Main Discussion

[David]

First be sure you downloaded the last version v1.1
Then did you copy ALL the files in the same folder and then launch the application ?
You should see 2 executable (window mode and full screen mode) 5 apllication files and a readme file
If it's not that, could the 3D card, or because you don't use W2000/XP.
You also need at least 1GB of RAM and 256Mb video RAM

For the 3D card, there are two restrictions: you need at least 512x512 texture size support (dont know any cards with less...) and the GL_ARB_multitexture extension, one of the first extension that appeared on graphic cards.
The excellent free Opengl Extensions Viewer called GLView from http://www.realtech-vr.com/ show me this, on my report tab :


Renderer: ASUS EAH3850 Series
Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Memory: 1024 MB
Version: 2.0.7055 Release
Shading language version: 1.10
Max number of light sources: 8
Max viewport size: 8192 x 8192
Max texture size: 8192 x 8192
Max anisotropy: 16
Max samples: 8
Max draw buffers: 4
Max texture coordinates: 8
Max vertex texture image units: 0


Extensions: 90

GL_ARB_depth_texture
GL_ARB_draw_buffers
GL_ARB_fragment_program
GL_ARB_fragment_shader
GL_ARB_multisample
GL_ARB_multitexture
GL_ARB_occlusion_query
GL_ARB_point_parameters
GL_ARB_point_sprite
GL_ARB_shader_objects
...

By now, it worked succesfully on 3 computers and crashed on the 4th one...

[xesf]

Great work David from what I see in the movies. I didn't try yet the binaries, but I'm downloading right now, as soon as possible I give you my input.

Guys, David indeed work in this engine for a while, he send me some e-mail months/years ago about some questions in the formats and here's the result.


What are your ideas now? What you will do with that engine?

[RobG]

Hey this is great! Good job!

I tried out your binaries and they run great on my pc (vista, geforce gtx280).

Looks like you still gotta sort out mapping the texels to screen pixels to eliminate those black lines. I know in DirectX it's: 1.0 / ScreenWidth(Height) that you need to offset vertices by. Can't remember for OpenGL though.

Just wanted to share with you a vid of some of my work getting LBA maps into my own engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-0Lb...e=channel_page

Anyway, good luck!

[David]

Originally Posted by alexfont

Great work David from what I see in the movies. I didn't try yet the binaries, but I'm downloading right now, as soon as possible I give you my input.

Guys, David indeed work in this engine for a while, he send me some e-mail months/years ago about some questions in the formats and here's the result.


What are your ideas now? What you will do with that engine?

Thanks !
By now I'm trying to import a fully animated twinsun character in my engine but don't know where to find it. It has to be compatible with Blender. I should browse more in details in the forum.

[David]

Originally Posted by RobG

Hey this is great! Good job!

I tried out your binaries and they run great on my pc (vista, geforce gtx280).

Looks like you still gotta sort out mapping the texels to screen pixels to eliminate those black lines. I know in DirectX it's: 1.0 / ScreenWidth(Height) that you need to offset vertices by. Can't remember for OpenGL though.

Just wanted to share with you a vid of some of my work getting LBA maps into my own engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-0Lb...e=channel_page

Anyway, good luck!

Thanks !
I'm working on removing black lines it shouldn't be that hard. Also in v1.2 it wont crash when u get out of map limits !

Very nice engine, I like the chasing camera, think I will do it on mine what do u think guys ?
How are you doing the depth sorting ? are you drawing the tiles one by one ? In my case everyting is pre-calculated as tiles are not moving ... I use the alpha channel combined with an alpha test, and normal depth sorting for character itself
Actually there are no tiles, only a set of 512x512 "big" tiles

[RobG]

I'm glad you like what I've done so far! Thanks!

I think the delay on the camera really add a nice feel, try it in yours and see how it goes!

I load every possible unique tile in the level into a large "tile sheet" texture, then I build the entire level, with every tile as 2 triangles, in one big vertex buffer (Not sure what its called in OpenGL). Then I can draw the entire level in one call. Of course I could split up the buffer into smaller parts, but it didnt affect the performance.

When I make each tile for the vertex buffer I position them differently on the Z axis depending on their "depth" in the level. Then the character is actually rendered offscreen into a texture that gets rendered with it's own Z Depth so it can interact with the tiles. So I don't need to do any manual sorting.

The best method I have found so far is actually to render each tile as a 6 triangle "box". Using this method you can add really cool lighting effects/shadows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RVmKOtA3Mk - this level was rendered only using LBA2 tiles and this technique (Also a Twinsen from LBA1).

