Liero3D rebooted!

After a long break, and working on a different project(Minertopia: a Minecraft remake) i have decided to go back and Finnish Liero3D before i continue on minertopia :)

However, I am afraid that there will be some rather BIG changes in this project that might not make everyone happy, and I'm sorry if I'm making any one disappointed.

But this project is taking a very different direction in the style of the graphics, and is instead going with a look much closer to the original Liero 1.33, yet still 3D :)

All the minecraft and voxel games have really inspired me to make Liero3D into something that feels and behaves more like the original(if not exactly!), something that lets me keep that hand-pixel-made feeling and still use all the glory of 3D rendering, and i belive "voxels" is the solution to do this.

The goal, assuming my engine can keep up with it, is to convert the original 1.33 graphics straight over into blocks, on a 1:1 scale, so that every single pixel becomes a "3D pixel" block :)
I did a simple rendering test, showing off some random mud balls and using deffered shadows:




Don't be alerted with the ugly and primitive shading, I'm planning to add SSAO(Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) to give it a nice shaded feeling, similar to this picture (NOTE: that that picture is pre-renderd in a 3d modeling software like Maya, so it can never look that good with realtime effects)

But there a few things that are interesting with the picture above, it has almost exactly the same field of view as the original Liero 1.33, and it fit the same amount of pixels as if you where simply adding a 3rd dimension to Liero :)

The performance is not great yet, but a big factor is that the sunburn engine don't like terrains where chunks are much higher than they are wide, adding my own occlusion outside of sunburn should improve this.

One more big thing i can do is to optimize a mesh so that a big flat surface, for example: 8x10 blocks, still takes the same amount of polygons as 1x1 cube, as long as they are made from the same material, an example of this would be the big flat top surface of those balls, if an smart algorithm could split that surface in as few sections as possible, we would save tons of polygons.


There are more things that will be totally awesome with this graphics style.
not only did i split development time in half... is it MUCH more simple for me to create a simple level editor where you can paint, digg and sculpture a game level.

The same can be done with the player and the weapons(model editor?) to make things just as mod-able as the original game :)

Also considering creating an algorithm that converts the original 2d sprites into 3d models straight over :)

Again, I'm sorry if this change of style is different from what people wanted, but i got a bit tired of getting stuck on all the problems that round-fake-holes gives me...

However, I absolutely LOVE Voxel style games! and this would make it more true to the original 1.33 :)

Talking about Voxel style games, check out Voxatron!, yet another game that inspired me to make the change ;)

Tec-demo video on Youtube!

If you have not seen it alredy in my frantic blog, check out the new Liero3D tec-demo on youtube:)

it was about time i show something more than stiff screen-shots, so here goes!

however, please note that it is still in a very Work-in-progress state, and a few bugs are very visible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE0QDfIZ8a0

Liero3d still in the works!

I don't know if people bother to check the other blog, but in case people don't...

I thought i should inform you people that the Liero3d project is back on track, and there are a few news on the subject on my other blog.

seems pointless to double-post everything here, so this post will have to do ;)

Moral Boost!

Woha... it dont happen very often, infact... for me, it was 7-8 years since last time.
and i have been behind evryone else ever since, bearly hanging in there, limited in evrything i do.

But now it is finnaly time for a change, I get a brand new computer within a few days! total awsomeness! Highlight in my life for atleast 5 years back :D

Ofcourse, this has little to do with Liero3d, but it do give me more options and more resorces to create a good looking game, and it also boost the moral for evrything i do on my computer, nobody likes to work with an old and crappy computer.

It is not a state-of-the-art or super expensive one, infact, it is the chepest one we can get, but still has some serius gamer performance, and it makes it possible to play any new game on the market with good settings :)

for anyone interested, here are the info:

• AMD Athlon II X2 250, 3,0Ghz, AM3, 2MB, 65W, Boxed
• DDR3 1333MHz 4GB KIT, CL9, Kit w/two matched DDR3 2GB, 240pin
• GF615M-P33, Socket-AM3, m-ATX, GeForce 6150se, DDR3,SATAII, GbLAN, PCI-Ex16
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB GDDR3 PCI-Express 2.0, DVI-I, native-HDMI, HDCP, Lite-Retail
• Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 500GB SATA 7200RPM, 16MB Cache

So this ofcourse means that performance requirements might increase on Liero3D, since my primary testing platform has more horse powers, but i will try to keep it as fast as possibly even in the future.

Im hoping this huge moral boost with give me more insperation, and i'm hoping that a video demonstration would be done before xmas(nice present for you guys?), but im not promising anything.

I guess one bad side-effect might be that i now can play all the 9 milion nice looking games i never could play before, and that would take all my time insted *sigh*
time will tell... ;)

sweet progress!

