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The Notrium 3D engine

ville 18 years ago

My suggestion is to create a mod for a known game, that way you can have results sooner than later, and don't need to code that much. For example there are a lot of mods to redo the Ultima games, most notably on the Neverwinter Nights engine and the Dungeon Siege engine.

Remember that I'm allowing the usage of the Notrium characters and story for fan games, but one rule must be followed. It must be clearly noted as a fan game of Notrium and include a link to monkkonen.net.

If you dare start this project, you have my thumbs up!

Amarth 18 years ago

"ville" said:
My suggestion is to create a mod for a known game, that way you can have results sooner than later, and don't need to code that much. For example there are a lot of mods to redo the Ultima games, most notably on the Neverwinter Nights engine and the Dungeon Siege engine.

This is indeed something we should decide upon. The backside to that story, though, is that it makes the game a whole lot less free, and that it probably limits our possibilities. And we'd still have to pick a game. Everyone who is interested, join the discussion over at my forum, somewhere in the Notrium 3D > Code section. That's here.

"ville" said:
Remember that I'm allowing the usage of the Notrium characters and story for fan games, but one rule must be followed. It must be clearly noted as a fan game of Notrium and include a link to monkkonen.net.

Sure. Slight question, can we use textures/sounds/... or should we create our own? We'll have to do the 3D models anyway, so it's not that we're lazy or anything

.

"ville" said:
If you dare start this project, you have my thumbs up!

Thanks! It's nice to have you supporting it

.

ville 18 years ago

"Amarth" said:
Slight question, can we use textures/sounds/... or should we create our own? We'll have to do the 3D models anyway, so it's not that we're lazy or anything .

Sure, feel free to use the textures and sounds. I can't promise this for Quanrian's textures though, those are marked with a "q" in the beginning.

Amarth 18 years ago

"ville" said:
Sure, feel free to use the textures and sounds. I can't promise this for Quanrian's textures though, those are marked with a "q" in the beginning.

Thanks! I wasn't really expecting this

. It once again shows what wonderful person you are, I guess. Don't know if we're actually going to use them, but we'll see. We'll give proper credit, of course.

Anonymous1157 18 years ago

I agree with the part about Ville (Yay! Thanky!), but not about making a mod to a premade game. I don't have any moddable game you people are talking about because the deafult mod in those games are bloody, so my mom obsessively never wants me to play them. Besides, Notrium 2D is a game engine in itself, with a deafult mod that we all know as "Notrium". Don't you think Notrium 3D should just be a 3D conversion of Notrium 2D? Sure, the idea may surpass it by a whole lot, but in essence, that's what it is, isn't it?

Vacuus 18 years ago

I'm still for using a free engine such as Irrlicht...

Yeah, it's alot of work, and yes, it'll take a while, but if we do it right, then it'll be alot more flexible than modding a game - which would require that everyone had the game, anyway.....

Thanks for the textures, though!

MageKing17 18 years ago

"Vacuus" said:
Yeah, it's alot of work, and yes, it'll take a while, but if we do it right, then it'll be alot more flexible than modding a game - which would require that everyone had the game, anyway.....

Yeah, it'll be so flexible that we'll be able to mod it instead!

Amarth 18 years ago

"MageKing17" said:
Yeah, it'll be so flexible that we'll be able to mod it instead!

That's what we're aiming for, indeed.

What brings me to the next question: Ville, did you use any sort of scripting library or do you do your own parsing for the various .dat files? And even another question, what sound library did you use? And did you use any other libraries, and would you recommend them?

It's not that important, all of this. It just that we don't have any preferences for most of our libraries, so we're asking someone with oh so much experience and wisdom

.

ville 18 years ago

For Notrium I didn't use a scripting library, the dat file parsing is just something that evolved along with the game.

There are plenty of good libraries out there, and I don't have any preferences. What I'm using for Cormoon are good ones though, you can probably find a list of them somewhere around.

But what I would really suggest, if you truly wish to code the thing, is to use a complete solution 3D game engine that comes with physics, sounds and scripting. There are plenty of free ones around, and most are well suited for FPS style games. Coding a full blown game engine from scratch is an educating experience, but I wouldn't recommend it for this kind of a project.

Amarth 18 years ago

Where are you finding these all-in 3D libraries in abundance? The only thing I can find is the Quake 3 engine (I'm not sure, but Q2 was way too hard for me), Kaneva (which seems too commercial), Nevrax (which does seems somewhat promising, but not too easy too use) and Jolt3D. Perhaps Jolt3D! is worth something... But the website looks *very* unprofessional, and I can't find any information about licenses.

ville 18 years ago

Here is a nice list: http://www.devmaster.net/engines/

Also there's plenty in sourceforge.

Redemption 18 years ago

For the switching between 3rd and 1st person you could make something that hides everything except the arms when in 1st person, the restores them when you switch back to 3rd.

Grim Reaper 18 years ago

"Redemption" said:
For the switching between 3rd and 1st person you could make something that hides everything except the arms when in 1st person, the restores them when you switch back to 3rd.

I'd suggest that it shows your legs, too. Preferably everything, but hides the head because it's so close to the camera.

