Dicta Boelcke update

HarryZhe · 30 March 2010, 05:23 PM

A lot of the content of this post is lifted from my announcement post on another (game development-oriented) forum. I basically edited it to seem less patronising to you savvy folk, and removed a bit of excess art tech information which probably is meaningless to the majority of the userbase here.

Some of you will remember this project from before the posts were culled (and hopefully you are happy to see it back and making progress... You didn't think we'd let it die did you?)

But for those who don't remember it, i'll give a new introductory post here as well.

The team is comprised of myself, doing all the art and tooling, and an astrophysicist friend of mine, Hernan, doing the programming.

Basically, it's a lightweight ww1 air combat pseudo-sim (realistic flight physics and damage model, but quick jump-in action and easy controls)

Oh yeah, and you can play it for free.
And don't have to pay extra for more planes.

You can follow us on moddb:
VIDEOS WILL BE POSTED THERE BTW.
Dicta Boelcke PC, PSP, Linux game - Mod DB

It's thus far unreleased. I know it's lame but seriously, it's not far off. We're both studying and this isn't an assignment, so progress is (understandably?) not all full steam ahead and more like sporadic bursts when we both happen to have a couple of days to dedicate.

The engine is scratchbuilt. We use openGL for graphics, SDL for window rendering, openAL for audio and devIL to load textures (though an objective of ours is removing devIL dependancy)
Basically your standard setup for a simple scratchbuilt portable engine.

This game should run well even on older computers.

Now, I know all of you want to know, which planes will be available.
In the first beta, at least two planes, maybe four, will be in.
We have a lot more planes than that modelled, but we still need to set them up with their physical model for damage and stuff before they are running smooth ingame.

The final game will have at least 8, and possibly as many as 15-20 flyables. This will be a while off.

And yes, we plan on including co-operative play in two seaters. This is something i'm very excited for and won't let hernan forget about it

As for the technical info...
AUDIO: We have our sound system more or less good. This was largely handled by open AL, so positional audio and doppler and everything work just fine. Our sounds are just WAVs.

NETCODE: Hernan i think must surely be autistic, because he's coded from scratch a working multiplayer netcode. It runs smoothly even over hamachi and our first couple of combat tests have surprisingly fun and accessible - as far as flight sims go.

GRAPHICS: There's a lot of optimisation to be done in the graphics department, but we have a few nifty things like fake volumetric clouds (inspired by, but implemented in a simpler way than, the shadow of the collossus smoke volumes) and a very simple animation system/model format.

A first person cockpit is planned, and some art tests done - but this isn't yet implemented and won't be in the first beta. A few tricks are up our sleeves when it comes to first person, so if you are interested be sure to look out for news regarding that.

TOOLS: This is possibly my favourite part. Totally custom planes (with user defined layouts and capabilities) will be possible. So far the only plane is a "scout" configuration and only the appearance is altered.
All the plane setups will be done through maxscripts. You could potentially make custom aircraft in other programs, but youd have to do a bunch of manual .txt editing... and let's be honest, that's lame. The max tools will export a max file into a rather clumsy but functional format used by the game engine. All the user has to do is name the parts appropriately and position a few dummy components. We also aim to support custom paintjobs (as all aircraft paint was in those days) which are fetched from a URL when playing multiplayer. The provided textures are close to factory paint - or as standardised as possible.

GAMEPLAY: So far it's just team deathmatch. We have a few ideas for game modes, such as balloon defense (akin to rise of flight. It's a shame they beat us to the punch on this one because we thought the gamemode up independantly)
Anyone on these forums with ideas for gameplay modes, please post them up. Advice from you folk would be particularly appreciated.

Another thing we are very keen on implementing eventually is co-operative flying of observation aircraft, as this is something seldom portrayed in ww1 air combat games, but very often requested.

Sorry for the massive TL;DR, but hopefully it wasnt too hard to find the things you wanted to know and ignore the things you didnt care about. I sincerely hope you may find something of interest here.

Now to finish with some screenshots. No combat shots as of yet, next time we do a combat test, we will be making some videos and releasing those as our first public showcase of dicta's combat. For now, just flying, and just the two beta planes. Sorry

Once again, feel free to show your support on moddb-
Dicta Boelcke PC, PSP, Linux game - Mod DB

again, the feedback you guys can provide will be GREATLY appreciated, especially with regard to gameplay ideas. While i love the ww1 air combat premise, the range of different sims i've played are regrettably limited (partially due to them being too old to actually run easilly on my system)
So if anyone would like to make any notes or cautions (for example, things to avoid which were done in other games and didn't work out as well as they should) or ideas for different gameplay modes or features (really interested to hear these in particular) please do feel free to post!

