What's Mindlord Been Up To Lately?

[mindlord]

So... he says to himself, "Why is it that all these modern space sims miss the mark for me? What with their hi-resolution terrain maps, flashy atmosphere shaders, and galactic battles with thousands of ships...". He ponders to himself, "Self... what if someone made a retro-remake of the Starflight game that didn't exist around 1995?"... "What would a retro-remake of a Starflight game look like if such a game existed around 1995?", he asks?"

Something a little bit like this?

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Now... don't get too excited yet. All it does so far is populate a galaxy with 50000 stars, lets you fly between them, orbit the exquisitely unique planets and admire their chunky fractally generated surfaces. Oh, and use Festival to have the ships' computer talk to you in soothing monotone.

Not done yet -
* any sort of interaction with the menu system, maneuver only, so far.
* any sort of landing on the planet
* any sort of tracking of fuel consumption or any other game related variables

Not going to happen -
* any sort of physics relating to reality
* any sort of bull to distract from the exploring, alien trading
* any sort of combat that requires more than pressing FIRE! and running for your life.

More to come...

 

[skeezix]

*AWESOME*

Looking forward to it; looks fun to write too

jeff

Any logic to your planet layout, or just random? (ie: equally spaces stars? planets actually laid out so trhey pretend to look like orbit a star?)

 

[fusion_power]

Tasty. ^^
looks a little bit like "Galactic Artifact" in 3D. I hope I can explore here too.
I played alot "Satar Control 2" even when I never was a huge fan of Space-Sims. Don't know "Starflight" but it sounds promising.

So in which direction will it go? Stressful space Combats? Or interesting "explore" Missions? I'm more the explorer, that's why I liked "Galactic Artifact": no enemies and you can explore a entire Galaxy.
Same for SC2: I more enjoyed the hunting for minerals than Space Combats. I would be more than happy if your game will contain at least a small part of discovering new worlds and hunting Minerals, valuable Metals...Artifacts... discovering Ancient Civilisations...whatever.

 

[mindlord]

*AWESOME*

Looking forward to it; looks fun to write too

jeff

Any logic to your planet layout, or just random? (ie: equally spaces stars? planets actually laid out so trhey pretend to look like orbit a star?)

There are plenty of fan sites out there that has information on and breakdowns of the original Starflight databases. As a matter of fact a group has written a pencil and paper RPG based in the Starflight universe. I'd be lying if I said my algorithms weren't heavily influenced by the tables found in there.

I use a real-time sin/cos formula to calculate the position of the planets based on the number of "ticks" since the program starts. If you hang out in a system long enough you will notice the planets very slowly orbiting the host star.

@Fusion Power -
You should really play Starflight - it is exactly what you want.

Exploring, mining, investigating ancient ruins, discovering artifacts, capturing wildlife, negotiating trades with alien races, and "casual" combat with hostile ones. No trading in Starflight I, but there is in II. I plan on incorporating all this, and a bit more. I will do my very best to make it just like Starflight II, but in 3D.

I plan to make as much of the game procedural as possible, so there is lots and lots to see and do. But no "Fed-Ex" or cookie cutter type missions. Very non-linear - with a scripted story-line that you can choose to follow, or not.

 

[fusion_power]

@Fusion Power -
You should really play Starflight - it is exactly what you want.

Exploring, mining, investigating ancient ruins, discovering artifacts, capturing wildlife, negotiating trades with alien races, and "casual" combat with hostile ones. No trading in Starflight I, but there is in II. I plan on incorporating all this, and a bit more. I will do my very best to make it just like Starflight II, but in 3D.

I plan to make as much of the game procedural as possible, so there is lots and lots to see and do. But no "Fed-Ex" or cookie cutter type missions. Very non-linear - with a scripted story-line that you can choose to follow, or not.

:wub:

Sounds very good. ^^
With procedural, do you also mean random generated Missions and Stuff? Sounds like you never play the game twice in the same way, me likes this. I press all thubs I have so that you can manage to put your Ideas in a working game. good luck!

 

[Holliefant]

mindlord I suddenly fell in love with you

I LOVE STARFLIGHT!

This game was my precious!


Keep up the good work.

 

[JayFoxRox]

meh I'm not into space games so I'll just judge on the looks: >> IMO << (and I'm not into most of that retro stuff neither..) you should have done voxel graphics or just ran a shader which pixelizes the image. The current one looks.. too thrown together imo.

Besides that I'd like to see some actual 800x480 shots of this

Last but not least, a better topic title would have been nice.


(Oh man, I sound like a bitch again, just don't take this offensive please, just trying to express my opinion )

 

[mindlord]

:wub:

Sounds very good. ^^
With procedural, do you also mean random generated Missions and Stuff? Sounds like you never play the game twice in the same way, me likes this. I press all thubs I have so that you can manage to put your Ideas in a working game. good luck!

