angle rotates the camera position about Z axis. If you don't want the pass to be rotated, set the ang to 0 (eastward). Support for rotated rooms is incomplete.
  
• Flipping the sprite Y-wise (making M into W) will nullify camera coordinate shift (sprite's absolute XYZ position). Such sprite can be placed anywhere, but floors must be situated above each other. Otherwise, an anchor sprite should be used to determine the coordinate shift between the floors.
  
• Giving the sprite a hi-tag will restrict the view to walls having the same hitag (so-called wall-over-wall effect). The shape formed by the tagged walls must be convex though.
  
• Shade and pal regulate the amount of light coming from the render pass; useful for color filters, but causes performance impact on large maps.
  
• The translucency of the effector stands for the ability to display the pass if the camera is inside the shape formed by hi-tagged walls. Useful for view-through-floor-via-wall-over-wall structures.
  
• The lotag is processed as a bit field, but most of its features are incomplete. Still a lotag of 16 can be used to reduce camera movement (parallax) by a factor of 16 and "magnify" the sectors by that.
  
• The extra parameter is the bias that affects pass sorting. It can be useful for displaying a bunch of congruent floors (sharing the same XY area) in a right order.

I use the 0x0 tile #13 as an "empty" texture to make some floor/ceiling/wall surfaces invisible (so-called VOIDTILE). AFAIK, it's impossible to select such textures in M32, but one can use tile #560 (mirror) instead, except for floors what causes unwanted hard-coded effects.

[Helixhorned]

CraigFatman, on 08 May 2011 - 07:20 PM, said:

I can see only that the line contains a break statement going directly after the case (telling the game to perform no actions), but the game keeps crashing even when I put a command into that case and resolve the warning, so I doubt that it's related to the problem.

That was more directed to TX to help him track down the CON compiler bug. I took a look at your code at that place and it seems OK to me, so maybe some optimizations TX did threw the compiler off.

CraigFatman, on 08 May 2011 - 11:43 PM, said:

I use the 0x0 tile #13 as an "empty" texture to make some floor/ceiling/wall surfaces invisible (so-called VOIDTILE). AFAIK, it's impossible to select such textures in M32, but one can use tile #560 (mirror) instead, except for floors what causes unwanted hard-coded effects.

You can. Just aim, press 'G' (for goto), and enter a tile number, or in newer revs, try start typing a tile name. It's only the 'V' tile selector that patronizes you.

[Gambini]

Very cool. Not much to see besides what has been shown already in your videos but it´s pretty cool to finally check it by oneself and make sure it is real. I know shit about CON coding so I can´t really measure how far you went beyond the normals.

You have already proved to everybody in this community that your limits are high, very high. Now it´s time to make good use of your capabilities, not everything in this demo is usefull in a game. The musical scores thing is an example.

What most amazes me is the crosshairs, the flares, the dynamic shadows and the wall over wall thing. Those crosshairs are really awesome in fact, not only well coded but they have style. I would have liked to have a more organized demo, with self explanatory example maps maybe launched through the episodes selector. Because this way players will always wonder why the palette is changed according to what map is launched. For example, in regular maps the palette is different and the monsters shadows are not translucent.

[Jan Satcitananda]

Thx for commenting. Another note I forgot to mention is that all cheats now begin with "qe" instead of "dn" for faster typing. If you want to restore original cheat keys, comment out the line in the end of lngaINIT.CON.

[Wolf]

CraigFatman, on 10 May 2011 - 01:02 AM, said:

Thx for commenting.

My god Craig, I don't want to sound like I'm adding another generic compliment but I can't hold myself back from posting, because what you've done here is amazing, even if you say it's in an unorganized/early stage, it's still fantastic. The effects, the code, and more than that the imagination and ideas behind everything is truly, in my opinion, the essence of the pinnacle of duke3d modding. It's all so very inspirational to someone like me. I hope you keep going with it, and if your confidence in it is high enough, keep releasing snapshots for us to enjoy and indulge in as you go.

Keep up the great work.

[Headless_Horseman]

I'm completely, absolutely impressed with this demo.
The test map have so much stuff I was a bit dizzy and the new features used in the original levels made them seems like new.
From the depths of my Duke-loving heart, thanks !

[Gambini]

Why screenshots don´t look like in game?

[Jan Satcitananda]

Lol, just found that my DEF file contains wrong directory name for voxel file locations (I'm developing the mod in lngagrp dir, so I didn't notice it until my mate sent me his log warnings). I've attached the fixed DEF file that enables voxel objects in the mod (particularly in the !LNGA.MAP) by removing the directory name from the paths.

 lngadfix.zip (292bytes)
Number of downloads: 482

Replace your lnga.def with this one. Type "r_novoxmips 1" into the console to disable mip-mapping (improves the look of some items).

Gambini, on 09 May 2011 - 03:33 PM, said:

You have already proved to everybody in this community that your limits are high, very high. Now it´s time to make good use of your capabilities, not everything in this demo is usefull in a game. The musical scores thing is an example.

What most amazes me is the crosshairs, the flares, the dynamic shadows and the wall over wall thing. Those crosshairs are really awesome in fact, not only well coded but they have style. I would have liked to have a more organized demo, with self explanatory example maps maybe launched through the episodes selector. Because this way players will always wonder why the palette is changed according to what map is launched. For example, in regular maps the palette is different and the monsters shadows are not translucent.

