OKS - 1900s Sci-fi FPS TC/game [temp name/Mega WIP™]

[Jarewill]

This looks pretty darn good, I especially love that butcher enemy as it heavily hits my aesthetic.
That sector acceleration thing also looks so hecking smooth! It deserves to be in base GZDoom.

[nova++]

That sector acceleration thing also looks so hecking smooth! It deserves to be in base GZDoom.

It's not particularly elegant in truth - it doesn't handle sudden reversals at all (like pressing use to re-close a door midway through opening). Ideally, it would slow to a stop and then reverse, but in this case it just instantly changes direction, because it only calculates the new speed based on distance from the start and end of travel. So to do it properly would require a totally new way of handling sector movement that gives the moving surface a certain degree of inertia and a sustained velocity, then actually accelerates/decelerates that at the required times. Also, it makes the physics freak out sometimes... I had to enable +MOVEWITHSECTOR on all monsters and the player, otherwise when going down somehow the platform escapes from them and you sort of awkwardly bounce down. Not sure why that is...

[nova++]

Today I spent much of my time trying to figure out the dark art of font authoring in this engine. I regret everything, but I at least managed a reasonable placeholder:



Just don't look too hard at the kerning.



You looked, didn't you.


I am struggling to figure out how font colors work, though. The small font always wants to be red-tinted by default. I don't really get how the translations and stuff work as they don't end up having the results I expect - a white label font doesn't get tinted, only colors below white. Which doesn't apply to the large font, only the small one... I don't know, I'm confused.

[Cardboard Marty]

This looks absolutely fantastic and unique, love the aesthetic you're going for! Looking forward to seeing more!

[nova++]

I do feel like the MG fires a bit slow, though.

I'm not 100% sure what its final fire rate will end up being, but the intent was to givei t some real heft as it hits pretty hard. It's sort of inspired by the slow fire rate of some weapons in the early days of automatic fire (like the Chauchat machine gun of WW1). Of course, much faster firing ones existed at the time, too, so it's still more of a deliberate choice. I want to make it have a much larger blood splatter than, say, a shotgun pellet, and I need to beef up the sound a bit (and maybe even the damage a bit more) to really convey its nature as a high-tier weapon.

[nova++]

Something new coming soon - need to finish a few more mechanics for it and then I'll make a demo video for it

[nova++]

Well, I got super sidetracked by re-porting my source changes back over to gzdoom instead of lzdoom, I think it's just probably better if I keep things up to date... there aren't a whole lot though so it's not too hard to do. After that I've been working on the fire system that will make the flare gun achieve its full potential.

More visually interesting, I've been waffling on whether I want to include dynamic lighting for particular objects such as the flares. I think it enhances the look, but a part of me kind of feels like it starts to get a bit unfaithful to the intended aesthetic I'm going for. I think I am leaning toward including them, though, just only using them tastefully and selectively in places where the visual is greatly enhanced by it.



I was hoping to have done the demo video by now, but I want to get it looking nicer before then. Also, I discovered that I can totally break gzdoom by running it on a network drive from another PC, then running it on the host PC again. Totally flips its lid and won't work again until I reboot. Wasted an hour trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

[Gez]

More visually interesting, I've been waffling on whether I want to include dynamic lighting for particular objects such as the flares. I think it enhances the look, but a part of me kind of feels like it starts to get a bit unfaithful to the intended aesthetic I'm going for. I think I am leaning toward including them, though, just only using them tastefully and selectively in places where the visual is greatly enhanced by it.

The Elder Scrolls Chapter 1: Arena (released in March 1994) had dynamic lights, from objects and from spells cast by the player. And it's a game that looks like this:

I wouldn't worry about dynlight detracting from the retro aesthetic too much. However, a "period accurate" restriction you could have is make them all pure white, because colored lighting was trickier to do in software with acceptable performances than having a single fade-to-black look-up table.

[Enjay]

And it really wasn't much later (1996) that Duke Nukem 3D was doing its very colourful sector lighting-like effects, the same year Quake was wowing me with the way rockets lit up the scenery as they went past and Quake 2, the following year, raised the bar several more notches. I mean, OK, those last two are true 3D games but things moved pretty quickly and a mid-90s aesthetic could draw from any of those and still be "period accurate".

The real questions, however, are:
What do you think looks best?
What fits with how you envisage your game?
Are you happy without dynlights? / Would you be happier with them?