There never were "missions" in the Starflight games. There was a main story arc - in Starflight I, for example: Interstel launches your ship to discover why your home star is exhibiting anomalous flare activity. You quickly discover all nearby stars are "flaring" in a wave emminating from the core of the galaxy. Killing off all life. Your "Mission" is to save the galaxy. You gain clues to solving the mystery by getting messages from Interstel, talking to aliens, and discovering messages left at ancient ruins.

In Starflight II, a weaker species, once Interstel's ally has discovered advanced technologies and now threatening Arth with slavery or death. You have to discover how they made such a leap in technology and put an end to their threats.

But there's none of that "Go to the guy with the (!) above his head and do what he says" stuff around here.

 

[mindlord]

meh I'm not into space games so I'll just judge on the looks: >> IMO << (and I'm not into most of that retro stuff neither..) you should have done voxel graphics or just ran a shader which pixelizes the image. The current one looks.. too thrown together imo.

Besides that I'd like to see some actual 800x480 shots of this

Last but not least, a better topic title would have been nice.


(Oh man, I sound like a bitch again, just don't take this offensive please, just trying to express my opinion )

If you'd check out screenshots from the DOS or Amiga orginals you'd notice that all I've really done is add lights and smoothed out the polygons some... oh and made the navigation window take up the whole screen and be all 3D instead of 2D. As opposed to a 160x160 box in the upper left corner. I agree there's a bit of "thrown togetherness" going on here, as the engine is far from complete. I am not using any sort of library to do any of this, just SDL + OpenGL. No OGRE, Irrlicht, or what have you. The big challenge is yet to come, when I put the terrain vehicle on the planet surface.

800x480 shots would't look much different truth be told. the UI is designed to scale to the screen, so just imagine the image in widescreen with no pixel distortion.

I haven't really settled on a name yet. This thread is more like a teaser... or tech preview.

Thanks for the input though. I take all criticisms constructively.

 

[fusion_power]

But there's none of that "Go to the guy with the (!) above his head and do what he says" stuff around here.

No, because there are Planets with a (!) above. -joke-
Well, I'm not the "mission runner" so I can live with it. Just traveling through the space and discovering unknown Planets can be very interesting, especialy when you find Valuable stuff on it.

In "Star Control 2" you was also able to land on the Planet to catch up Minerals or life forms. And it was quite challenging because your landing craft couldn't stand every extreme environment, you have to upgrade it so it was able to resist heat, lightning bolts, erruptions, enemies... quite a "Game in the Game", very nice. I made a huge bunch of money, just with exploring solar systems for Treasures and then with selling all the minerals, I never followed the main story line that much :lol:

If you'd check out screenshots from the DOS or Amiga orginals you'd notice that all I've really done is add lights and smoothed out the polygons some... oh and made the navigation window take up the whole screen and be all 3D instead of 2D. As opposed to a 160x160 box in the upper left corner. I agree there's a bit of "thrown togetherness" going on here, as the engine is far from complete. I am not using any sort of library to do any of this, just SDL + OpenGL. No OGRE, Irrlicht, or what have you. The big challenge is yet to come, when I put the terrain vehicle on the planet surface.

A simple but solid LOD system should help to make the Planets less pixelating.
Oh, these Aliens from the Screenshots look very funny. XD

 

[mindlord]

No, because there are Planets with a (!) above. -joke-
Well, I'm not the "mission runner" so I can live with it. Just traveling through the space and discovering unknown Planets can be very interesting, especialy when you find Valuable stuff on it.

In "Star Control 2" you was also able to land on the Planet to catch up Minerals or life forms. And it was quite challenging because your landing craft couldn't stand every extreme environment, you have to upgrade it so it was able to resist heat, lightning bolts, erruptions, enemies... quite a "Game in the Game", very nice. I made a huge bunch of money, just with exploring solar systems for Treasures and then with selling all the minerals, I never followed the main story line that much :lol:

A simple but solid LOD system should help to make the Planets less pixelating.
Oh, these Aliens from the Screenshots look very funny. XD

When dealing with some of the aliens in Starflight they will hint at certain things you can do to improve your relationship with them, like recover a specific artifact for them. But, it doesn't show up in any sort of "quest log" for you. You had to take notes in those days.

Star Control is widely considered the spiritual successor to Starflight. For just the reasons you describe.

I know it is ludicrous, but I actually want the planets to look "pixely". I even turned off bilinear filtering to make them look more "pixely"

 

[JayFoxRox]

Well I didn't know the original game yet, but I'd say that the stars are somewhat more subtle. While yours are 1 pixel in size most of the time and a very red color, the original seemed to have grays and dark colors and there were far fewer stars on the screen as the systems didn't allow too many pixels. In your case I'd probably go with real billboards for the stars which have a proper texture which cover a larger screenregion (which is what I do for my space-FPS). If those visible dots are planets I'd LOD-Stream them away and replace them with larger billboards instead too.
I'd also drop the low-res approach on the planets and actually add some sort of perlin noise and fade colors OR stay with the "checkerbox"/low-res approach with a perlin noise OR just blur anything out and overlay a new grid to seperate it into cells.
I like what you did with the fonts tho, even tho I'd probably stretch them in width to make them more similar to the original. Besides that I think that the original UI looked.. more sorted as it looks like a control panel. Yours does more seem to be an overlay. If you take the freedom to do that change - go for it, but you should also think about making the text transparent etc to not break the look.
An 800x480 would look different as it would get back the control panel look probably, thats also what I thought before doing the last post.