Those music scores were intended for producing dynamic ingame music that smoothly changes on various game situations. It's supposed to work outside the playable area and produce sounds like if they were always located near the player. It could be really useful only if the sound quality provided by the engine was better though. And the palette is the same for both regular and native maps, although Duke maps go through special preprocessing during the load to look correctly. =)

Wolf, on 11 May 2011 - 04:18 PM, said:

My god Craig, I don't want to sound like I'm adding another generic compliment but I can't hold myself back from posting, because what you've done here is amazing, even if you say it's in an unorganized/early stage, it's still fantastic. The effects, the code, and more than that the imagination and ideas behind everything is truly, in my opinion, the essence of the pinnacle of duke3d modding. It's all so very inspirational to someone like me. I hope you keep going with it, and if your confidence in it is high enough, keep releasing snapshots for us to enjoy and indulge in as you go.

Keep up the great work.

Of course I'll keep releasing new stuff, although not very often due to my spare time and inspiration limitations. I think, my later work will involve complete recoding of game mechanics (inventory, doors, weapons, enemies etc), the main part of any game, so it will take a long while.

Gambini, on 12 May 2011 - 04:30 PM, said:

Why screenshots don´t look like in game?

If you mean some of the sector-over-sector effects which were shown on the screenshots before but disabled in the current snapshot, they were temporarily turned off for some revisions, including the adaptation to the new staged rendering system (namely my combinable pass collection). No doubt that this will enable for even cooler constructions, such as realistic reflective/refractive water.

[Gambini]

Not sure if it´s related to that, probably not. I took a few screenshots of a regular map being played with LNGA and the screenshot looks nothing like what it was like in game. Like if the screenshot were processed by a sort of blue tint layer. I´m gonna show you an example later if you can´t determine what it is.

[Jan Satcitananda]

Gambini, on 13 May 2011 - 04:15 PM, said:

Not sure if it´s related to that, probably not. I took a few screenshots of a regular map being played with LNGA and the screenshot looks nothing like what it was like in game. Like if the screenshot were processed by a sort of blue tint layer. I´m gonna show you an example later if you can´t determine what it is.

Dunno, it didn't happen to me. If you're suspecting that the game saves corrupt screenshots, send me one so I could check it myself...

[Jan Satcitananda]

Whew, no new posts for sooo long. I guess, several of you are curious what's going on with this mod now. So I'm bumping this thread to tell you that the project is still alive, although I've been working on it not very often recently, as my life has considerably changed last year. Thus, there are not very many impovements since the latest release, but they deserve attention anyway. Stay tuned for some videos and a new snapshot which presents the new inventory window and updated visual effects.

For the time being, I have some screenshots to show. First of all, the inventory is changing the look. My concept claims that all things Duke owns including the weapons and ammo are actually stored remotely and get teleported to Duke on demand. This is the only way to explain how he can carry such amounts of ammunition without an impact on his speed or stamina. The inventory window might look bulky as compared with the old HUD, but it should meet the gameplay particularity pretty well (actions with tons of different objects, for instance). It can show up to three rows of various objects; some of them (such as weapons) are planned to be more than one unit wide. Only the inventory items, the keycards and the body armor (shown with the spacesuit icon for a reason) are listed so far.



What next. Here is reflection mapping for walls. I've introduced a couple of "magic" textures which get automatically moved and resized to simulate reflection maps. Although static screenshots won't show its real dynamics, you may believe that walls with this effect actually look like shiny reflective surfaces.




The lens flare effect is still being improved in a number of ways. Now the flares are even more accurate and the default camera type is set to "eye" (with prominent blooming and some eyelash diffraction). Also recently I've coded anti-aliased volumetric lines which are used to replace tripbomb laser. With smooth lines, realistic falloff and the bright spot at the hit point the thing looks like a real laser beam.
I've dimmed the ambient light here by a factor of 64 (what equals to 12 LNGA shades or s+12 in my notation) to improve beam visibility. Still the scattering is somewhat exaggerated here, as there's no need for such a powerful laser for usage with tripbomb motion detectors.




Another thing I'm also fooling around with is the built-in scanline raytracing renderer, which uses the hitscan command for each pixel to draw the scene. =) Since I'm drawing several lines per frame, the framerate counter shows an incorrect value; actually each frame might take several seconds to be rendered this way, what is unsuitable for real-time graphics. On the other hand, it enables for a plenty of tricky effects, such as dithered vignetting featured on the screenshot below (the setting is from Gambini's "It Lives"). The texture mapping is incomplete at the moment.

[Micky C]

The way it's brighter in the middle and becomes darker as it gets closer to the edge made me think that the last shot was actually a spotlight in the polymer renderer the good looking shadows didn't help.

[Helixhorned]

Haha, Lezing strikes again! Reps for that antialiased lines and the ray tracing. Do you still use the game's laser line sprite or is this another per-pixel wizardry? I'm just wondering whether it'd be possible to attach them to slanted surfaces...

[Jan Satcitananda]

Helixhorned, on 29 March 2012 - 04:00 AM, said:

Do you still use the game's laser line sprite or is this another per-pixel wizardry? I'm just wondering whether it'd be possible to attach them to slanted surfaces...

I'm spawning my anti-aliased dash sprites and the old laser lines are hidden. That is the same tile which is now used for drawing lines for my overhead map (http://imageshack.us...88/lngaged.png/). And no, there's no way to incline them...