Originally Posted by david38

Thanks !
By now I'm trying to import a fully animated twinsun character in my engine but don't know where to find it. It has to be compatible with Blender. I should browse more in details in the forum.

There is documentation on the LBA character file format, you should look at getting that into your engine too.

So where do you plan on taking all of this, and what are you going to do with it?

[Necdilzor]

Hey, maybe it's my graphic card, pretty much outdated, everyone knows here .

[David]

Originally Posted by RobG

I'm glad you like what I've done so far! Thanks!

I think the delay on the camera really add a nice feel, try it in yours and see how it goes!

I load every possible unique tile in the level into a large "tile sheet" texture, then I build the entire level, with every tile as 2 triangles, in one big vertex buffer (Not sure what its called in OpenGL). Then I can draw the entire level in one call. Of course I could split up the buffer into smaller parts, but it didnt affect the performance.

When I make each tile for the vertex buffer I position them differently on the Z axis depending on their "depth" in the level. Then the character is actually rendered offscreen into a texture that gets rendered with it's own Z Depth so it can interact with the tiles. So I don't need to do any manual sorting.

The best method I have found so far is actually to render each tile as a 6 triangle "box". Using this method you can add really cool lighting effects/shadows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RVmKOtA3Mk - this level was rendered only using LBA2 tiles and this technique (Also a Twinsen from LBA1).



There is documentation on the LBA character file format, you should look at getting that into your engine too.

So where do you plan on taking all of this, and what are you going to do with it?

I've just watched the vids with shadows, it's amazing ! How you do that ? How can I add shadows to my engine ?
I think the method you exposed for depth sorting is the equivalent to display list in opengl.
Actually that was my first method. Instead of displaying 3 polygons (or 6 for shadowing ??) for each bricks I was drawing the whole brick in one time as a simple rectangle at a certain depth, getting the texture from a unic big texture like you do.
The goal was to fill the depth buffer bricks by bricks. Display list are for static scenes only but it works great ... until a certain number of bricks. Combined with the character display I couldn't get the 60 fps or even 30 fps on every 3D cards. As I plan to display more than one character, I had to find another method, the alpha channel. Works great for complex scene with a maximum of 256 different depths. The bad point is I can't perform any shadowing...
Yes I've seen the work for getting original meshes from LBA but I prefer to work with new meshes like the one made by Jasiek. It has to be animated and textured, and also it has to be compatible with blender. Jasiek didn't answered to the mail I sent to him via this forum, dont know if he actually received it.
By now my plans are to import home made meshes and not comercial ones, correcting black lines bug, adding chasing camera, add collision detection. That's a lot !

[David]

Originally Posted by Agustin

Hey, maybe it's my graphic card, pretty much outdated, everyone knows here .

Yes that could be the 3D card, so please can you show me the GLView report ? That could be youseful to make the engine more compatible
Thanks !

[Necdilzor]

I opened it and it crashed, I got no messages.

[David]

Mmm ... That's curious
But that GLView report is important, the program can crash even at the initialisation because of the 3D card
link here : http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview/download.html
A little effort please !

[RobG]

Originally Posted by david38

I've just watched the vids with shadows, it's amazing ! How you do that ? How can I add shadows to my engine ?

Thanks! Its an idea I have been working on for a while now. To have shadows you need to use shaders. Which would mean that your engine would require a slightly more powerfull video card then what it requires at the moment, however the requirements arent that much really, but it is something to note.

The basic idea of 6 polygons (12 triangles) for a tile means that each tile is actually a full 3D box instead of a flat rectangle. And each box has the tile texture "smooshed" onto it. This means that the level will actually be fully 3D and depth sorting other 3D objects is automatically handled by the depth buffer (as you seem to be doing, but in a different way). Each light can then cast shadows becuase it can see the world "in 3d".

I can explain exactly how the shadows are done with the shaders if you are interested, but note that I don't know anything about OpenGL shaders, hehe, only DirectX.

Originally Posted by david38

I think the method you exposed for depth sorting is the equivalent to display list in opengl.

Ah yes, I think you are correct.