SCMc · 30 March 2010, 08:35 PM

Congratulations on what you have done so far.

I think that your British planes could be a bit more brown, but that is a matter of debate, so do it to suit your own tastes.

From what I can see your wings on the Albatros are a reasonable representation of lozenge, but the crosses do not appear correct. If you PM me an e-mail address, I will send some bitmaps that you can use to have better crosses.

Steve

HarryZhe · 30 March 2010, 09:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SCMc

Congratulations on what you have done so far.

I think that your British planes could be a bit more brown, but that is a matter of debate, so do it to suit your own tastes.

From what I can see your wings on the Albatros are a reasonable representation of lozenge, but the crosses do not appear correct. If you PM me an e-mail address, I will send some bitmaps that you can use to have better crosses.

Steve

I know what you mean on the crosses, but our textures are very low res so that they can run potentially on handheld and older computers. This means i actually only have a limited number of pixels to represent the crosses with, and thus the curves arent quite right. Ill have a look again and see if i can get them looking any better but i can't make any promises.
As for the british colouration, i'll alter it a little. A lot of the pictures i saw had lots of variation in them so i couldnt decide on which tone to choose but if it stands out as "too green" i'll alter it

SCMc · 30 March 2010, 10:34 PM

When I did skins for Red Baron 3D, The entire fuselage skin were about 256x64 (none of the skins could be more than 256 pixels in either direction). If I remember correctly fuselage crosses were about 24-30 pixels, but I was able to get results that looked like they were much higher resolution:

Voss' Albatros D.III

Strähle's Alb. D.V (using a D.Va)

If you look, you can see individual pixels, but blending results in smooth curves with fairly accurate proportions.

I accomplished this by

Starting with large, accurate insignia.
copying the area of the skin where I wanted to put the insignia.
Elarging the copied area by integer factors to fit the insignia.
Pasting the insignia on the copied area.
Reduced the area to its original size in a way that averaged the pixels (Smart Resizing in Paint Shop Pro).
Pasting the area back in its original location.

Steve

HarryZhe · 31 March 2010, 02:37 AM

Hehe, all of our planes are mapped onto a single 256x256 texture, every single part, with both sides of the fuselage mapped separately.

Looking at the textures again, it seems i might be able to get the shape more correct on the wing, but i have my doubts for the fuselage, and am quite sure it wont get much better at all on the tail.

The reason i'm not inclined to use sized down high resolution graphics is because the algorithm scaling them down can cause them to have uneven pixels on either side - which wouldnt matter as much on a higher res texture, but when a pixel represents a good inch or more of the surface area, it becomes a problem. Antialiasing at such a low res also leads to a blurred look.

But i will definitely have another look at the wing insignia.

SCMc · 31 March 2010, 08:34 AM

Try this:

I changed both wing crosses, 1 fuselage and 1 rudder cross. I did not texture the upper wing cross. The whites may still be too white and the blacks too black, but it should give you some idea.

Steve

HarryZhe · 31 March 2010, 07:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SCMc

Try this:
[IMG]http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/3820/albatros.jpg[IMG]

I changed both wing crosses, 1 fuselage and 1 rudder cross. I did not texture the upper wing cross. The whites may still be too white and the blacks too black, but it should give you some idea.

Steve

Thanks for the advice. The UV layout isnt particularly user friendly, so I will probably need to clean it up a bit (and of course make the underlying material a bit more visible) but this should give me a good base to work from.

and a new video showing some damage
[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqpWRb8VY8g"]YouTube- AOP.wmv[/nomedia]

zoomzoom · 8 April 2010, 10:26 AM

Wow. I have a suggestion. If you guys could translate this into an ipod app game, it would simply rock! If you want an example, check out AERA, a very cool flying ipod game app. Since this is geared to older machines, it might work.

ZZ.

HarryZhe · 9 April 2010, 03:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zoomzoom

Wow. I have a suggestion. If you guys could translate this into an ipod app game, it would simply rock! If you want an example, check out AERA, a very cool flying ipod game app. Since this is geared to older machines, it might work.

ZZ.

That's something we'd love to see happen... the only problem is we'd need to charge for it. Developing for iphone isnt cheap

it can only legally be done on mac hardware, so it's a $500 investment from the outset, which for 2 university students is a bit much. When there's a stable release for PC, and if our feedback tells us that people like the game, we will more seriously look into it.

LewisS · 15 April 2010, 11:37 PM

I'd like to add easily importing 3D models, well because I make 3d models

I don't know what formats your sim can support, I can export to a lot of different 3D formats though.
Some of my work, These are already available at RC Sim.de in the FMS RC sim free downloads. I've just been doing small improvements and details

Cheers

Lewis