The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

[Rachael]

I am very eager to see where that goes.

[Nash]

Sometimes seeing even a buggy menubar can feel quite satisfying when you've spent months booting just enough of the unrealscript VM, playsim and package environment for it to draw itself :D

Awesome! dpUnrealEngine when? :)

[dpJudas]

Any minute now! Since I have a (almost) working unrealscript environment it in theory is "just" a matter of implementing all the native functions and emit the correct events for the thing to work.

First thing of course is to fix the bugs that makes the menus not fully work (seems to be something to do with reference parameters to native funcs not getting modified). Then add the input logic so that I can move the mouse around and click on the menu items. Then figure out why it's writing New/Load/Save instead of what it really was supposed to write. Etc etc., lots of work left for it to finally run the actual game.

Edit: fixing the out parameter bug in the unrealscript VM indeed fixed the menu as I had hoped!

[InsanityBringer]

for some reason it seems it's using the Unreal Gold game menu rather than the proper UT one. Weird, but this is super cool to see so far.

[dpJudas]

It is probably because I'm not initializing the 'config' or 'globalconfig' variables in the unrealscripts correctly. I.e. same reason that the Version text to the right is not saying 436 or 469. Right now I'm not reading anything from the .ini or .int files either. Having actual visuals makes it 100 times more fun to debug these issues though. I'm super happy about finally being able to see anything.

[Nash]

I see lens flares, I press like

[leileilol]

I wonder if it'll ever lead to coding your own UCC and cleanroom rewriting the entire ugame uscript because Tim ain't freeing it anytime soon.

(if there's ever a libre media project, i've already made a bunch of u-like detail textures and coronas to start with lol)

[dpJudas]

Personally I don't think anyone will ever rewrite the uscript code. The good news is that since that part comes as part of the game when you buy it, it can simply be treated the same way as we do with doom.wad. If I actually ever get my reimplementation playable I'm sure someone would like to write a new UCC and UnrealEd.

The UT community seems quite dead at this point though. If such things were to happen it would probably require that a lot of new fresh blood would join in on it using my codebase as a base. They have really been suffering hard when only a few select people could ever get access to the code. Even the 469 project is hamstrung by the fact everything has to go through Anthrax (regardless of his best intentions).

[Redneckerz]

Not mines, but a holy grail has this week been unearthed, from 1998. Shot taken by me. Moar details soon.

Note: Not ZDoom.

[Marisa the Magician]

Honestly, glad you're doing all this stuff, dpJudas.

[Enjay]

As am I. IMO UT99 is the Unreal Tournament: accept no substitutes. So it's always good to see the early Unreal engine games getting some love.

[dpJudas]

Thanks guys and gals Enjay is right about it being the only real UT!

[leileilol]

Making a UT99-gameplayandrules OA submod was an urge at one point. dammit i want to full ges blast a jerk again. The least I can do myself is just mimic some of the renderer aesthetic (in idTech3) which involved:

- detail texture fading on the "modulated" mipmaps (no idea how to do the weird fog-like depth clip for the subtractive variation)
- delyed traceline corona fading (al alternative to the expensive depth read flares)
- (libxmp) tracker music playback, along with fading to switch patterns on the client (for dynamic music hookups)
- model shading using some specular calculation instead of diffuse so it has these weird u-like chiaroscuro/rimlighting looks
- mimicing the weapon and view bobbing (eyes bob to the side too)

Good luck when you get to the "volumetricLighting" fog balls!

[dpJudas]

Speaking of the fog in UT - how does that work exactly? I know they get converted into fog textures when it hits the renderdevice (since that's what my vulkandrv.dll renderer received), but what controls the fog?

Is it an actor that emits fog in a radius? If so, I guess it is basically just a question of doing a sphere collision check for finding all surfaces covering it and then treat it like a lightmap light when generating the fog texture.

[leileilol]

This old tweet might have some clue.