After several very productive days, things are relly starting to shape up, the new engine has almost reached the state of the old one before i started the re-write.
and i must say, im very happy with how things are currenly going :)

There are a few issues i need to fix, and then i will implement a new Octree to replace the old one.
after that i think i might implement a few experimental weapons to use for a future tec-demo video :)
Hopefully this is something that i will manage to produce in a near future!

Even the new engine has a few glitches(see image abouve), and im not sure what the problem is just yet.
it might partly be a normal-issue, and i know there are loads of texture stretching, witch makes it look like some triangels might be wrong even if thay are not.
however, i suspect a few triangles are still a bit wonky... so i have some work to do here :3

Ofcourse, you might also notice that im experimenting with a new texture for the mud, im still not sure what people would prefer, this more "realistic" one, or the old-school Liero style texture, so leave me a comment on the subject.

[Edit]changed some of the content and flow in the text, it was poorly written from the start :(

New Ideas, new ways

Oky, its been a looong time since i posted a message, and by now, im guessing people are thinking this project has been terminated...

however, im writing this post to tell you all that this is not the case, this project is still my main project and the one project i am still most pasionate about.

i should say, this project has not come without its fair share of pain and head bashing, it is proberbly the most complicated game i have ever worked on, possibly the most complicated project i have been involed in the 15 years i have been interested in programming.

This whole project started a long while ago, i had this idea of how to -in a rather simplefyd way- making 100% destructable terrain, as it turns out... this way, as simplifyd as it was, had more problems than solutions, and it took me 2 re-writes to figure out that it would simply not be possible to solve the problems using the old ideas of 'how to digg'.

a while back, i posted a comment on "new digg algoritm", even this one was based on the old ideas of doing things, and ofcourse, again it turns out the issues could not be solved.

things started to look rather dark, several times i doubted if this project was even possible, and then... it happend...

My friend Mr Lago, had a new idea of how to solve things, it was totaly different from how things was previusly handeld, and i had some serius doubts about implementing the changes... or, should i say... almost completly rewriting the project! ... *yaiks!*

but the previus 2 attemts; trying to change and tweak the old ideas, seemd to have prove it could not be done with the current ideas, i HAD to make the hard choise, i had to let the old ideas go, i had to let the source go... and after some wry face, so i did.

as it turns out, rewriting the project whent much faster than expected(a few miner things like Camera control could be reused), and here are a few things you people might find interesting:

• New ways of rendering seems MUCH faster, this should give longer rendering view. Infact... the tests i have renderd almost always hold 60fps, where the old one was rearly over 30.
  

• New ideas should make it rather simple to implement LOD, something that was almost impossible before, this ofcourse gives even longer vision range!

So how do i know it all wont just come crashing down around me again? ... truth be told, i dont.
but i do have a good feeling about this new solution.

I have also learnd loads from previus misstakes i did in the previus 2 prototyps, so even if this project has had a slight stepp-back, i will still say it was well worth it.

for the future of Liero3D!

NOTE: I think it might be important to note, that since i complitly change the way holes are created and renderd, it might not look at all like the previus screenshots, i have yet to deside if holes will be smaller aswell, something that will make them a bit more square-ish.

New digg algoritm!

Admit it, you where a bit worryd for a second there huh? well, to be honest... so was i ;-)

I started to think this project had problems impossible to solve, it turns out i was partly wrong(thank god!)

I have never had any interest in changing to voxels, and when i started to get the feeling this project might have to serius issues that might not be able to be solved, i started to loose all the creativity and interest in this project, for some time i even thought "oh well, i guess this is it then...*trash*"

But it would seem fait had other plans, after several weeks of bashing my head bloody aginst the wall, i finnaly got the break i was looking for, and it was so simple... why did i not see this before?

The solution: Totaly change how the world is being deformed, invent new algoritm :P

it might be a bit slower than the old one, but it also gives loads of more power and flexebility with NO of the pointy triangels and it never destroys the cube like the old one did way to much.

now, admetedly it is not perfect, and there are still a few senarios where it simply wont make the world 100% correkt, the result is small cracks in the walls in some places...

anyway, new algoritm is many times smarter!
Say goodbye to pointy triangles, mangeld walls and weard looking surfaces!

picture abouve demonstrates a prototyp i did in BlitzMax (i always do 2d prototyping in bmax) to see if the new algoritm was working before implementing it in Liero3D engine, and it would seem it does so very well :)

EDIT: the last picture was a bit booring as far as digging goes, and containd a few errors, so i made a nicer one, and edited the text to mach :-)

This game do open up a few creative possibilitys!