Originally Posted by david38

Actually that was my first method. Instead of displaying 3 polygons (or 6 for shadowing ??) for each bricks I was drawing the whole brick in one time as a simple rectangle at a certain depth, getting the texture from a unic big texture like you do.
The goal was to fill the depth buffer bricks by bricks. Display list are for static scenes only but it works great ... until a certain number of bricks. Combined with the character display I couldn't get the 60 fps or even 30 fps on every 3D cards. As I plan to display more than one character, I had to find another method, the alpha channel. Works great for complex scene with a maximum of 256 different depths. The bad point is I can't perform any shadowing...

Oh, so you WERE using the method I am using in my "non-shadowing" engine (with the rectangles per brick). It should definitely not run slowly, even on slightly older cards. What cards were you testing on? In the most complex level in LBA2 my engine was running at over 1300FPS, granted it was running on a geforce8800, (cheap these days) and no character was being rendered, but surely this method would easily hit 60FPS on slower cards.

Originally Posted by david38

Yes I've seen the work for getting original meshes from LBA but I prefer to work with new meshes like the one made by Jasiek. It has to be animated and textured, and also it has to be compatible with blender. Jasiek didn't answered to the mail I sent to him via this forum, dont know if he actually received it.
By now my plans are to import home made meshes and not comercial ones, correcting black lines bug, adding chasing camera, add collision detection. That's a lot !

Well sounds like you have a lot to do! But I think the hardest is making a good collision system. I'm still playing with different ideas to get mine right.

[Necdilzor]

I tried downloading and got this error:

Originally Posted by Browser

This webpage is not available.

The webpage at ftp://ftp2.realtech-vr.com/realtechv/pub/glview311.exe might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

More information on this error

[David]

works fine for me, might be your firewall
you can get it here : http://www.mediafire.com/?yggzont5yjm

[Necdilzor]

Originally Posted by david38

You also need at least 1GB of RAM and 256Mb video RAM

This is exactly what I don't have
My comp is old, nevermind.

[David]

well one of the objective of my engine is to take profit of new possibilities 3D cards offer over the last 5 (or more?) years so sorry.

[RobG]

May I ask why you would need 1GB of ram? Doesnt that sound like a lot for this type of application? ;P

[David]

It's because I haven't tried it on a computer with less RAM yet ! Suppose it could also work with 512 Mb.
For the chip I've got low performance under 1 GHz.
I remember I played first LBA on a Pentium 60Hz !

[RobG]

Ahh. I did some tests. At first it seemed like your engine was only taking around 40-70megs of ram, but after cycling through the maps a couple times that number just grew and grew. Looks like you have a bad memory leak somewhere ;p. I got the viewer taking over 500meg after cycling through a few times. Just letting you know!

[David]

Yes I also noticed that maps were taking longer time to setup each time you change them. Also it crashes after a certain number of cycles. Thats another bug to fix for v1.2 ! Thanks for advising me !
Well I dont know why Agustin can't even start the app if it "only" needs 70Mb , might be a VRAM problem. I use a LOT of textures, and I remember I use a 1024x1024 one for tiles.

[Necdilzor]

My computer is outdated, Intel 82845 graphics card, 256 MB RAM, Pentium IV 2.20Ghz. I wanted to help this project, but my computer doesn't let me

[David]

It looks like if you really want to help this project by now you gotta have to find a cheap GeForce or ATI ! Mine is 6 years old and it works perfectly...

Remember guys if anyone has a home made 3D animated mesh with Blender it would be nice to send it to me. I'm sure we have a lot of good modelers on this forum.

By now I'm fixing memory leaks and black lines, will take a while til v1.2

[Ravey]

Seems to run fine on a Geforce 5200 FX 128MB, i'll test it on a Radeon 9600 when you have ATI support working.

[David]

Thanks for the info it really helps. Versions from 1.1 are now working with ATI
I released the v1.2 here.

The changes are

v1.2 - 16/12/08 :
Adding camera chasing effect
Adding timer for keeping game speed always constant.
Bug fix : No more black lines between tiles, no more memory leaks during map loading/unloading.

For the next release, I'm going to add some LUA scripting for finally starting writing a game. I'll add script functions for adding/removing none player characters directly from a script, and why not adding some dialogs.
Other stuff I need to improve are :
- changing the step by step character animation by Keyframing animation. By now if you look carefully you'll see uncontinued movements on the dwarf animation.
- adding flat shadows
- adding artificial intelligence to none player characters starting with path finding
- adding some home made characters/models rather than warcrafts ones. Please tell me if you're interested in adding you're own characters in my demo.
That's all for now !

[LBAWinOwns]

This is all great, I'm really curious how you manage to find time for this project

So you're saying this will become a game? can you provide some more info ?