Arawak 18 years ago

For the switching between 3rd and 1st person you could make something that hides everything except the arms when in 1st person, the restores them when you switch back to 3rd.

I'd suggest that it shows your legs, too. Preferably everything, but hides the head because it's so close to the camera.

IF we did that multi would look strange...

Grim Reaper 18 years ago

"Arawak" said:
For the switching between 3rd and 1st person you could make something that hides everything except the arms when in 1st person, the restores them when you switch back to 3rd.

I'd suggest that it shows your legs, too. Preferably everything, but hides the head because it's so close to the camera.

IF we did that multi would look strange...

How so? Obviously all the OTHER people would be FULLY shown to you (unless they had some sort of invisibility thingers).

Vacuus 18 years ago

Didn't we just have a discussion about this a page back? Anyway, I can see clipping issues with it - either that, or an inability to look fullly down..

Amarth 18 years ago

For anyone searching acces to my forum, the adress has changed to <a class="postlink" href="http://amarth.p4host.be/forum/">http://amarth.p4host.be/forum/</a>

The other one had a couple of minor problems, so because we have time in excess, we decided to change, just to know how it felt. Perhaps we'll do it again, like, next week.

Cough. NOT.

Anonymous1157 18 years ago

Amarth's new forum has more features than this one. *elbows Ville* Unfortunately, it loads insanely slow on DSL. *elbows Amarth*

Edit: I just found out that that's my problem, not his website's. Our DSL controller thingy must be running at 56K today...

Vacuus 18 years ago

Unfortunatly, Ville's theme would be lost in the install - so, he might wish to wait

Anonymous1157 18 years ago

On top of that, I'd say there's a total of more than !!!!30,000!!! posts on the forum, and we wouldn't want to lose any, right? I know, it seems amazing and impossible, but count them from the main page.

Vacuus 18 years ago

Bah - he'd keep all of his 30,000 Posts, but the theme would be gone

Amarth 18 years ago

You know, we also have 200 posts. That's about 0.666% of this forum. Since Ville's forum's coolness factor is infinite, we have (0.666/100)*infinite = infinite coolness. Sweet.

Anonymous1157 18 years ago

It's actually infinity+1 because our forums have more features.

MageKing17 18 years ago

"Anonymous1157" said:
It's actually infinity+1 because our forums have more features.

You fools, everyone knows that Ville's forums are Aleph 2 coolness. So therefore, any thread within the forums is also at Aleph 2 coolness.

Anonymous1157 18 years ago

On the contrary, might I remind you yet again that we have more features. Simple Machines Forums may be a pain in the effin' arse to understand, but once you do... WEE!

Amarth 18 years ago

Erm, just wanted to tell those who are helping development, I can't access my site. I don't get any errors, only a blank page. It responds to ping, and everything works with a proxy. I'm a bit scared

. I've never seen anything like this happen. I hope it's something temporary...

Anonymous1157 18 years ago

I noticed already.

Vacuus 18 years ago

Blank index.html ? :S

Anonymous1157 18 years ago

This happened to Ville once. What did he say the problem was with Monkkonen.net? We might have the same problem.

Index.html isn't empty. I just tried directly linking to the forums, and they're blank, too.

Amarth 18 years ago

Anyway, the site is up again. 'Twas just some apache problems on the other side of the connection. Pretty scary, though...

Quanrian 18 years ago

Good luck with this. Though I'm still not sure why you guys didn't just use the Unreal engine which would of worked just fine if not great... I hope you guys are in it for the long haul because new engines take a year minimum to develop properly

. Don't let that discourage you, but try and look back at what Notrium started with, because trying to add in everything in 1.3 is not practical.

I'd use a game like Deadhunt as inspiration on how to transfer the gameplay of a 2d game into a proper 3d game. Just watching the nuke effect in 3d makes me drool. They have a real nice engine for tearing apart models, so you can take off arms, legs, shoot off bits of armor and so forth.

HarmlessHermit 18 years ago

I seriously doubt you can make a new engine from scratch, and the effort would put Ville's game to shame. Some mods for widely played games would be easier and it could potentially spread to more people. Try taking a poll of who has a lot of a certain 3D game, or find a decent freeware one. The second option is probably better.
But mods for Notrium are hard enough to get going.

Vacuus 18 years ago

We're not exactly creating a new engine from scratch..

Indeed, we are using the same engine that Ville/Quanrian uses for Cormoon - that's Irrlicht.
In addition we'll add support for a few other libraries - Raknet (Which Cormoon uses), for networking, Newton (which Cormoon also uses), OpenAL, and lua...

ville 18 years ago

You should realize there's a huge difference between a game engine and a library. What you mentioned are libraries, and it's an enormous task to integrate them all into a functioning game engine. For a 3D game that has scripting, we're talking about a year of time for a single person. That's why I suggested using some full 3D game engine that comes with all of that stuff, and only requires you to write the game code.

Vacuus 18 years ago

Bah, I think the terms "Engine" and "Library" are thrown around too much these days - The Irrlicht site even calls itself an engine, although in the original meaning you are right - Irrlicht is a library.

I think random terrain can speed things up a little, as once a system for that is in place, a world can be readily generated..
But, I'm not sure about the others, but I wasn't expecting to get a release out there - with all the features we want, any time soon.

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