Derelict 9 Prototype

[John J]

Solid Snake,
How are your controls set up? Are you using WASD for movement and mouse for firing or some other scheme. I'm messing with some schemes myself and most WASD for movement and mouse for aiming ones that I have done are clunky. ;-)

John

[Solid Snake]

I dont mean to at all be condescending or anything but you thought about sticking in a MiniMap yeh ?

I'm having a think about how to exactly handle mini maps. I know I can do it pretty easily with scripted textures, but Sacren tells me that they are possibly broken at this point. Common methods for doing a mini map at this point usually rely on creating the actual mini map before hand, but because these levels are created dynamically at runtime I won't be able to do that. Still I haven't had the time to really look into mini maps yet.

Maybe some fog of war ?

Fog of war is actually kind of difficult in Unreal Engine 3. We did it back for USkaarj in UT2004 using the PokeTerrain functionality and that worked pretty well. Doing actual fog of war could again be possible if scripted textures work, but I'm not sure if fog of war particularly fits with the game that I am designing.

Thumbs up though dude, great work, definitely one of the projects on the forums that really looks like its going somewhere.

Thank you! . I hope to keep refining the random level generator. I've come across a pretty big stumbling block at the moment, but I think I have a fix for it.

[McTavish]

That looks really solid, snake.

heh

I dont mean to at all be condescending or anything but you thought about sticking in a MiniMap yeh ? Maybe some fog of war ? Theres a tutorial on Mini-Map on the UDK official reference site and some Fog Of War discussion around the forums. Anyway Im sure you have thought of all this and are just busying yourself with other mechanics currently.

Thumbs up though dude, great work, definitely one of the projects on the forums that really looks like its going somewhere.

Regards, McT

[Jade-Phoenix]

It actually reminds me of quite a improved Gauntlet Game.

[Solid Snake]

Still working on the random level generator. This current iteration is much better than the previous version as it can also generate non box rooms. There are still some bugs I need to resolve however, but it is looking pretty good.

[LordsWarrior]

So good!!! Jealous!

-LW

[Denny]

That looks really solid, snake.

[Solid Snake]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_H9l1PmiE0


Playing as the Preacher. The Preacher is able to bounce bullets and is 100% accurate.


Playing as the Gentleman. The Gentleman is able to pierce multiple enemies with a single shot.


Playing as the Mercenary. The Mercenary is able to shoot multiple times per single shot.

There is also Navy, Brigand and Thug that aren't shown here. Each class alter how the same weapon behaves, which hopefully is kind of a neat game mechanic as some weapon types will naturally be better for some classes than others, and can add to better team dynamics perhaps.


Basic game objective system is now done. Two objectives have been created, one being to destroy an energy core which I have done here, and the objective is to return back to the extraction zone.

Still more things to do with this prototype, but the list is becoming smaller. I still have to write Professions and Special Powers. After that we'll test it a lot on multiplayer and see if it is fun. If the core game mechanics are pretty fun, then we'll move into expanding the random map generator, add in new game objectives and so on.

So far, compared to the other game prototypes I've made so far, this one is promising.

[Solid Snake]

Very cool :P

Thanks!

Procedural map generation is cool!

Yeah, I quite enjoy writing procedural map generation algorithms. I did a lot of them for my own projects last year, although they were written in my own engines back then.

The main problem with procedural generation is that if it should make sense and have a largy varity of rules it can take a long time to generate. But when it works it really works.

Well, it depends on the theme of the maps. To create a cohesive map, you really want a few key rules that stick to a central theme. Otherwise maps just become too cluttered with too many different rules that simply don't work well with each other. Certainly maps could take some time to generate, but I don't think they would take so long that it would surpass a standard level load (considering that most levels can take minutes to load these days).

I am still thinking about introversions subversion, the one where they have relseased the city generation movie. I am rambeling, i hope you will get the result you want out of your generation.

I think one thing to remember is that Introversion wanted to generate a believable city, where as mine can be as random as I want. After all, how many of us have been on abandoned space ships before? So in order to create a believable city, many rules would have had to be introduced to do simplistic things such as creating the road network. Buildings would have to make sense where they were placed, etc. I just create rooms with random dimensions and join them all together. The scale is also very different.

nicely done. very cool that you can generate maps on the fly with the unreal engine.

Yes. I was interested to see how good the results would be. I knew it was possible, as I played around with this back in UT2004. However, the results were not as good in Unreal Engine 2. Meshes couldn't be lit very well (vertex lighting!), shadowing was pretty poor, textures could not be tiled freely... and so on.

one minor point of small critique, are the tiled textures. but off course there are ways around it i guess, besides its still a prototype. a very promising one, i might want too add.

A simplistic approach to solving this problem is to create extra tiles on the floor which help to break up the monotony of the single texture that is currently applied and tiled across the mesh. Another way is to place meshes of interest to help make the scene less sparse. And as you've indicated, it is a prototype, so my current interest is to test the main game mechanics first. If the prototype is fun, then I can move on and solve some of these other issues later on.

Wow this is turning out well....... Solid.............

Thank you!

[mainframe]

Wow this is turning out well....... Solid.............

[Tag@gears]

nicely done.
very cool that you can generate maps on the fly with the unreal engine.

one minor point of small critique, are the tiled textures.
but off course there are ways around it i guess, besides its still a prototype.
a very promising one, i might want too add.

[TheSpaceMan]

cool, will be nice to see how you extend this.

The main problem with procedural generation is that if it should make sense and have a largy varity of rules it can take a long time to generate. But when it works it really works.

I am still thinking about introversions subversion, the one where they have relseased the city generation movie. I am rambeling, i hope you will get the result you want out of your generation.

[CupcakeMan]

Procedural map generation is cool!

[Lord Banshee]

Very cool :P

I like the game-play style and the random maps... I can't wait to see more.

[Solid Snake]

How did you do that only floor gets detected under the cursor?

I have a blocking volume all the way at the bottom of the map that is very, very large. The blocking volume is a new class which extends blocking volume. I use the TraceActors iterator to only detect this extended class. Since there is only one volume that TraceActors could possibly react to, I only ever get one result.

Are you using navmeshes or path nodes for bots..

I'm not using anything. This is what surprised me. I guess for now because the levels are very, very sparse, there isn't much to block enemies from just doing a straight bee line for me. As I lay more stuff done in the levels, then it will probably be more pronounced that they don't actually have any pathing.

I forgot oter questions from pure awesomeness

Thanks