Being "period accurate" is all well and good, but you're making the game in 2021 using an engine that harnesses many modern technologies. In such a situation "period accuracy" is only an aesthetic veneer anyway.

[nova++]

Yeah, I try not to let the little voice flailing about "authenticity" have toooo much sway. I try to let it keep me aesthetically consistent but I have to smack it sometimes when it gets pushy. They already can be toggled anyway, so...

In the background I have a bit of "meta-lore" for the game that places it in the 1996-1997 era by some unknown small team of developers working from, I don't know, rural Maine. Hacked slopes and dynamic lighting into their unlicensed doom engine mods can just be one of their lost achievements. I dunno, something about imagining this in the back of my mind as a source port for a lost game is fun.

As for the flare gun, I pretty much just need to get some fire particles together... I am trying my hand at painting them from scratch instead of just using photo textures, although I should probably just get some placeholders first.



It's either a flame or a chicken nugget

[Enjay]

Most games have an in-game backstory of some sort but it's pretty cool that you've got a back story for the dev team and process in your head too. I like that idea.

[nova++]

This tangentially reminds me, I need to think of some future SFX directions as well. I've been trying to make as much stuff as possible from scratch, either from my own recordings or CC0 stuff from freesound.org, there are currently a few exceptions though. Namely the Butcher's sounds, they are partially derived from monster screams from Return to Castle Wolfenstein. And... I love them as they are, but I also do want to move to something from scratch at some point. Hmmmmmmppph... I guess I can make some awful screeching and moaning noises into my mic and remix that sometime

I've also been having a mild struggle with audio bitrates. I am quite fond of the delectable crunchy sound of 11khz audio and nearest-neighbor resampling, but I have to admit it is very hard to get things sounding good under those limitations when you are dealing especially with a lot of high frequencies. Gunshots in particular have been very frustrating to work out. I guess in general it seems the more headroom I have the better it goes. Increasing the bitrate works fine too in some circumstances, but ironically a 22khz or even 44khz sound can sound not quite as crisp as a nearest-sampled 11khz one.

The lesson here is: Don't be like me. Don't do this to yourself.

[nova++]

And at last, here is the flare gun and fire extravaganza -

[nova++]

Haven't had as much visually interesting to show lately, I've stepped back from monsters and weapons and have instead been experimenting with finding something resembling a good mapmaking workflow (woe to we, the linux mappers) and re-implementing some stuff left over from the lzdoom-gzdoom switcharoo, like the sector acceleration.

I do have something to share, though:



I've been experimenting with the idea of ZScript based level logic, as opposed to ACS, and this elevator is a prototype of this (the other parts moving with it are just Sector_SetLink though).
Just placing down this elevator control actor is already so much more convenient than jumping through the ACS hoops... I think I may have started down a dangerous road.

[nova++]

I think it's about time I started working on and talking about environment stuff...

Over time, as I've been developing all the other stuff, I think a fairly clear vision of the three particular aesthetics of the game have crystallized fairly well -

1 - Lunar city/other human structures
The city (which I still need to name) is built out of a mixture of local and imported materials, following the architecture of the turn-of-the-century inspiration - substantial amounts of brick and stone, large framing beams of iron and wood holding up the containment structure to keep the poisonous moon air out. Generally a warmer color palette, earthy materials, as well as greens and other colors from imported vegetation. I don't dare call it "steampunk" but there are similar elements in the palettes to be sure. In addition, the city has a canal system that links up with rivers outside, connected through large airlocks so lunar boaters can go in and out and cruise the rivers and seas at their leisure.

This is where I tentatively start in creating environment assets - I recently remembered that I have a copy of Aseprite, and with that I finally have returned to texturing for the game. It's been so long since I've done any texturing, and in this case, they're actual actual hand painted textures instead of just crushed photos like I was doing before.
Thusly, behold, texture #1, Grimy Block Wall 01 -





2 - Lunar wilderness
The moon itself is very different from the artificial structures built on it - strange vegetation and animals with an exotic color cast, and the earth in the sky peeking through the clouds in the thin atmosphere. The plants and trees are white-leaved with a multitude of colors of flowers and fruits popping out of them as strange vines curl and creep across the landscape. The landscape is jagged and harsh, although this doesn't deter the vegetation, which clings to whatever surface it can. There is substantial inspiration here from types of infrared film photography:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... _Trees.jpg


https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... _IR_M8.jpg




3 - Extradimensional domain of artistry and evil
... is a whole subject of its own. Another time...



I hope I am not causing annoyance with my repeated posts. I don't want to be spammy.