Dragoncraft 0.32
Community Forums/Showcase/Dragoncraft 0.32
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| EDIT: Update with a version with improved lighting system. Hopefully in another 2 months more interesting things happen in the game. ;) A while ago I posted my minecraft clone, since then, there isn't all that much new about it, but I've improved speed a LOT since the last time, and at least there is a new grass system included.  Download: http://www.kittomer.com/temp/dragoncraftwip13.zip (2,5 MB) Life busyness is the biggest reason for the slowness of progress, also I foolishly decided I needed to learn c++. Another reason is that I'm trying to convert dragoncraft over to use Irrlicht as renderer. I'm hoping for a speed gain over minib3d, once I optimized it, but I'm having my doubts... If nothing else I'll have some more versatility.  Download: http://www.kittomer.com/temp/dragoncraftirrlicht.zip (4,0 MB) Do you people think it's worth continuing on the irrlicht version? Last edited 2012 |
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| TBH the first one looks more impressive than the irrlicht one and runs better on my systems. |
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| Posting this from my ainol (heh heeh) tablet so cant test the now, both look bloody awsome |
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| The first image does look a lot better than the second one -- the second one looks quite a bit washed out to me. |
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| That style is so weird looking and cool. |
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| Reminds me of lego. |
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| Ahh, thanks everyone! Blitzplotter: Ainol? Glad you think it looks good! JoshK: Well, thanks! I've decided not to do things QUITE like minecraft does, so I'm trying to use different visual gimmicks. Matty: You do know Minecraft, do you? EdzUp[GD], xlsior: Regarding the irrlicht version, that one looks worse because it's not at the same level yet as the minib3D version. I had to disable a lot of stuff until I figured out how to make it work in irrlicht. And I still need to figure out what I can do to optimize things. My question was a bit awkwardly phrased, I meant if you've worked with irrlicht before, can I expect a speed gain over minib3D in extreme situations like these, in your experience? Last edited 2012 |
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| You know that there is a Irrlicht wrapper for blitzmax, right? So you don't need to learn C++ just to port the engine over... |
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| Oh no, I am using the blitzmax wrapper. I'm just learning C++ because. Err. I guess I'm a bit masochistic? |
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| I've heard of minecraft but I still think it looks like lego...which came decades before minecraft... |
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| Well, what can I say, I'd say the scope of lego and minecraft type games is a bit different. I've never really taken the visually creative aspect of minecraft serious, though, since there is... far less painful ways to achieve the same... thing. I'm more interested in the style of gameplay. |
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| Add a save and load world option then I can use it for relaxing whilst between coding sessions ;) |
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| Well, it has one, albeit it's really slow since I haven't implemented per-chunk-saving or compression yet. It will ask you if you want to save when you quit. (It creates two 128 MB files in the program directory, so be warned.) |
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| Excellent :D |
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| Great stuff! :D |
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| Thanks! Just as a heads up, I have fixed two pretty awful bugs, as well as making the grass system single surface:  http://dragoncraft.kittomer.com/?page_id=43 |
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| It's a kind of escape environment. A virtual world of abstract variety. Some background sounds and other characters would be a welcome addition. |
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| Excellent once again, two things come to mind: 1) when you quit out and it saves could it save your inventory as you lose all the blocks you mined. 2) Maybe a light source at night time as when it gets really dark you cant see much, and maybe one when your deep underground. Apart from that its excellent :D |
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| Excellent once again, two things come to mind: 1) when you quit out and it saves could it save your inventory as you lose all the blocks you mined. 2) Maybe a light source at night time as when it gets really dark you cant see much, and maybe one when your deep underground. Apart from that its excellent :D |
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| I will add inventory saving at the next chance! Actually, I added some support for light sources already in the newest version, but due to the nature of my hybrid lighting system, the light sources seem dim and washed out at night. Will have to fix. If you get it and point at a block you can turn it with "Q" into a lamp.  Last edited 2012 |
