A Preview of Island Deathmatch
Community Forums/Showcase/A Preview of Island Deathmatch
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| Hello As some of you might recall i'm a new guy to Blitz and I just started working on my second game. This one I am writting to learn about landscaping in Blitz and multiplayer. The landscape I think is fairly standard for a Blitz game, i've learned a lot doing it though in my attempts to "go a little beyond" the normal that all failed ! :). [IMAGE SUPERCEDED BELOW] The foliage I am quite proud of, I dont know how it compares to BlitzGrass/BlitzTree games as i'm still a bit new and that does seem to be a popular method of putting in fauna, but I decided to write my own. The map used in these screens is 50x50 view distances in size and is populated with 120,000 bushes/grasses and 1,250 trees running at 20fps on a GeForce2 MX card (my intended minimum specification). I plan to make the graphics scaleable so that the fps can be higher, but for this type of game (hidden & dangerous style deathmatch) I think 20fps is playable for a low end system, but low quality settings could run at around 60fps. I'm about to start on the multiplayer code and hope to have it playtested during the week for a release next weekend. [IMAGE SUPERCEDED BELOW] |
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| Looks very nice. |
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| Nice. You might want to have a look at this : http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=34670 |
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| Cool man. Nice to see a new game :D |
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| "You might want to have a look at this" A mesh landscape by the looks of things? Yes I sometimes model them myself in Max and even wrote a program to texture them for me, but I wanted to play with the Blitz landscape commands. I may do a model landscape in my next Blitz game to compare how BB3D handles them. The Blitz terrain commands are very good, the only dissapointment to me is that I have not yet managed to construct the textures fast enough on the fly to make them truly dynamic and still retain visual quality, if and when I can solve that (and I have ideas to test) it would allow for really visually detailed worlds of considereable size. Mind you, for gameplay purposes large maps often get in the way, it's just nice to be able to make 'em is all ;). First though i'll finish this as I want to look at the multiplayer stuff in Blitz - and I have a LAN session planned in a couple of weeks and want to try this and my other multiplayer game in dev out (a motor racing sim not written in Blitz). |
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| I did a few more screenies tonight, as i've not had much time to program I just tweaked the grasses a bit. [IMAGE SUPERCEDED BELOW] [IMAGE SUPERCEDED BELOW] |
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| Why does it say 'Crouch Mode' and 'Run Mode' upside-down? |
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| Because this is the Australian edition. |
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| Right... (wonder if he will harm himself or others) Nice pics, but it's a bad idea to include such an fps count, on the other hand, a GF2 MX is a sort of an excuse. What processor do you own? I wanna know if your computer in general is a good minimum specs system. (You'll be forced into hours of testing if you say 600 Mhz Celeron) |
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| My computer will run the landscape at 60fps with low detail settings, but that wouldn't look as good for the screenies. The CPU is OK at 2Ghz, but the graphics card and intentional use of slower but older drivers dont help (slower drivers keep it cooler because it is over heating in this heat wave - i've got the side off, with a fan blowing at it!). I'm struggling with the multiplayer commands at the moment, they are a complete departure from what i'm used too in the way they work. I thought as a learning exercise i'd knock up a simple multi-threaded web server and I can't get that working either! I think i'll be spending the weekend reading up on tutorials... |
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| Well as of mid night tonight I finished my multi-threading web server and think I now more or less understand multi player in Blitz, so the big question I have now is - what is that GNet thing in the Blitz community, can I use it, is it free, and how ? If anyone knows, i'd like to hear from you please :) http://www.blitzbasic.com/gnet/gnet_servers.php |
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| GNet is just a way of finding games, a bit like GameSpy. The server registers a game with a GNet server ( usually this site, but you can get the php to do your own central server if you want ) and then clients connect to the GNet server to get a list of active games. It's just a lot nicer and easier than using IP addresses and Port Numbers in text boxes. It's entirely free to use. |
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| Ah sweet thank you Sybixsus ;). I cant run php on my own server so i'll be using the GNet service here - it's free publicity anyway to have my game listed ! The web server software I just wrote to learn the multiplayer commands is actually being trialled by my web host next week and if they like it then I might be building game server functionality directly in to it, and a lot of new dynamic content for my site will follow :). Of course, they might just look at me and say, "You wrote that?" and giggle. |
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Here are some new screenshots showing some of the scenic improvements I have made. HQ Image  HQ Image  HQ Image: None - Problem between chair and keyboard  HQ Image  HQ Image The multiplayer is almost completely functional using an online game server for match making. The characters move about and can fire and talk to each other. There is little or no interface so far and some game play elements still need to be added which I hope to get done this weekend. I think i'm still more or less on target for a release on Thursday 1st July, depending on any technical issues i'm yet to descover. |
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| That looks very nice! Great job so far. |
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