It's good to see that more people write their own graphics renderers by the way
SDL is not really my thing but its common and is being pushed a lot on Pandora - I guess I'll just have to accept that . You should be warned though that the high resolution of the sphere will actually result in slow draws on the SGX, especially when wrapping GL to ES unless you use the correct buffer format. Immediate mode would definatly kill your performance. since you probably have lots of spherized objects you might want to see if distance field checks in the fragment shader would work. Planets shouldn't intersect so you can drop the depth-buffer per planet and draw each planet using 2 triangles in a single strip. The raytracer would alpha out the parts outside the sphere (hence giving you a pixel-perfect sphere) and you can get the position on the sphere which allows you to color each field on its own.

 

[Mithrildor]

Your awesome mindlord

EDIT:

Jay, dont say pixelized shit looks bad. Minecraft looks really nice.

 

[JayFoxRox]

I'm not saying pixelart is bad, actually I do ascii art at times myself and I also did iso-pixel art before. However, I think one should stick to one single artstyle. And if he decides to modernize this he should consider putting in one style too. He might be thinking different about it, but from my own expierence and opinion I can tell its hard to mix pixelated stuff with pixel-perfect geometry. You also have this problem with high-res and low-res textures or point filtering. Things look bad normally as they just don't fit together.
In 2 of my 3 ideas I also recommended to stick to the pixelated (or atleast with a grid to get larger blocks) approach as it seems be a keypoint you'd remember from the original (judging from the screenshots) - it just can't hurt to add some detail (or at least trying it out).

 

[mindlord]

@JayFoxRocks - Re - lots of spheres - The spheres are a lie. In reality only the planets are spheres, and they are actually fairly low poly spheres at that.

Re- stars as billboads - The stars are point sprites. I've checked it should work just fine unde GL/ES on the SGX.

Re: The UI: Right now, I'm using orthographic view to slap a bunch of quads together to make the backgrounds and borders. I have bigger plans that just just beveled rectangles. Today I was working on the under-the-hood UI stuff. Adding the ability to actually navigate the menu.

Re: The overall look - It will definately have a more unified look very soon.

@Holliefant - Aww, Thanks. But my wife is the jealous type. For your safety you should refrain from gushing over me publicly.

@Mithrildor - Thanks!

I've always been a function before form style of programmer. I'm also pretty messy at first and then things get organized better as I go. I know, I know, terrible habit... but that's what happens when you learn GWBASIC at 5, and then try to learn something useful 20 years later. I'm actually an artist first, programmer second... If I start focusing on the nitty gritty graphical details now, I'll get bogged down and never finish.

 

[Mithrildor]

I agree with Jay though, those stars need a pixelized look too.

 

[mindlord]

That can certainly be arranged. It's just a png right now... eventually I'm going to give it an animated texture... when I do make it look more chunky like the planets.

 

[fusion_power]

I agree with Jay though, those stars need a pixelized look too.

I like, how the stars look. Are they animated? It would be awesome.
Maybe, there could be an option to switch between retro-Pixel-look and more modern, bilinear filtered 3D Stuff? So everyone can decide. I actualy don't see any advantages in these huge Pixels. I love Retro-Graphics and old fashioned Pixel Art but only at the right spot.
For this game, Planets should look like Planets. I don't know much Planets that have straight square pattern surfaces. :lol:

EDIT: another Idea *pling*
YOu could pimp the plain black space with some colorful Nebulas here and there, I like all these impressive Hubble Space Photos. ^^
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/tours/

 

[mindlord]

EDIT: another Idea *pling*
YOu could pimp the plain black space with some colorful Nebulas here and there, I like all these impressive Hubble Space Photos. ^^
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/tours/

Two words, procedural nebulae.

 

[JayFoxRox]

I agree with Jay though, those stars need a pixelized look too.

I like, how the stars look. Are they animated? It would be awesome.
Maybe, there could be an option to switch between retro-Pixel-look and more modern, bilinear filtered 3D Stuff? So everyone can decide. I actualy don't see any advantages in these huge Pixels. I love Retro-Graphics and old fashioned Pixel Art but only at the right spot.
For this game, Planets should look like Planets. I don't know much Planets that have straight square pattern surfaces. :lol:

EDIT: another Idea *pling*
YOu could pimp the plain black space with some colorful Nebulas here and there, I like all these impressive Hubble Space Photos. ^^
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/tours/

I actually meant the small stars or possibly planets in the distance which are single, colored pixels.