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| Looking good! My only concern is that sometime soon Mojang will decide to sue the ass off all the clone versions of Minecraft. but then Notch has always been a supporter of indie coders and he stole the idea himself anyway, so who knows? |
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| The question is whether it would be a good idea for Mojang to proceed that way. There already are many clones around, many of them commercial, and even commercially successful. The XBox 360 game "Fortresscraft" generated a revenue exceeding a million already, and Mojang themselfs said they have no intention of suing them or any other clone. The simple reason is, that they most likely wouldn't gain anything from it, and I am fairly certain the creator of "Infiniminer" would probably raise his arm and go "Ahem." at that point. |
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| It's kind of sad how little visible progress there is for this, but I rewrote large parts of the sky and chunk system, and that means that colors for the sky and light are no longer hardcoded, but controlled by a handful of images with gradients. Also, the chunks are now completely self-contained, so I can save and load them on the fly. I fixed some bugs, and inventory and current position are now saved too. It's probably a bit slower than before, though, and there is lighting bugs on chunk edges, especially when the world is freshly created. I'll endeavor to finally have some creatures and more block types by the next time.   Download (2.6 MB): Dragoncraft V0.55 |
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| Nice :D |
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| EdzUp[GD]: Thanks! I made further speed and quality improvements. (I posted the noise code I use for the landscape generation in the code archives, if anyone is interested: http://www.blitzbasic.com/codearcs/codearcs.php?code=2935) Also, the first rudimentary mobs are implemented. X : Create a Jumper. Hold down to create MANY. All newly created jumpers will try to follow you. C : Make all Jumpers move to the pointed spot. Currently mobs are not saved. They will be removed at a certain distance, but they will return as long as the chunk is not unloaded.  Here you are seeing a bunch of them having a... meeting in the water, while others try to follow me. Download: http://dragoncraft.kittomer.com/?page_id=43 Last edited 2012 |
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| Alright... Unfortunately, things don't move as fast as I would like, due to personal stuff, but what the heck. I still managed to overhaul the UI, make a little bit more handy debug system, finish the basics for the NPC/Mob system, change some sound effects, add some music (something old that is mostly placeholder) and add some visual gimmicks. X : Create an entity. C : Make all entities move to the pointed spot. They don't have any sort of intelligent behavior yet, the can just move to a point. Entities can be attacked with left mouse button held down. (They died when they turn black.) Entities can be "poked" with right mouse button. No function yet. Backspace: Show Debug stuff. Currently mobs are not saved. They will be removed at a certain distance, but they will return as long as the chunk is not unloaded.    Download: http://www.kittomer.com/temp/DragoncraftWIP20.zip Some known bugs: -Grass often not properly removed. Reason unknown. -Liquid updates very slowly. Reason known. -Entities get stuck a lot. Reason known. -Removing blocks on chunk edge will create holes into void for a moment. Reason known. -Blocks that get added to a chunk sometimes end up on the other side. Reason known. -Entities fall through ground when chunk is not in view (They reappear at the top of the chunk, this is wanted behavior). Reason unknown. |
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| You know Kittomer, I really have to hand it to you. I think you're doing a pretty good job on this one. My opinion is that visually, it has more appeal than the original. Keep going! |
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| Why thanks! My background is more on the artistic than the programming side, so I hope at least that side of my game(s) will appeal. |
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| I like the look of your UI as well! |
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| I like this project so I am going to pass on my wishes. - Reflective water - The ability to grab and raise/lower the edges of blocks (for making slopes) - Obtainable NPC guards (for guarding your house, resources, etc) - NPCs that live in caves or houses and sell things - The ability to level up skills - Basic flight physics (for building gliders) - Ability to discover electricty Just a few ideas that I got while playing Minecraft. -Entities fall through ground when chunk is not in view (They reappear at the top of the chunk, this is wanted behavior). Reason unknown. Maybe change their gravity to zero when their current chunk is not in view? Last edited 2012 |
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| very nice :D |
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| Hmm I loved the original code you posted. This runs soo slow and not much difference visually. Shame. |
