Spiraling tunnel!

oky... i was relly not planning on posting a new blog message alredy...

but after playing around in the engine for a few minuts, i manage to create this awsome looking spiraling tunnel.
its relly to bad it has loads of pointy triangles(I seriusly need to fix those!), but other than that, it looks fracking sweet!

Tunnels are a creepy place!

Admiterly, the previus pictures dident relly show much of what the game might look and feel like, hopefully these new images will give you a bether idea of what you can expect :)


It made me a little bit sad at first, but I was forced to add FOG out of necessity...
The huge ammount of vertices making up the tunnel walls was far to great...
And performance is still one of my greatest conserns, even with FOG the framerate on my system(as crapy as it is) is very bad... around <15-20fps.

There is still room for optimazion, so there is still hope :-) But on the bright side, it do gives a creepy and mysterious feeling when you walk around, not knowing what might popup from the black foggy caves!.

now ofcourse, the original liero did not have fog, after all... you had only -one screen field of view-, but this is also why i Dont think the fog destroys to much gameplay, you are not supose to have vision all over the map.

so maybe fog is the way to go anyway. :-) You may also have noticed, some of these pictures contains a few mangled triangles, I'm still struggeling with this problem, im not even sure it can ever be solved 100%, I have a few ideas i want to try, but unless i totaly change the way mudd is removed, mangled triangles are here to stay.

so... to all of those asking me "will to wholes make a tunnel?", i hope the pictures abouve give you a satisfying awnser. This was running on a rather crapy machine:

XP2100+ CPU(damaged, so it identifys it self as 1500) running at 1.29Ghz.
1Gb of RAM.
AGP ATI ASUS X1650 256mb
Note:Motherboard is old, only capable of AGP4, so half speed.

Some screenshots? ;-)

I thought it was time to show some sneak peaks of what things look like when you digg holes, just to keep people interested and to prove this project is infact real and not "vaporware".

as you can see, even in these small tests, things look rather nice alredy, and the engine does it's jobb well, some tweaks are still needed ofcourse... but overall, im happy with how things work :-)

It should be noted that this sample only shows an 8x8x8 sub area from the total level, wich is ment to be 128x128x128.

and only for the purpace of this demonstration, all cubes are renderd to show the walls outside, this is however not done normaly.

and yeas, that is a part of the original liero texture i'm using ;-)

I am delibertly going for a very retro 3D feeling, trying to just add an extra demension on the original liero game, I am afraid that if i start adding high resolution textures of sand and stuff, things wont look and feel like liero anymore.

so im keeping it as much as possible as the original :-)
after all, we dont play liero for the awsome graphics, we play it for the sweet gameplay!

I also want to wellcome an old friend and skilled programmer who recently joined this project, and have speeded up the devolepment time immensly, ladys and gentlemen: mr Andreas Lago! *warm applause*

oky, thats all for now

Liero3d should be freeware?

Oky, so i have been doing some thinking about the future of this project and the multiplayer aspects during the last few days.

now... in true Liero spirit, it should be important that a Liero game is freeware(extra so if i use data from the original, like sounds files for example), and this feels important to me aswell, however... spending loads of time on a project and never ever get a penny on it, is both depressing and unmotivating.

so if i find a way that would keep the liero fans happy, and me inspired to continue and make the game blossom for several years to come, that would be ideal.

so... here is what im thinking, what if the whole game is 100% free to download and play as much as you want with no limitations*, including both singel play, local LAN and direct IP2IP.

however, if people want to play with each other in groups, teemworks aginst random people on the internet(evrything that needs a remote server), you could subscribe for like 10 euro a month(?).
it seems only fair that i can take money when people is using my servers and broadband, stuff that needs maintenance and work to keep running.

this also keeps the game totaly free, and yet gives the project some money for future devolepment. the best of both worlds. just the way i like it ;-)

Great progress! :-)

Well, i have been working hard on this very interesting engine, and things is relly shaping up nicely!

infact, i'm rather impressed with the current state of the engine, and as soon as we have fixed a slight issue and added textures, i will make a public tec-demo movie and upload to youtube!
i'm sure it will dropp a few jaw's ;-)

now... it should be mentiond, that textures is a big pain in the a*s, due to the nature of this engine.
since texture cordinates constantly changes on evry explotion, making textures look good and seemengsly fitt together wont be simple, but i have a few ideas of how to go around this.

this is starting to look like the most interesting project i have ever been working on in my life as a programmer, wohow! :-)