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| BlitzPlotter: Thanks! Stayne: Some of those things will be in the game, although I'll point out that there's a reason why I named it Dragoncraft: You'll be a dragon building lairs and terrorizing the villagefolk. Some some points don't apply here, like guards and electricity. There'll most likely be magic, though. EdzUp: Thanks! Steve: Really? Can you define what you mean by slow, FPS, stuttering, slow world building? On what Computer? Compared to which version exactly, the one on top? Did you adjust the settings? Stream amount and view range especially have a huge impact on performance. Naturally things aren't as optimized as the finalized version will be, and as I add more systems things will get a bit slower, but I do try to optimize show stopping slowdowns away. I can't detect a significant difference in performance of my current version to the one in the first post, and even on an old Pentium 4 with a Radeon X800 GT I managed to get relatively stable 40-60 FPS with my new version, after adjusting graphics settings, of course. Unfortunately, even with the simplicity of the graphics it's going to be hard to make this run very fast on computers that just barely managed to get past the "glorified calculator" stage. When you do a lot of procedural generation, you loose performance, just like you loose flexibility and gain speed with premade assets. I'll try my best, though. :D |
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| OpenGL doesn't even work anymore. My specs are in my sig. I'm talking about 10 seconds delay in drawing, that sort of thing. The original program ran well and so I'm wondering what has changed lol. The original version was awesome by the way. I love this kind of graphic design. |
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| OpenGL doesn't work anymore? You mean there is nothing showing? I do remember that there was this one occasion where the player save data got corrupted and on continue I was dumped at 0,0 and since there was no chunk data at that point the voxel handler got a bit crazy re-sampling a lot of voxels randomly until the current chunk managed to finish streaming. The same thing also happens when you manage to move past and too far away from generated chunks. I should probably add a check for when sampling chunk borders takes too long. Try deleting the chunks folder or simply starting a new game. Otherwise I would be glad for a more.. uh detailed description of what is happening. I test my versions on four different computers of varying performance and OS, so I'm always stumped when it works so badly for some. ;) |
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| Took a closer look and must say really great work! |
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| Sorry, lol. Too busy for proper feedback. Yes OpenGL doesn't even run. I'll try adjusting the settings. It was just a surprise that your first demo ran so well, and this one is pretty bad to be honest. Nothing renders at first. A white screen and a blue couple of lines. Eventually the game starts drawing. I'll dig into this and give you some proper feedback tomorrow. |
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| I have nothing terribly new, but I did make some speed improvements. Hopefully that will bring it closer to olden times. Also! I managed to build a Linux version, to my surprise it compiled without any fuss at all (It's tested and ran flawlessly under Ubuntu 11.10). Both the Windows and Linux version is here: http://www.kittomer.com/temp/dragoncraftWIP21.zip |
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| Now all ya need is a OSX version ;) |
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| Your wish is my command. :P I've got a working Mac now, so I managed to compile a Mac OS version, too. http://www.kittomer.com/temp/dragoncraftWIP22.zip Please tell me if there is trouble with any version. Now that I have versions for all OS-es-es, I'll concentrate on getting some actual progress done. |
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| :P one problem I come across on the win32 build was it crashed when you first click new game, it took ages and ages. The old version used to come up with a bar so you could see what it was doing this one just dropped dead no bar or nothing. It was consuming 40%-50% of the cpu but nothing was happening. Specs: Mac mini, WinXP, 2.5Gb ram, 512Mb NVidia 9400M, all the latest drivers :) Last edited 2012 |
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| Well, when you click new game it sets up the engine, clears old chunks (that can take a sort of long time if there was a LOT) and starts calculations, and I've not found a computer that took more than 3 or 5 seconds for that, so I didn't think a progress bar was necessary anymore. And the slowest processor I tried it with, was an old P4 2Ghz or something. How long exactly did it take before you, I assume, killed the task? What processor does your Mac Mini have? I am stumped, really, I've so far personally tried it on about 8 different computers and never encountered a show stopper. XD |
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| My mac mini has a Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, and it took over five minutes before I killed it. |
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| the screenshots look very unusual but also very interesting! |
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| Kittomer: I got it working by changing drivers and reinstalling the game |
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