fTYPE Defender - Progress Log

[Alienhead]

 

For starters, I love the 'arcade' genera. It was my favorite as a kid and still remains.
For a very long time now I have been wanting to try something, more of an experiment rather a game project. Thanks to Playniax inspiring me with the Galaga Essentials pack and my main project, defendTHIS!, on hold while engine changes take place - I decided to experiment. What started out as a few ideas tossed together quickly became a full blown project for me.

I am attempting to take 4 games from the past, Space Invaders, Defender, Galaga and Zaxxon and mix them all together, modernize the gameplay and do it all in 3D.  After a few months of playing around I have finally got a few playable levels under my belt.  And it all seems to mesh and work together, surprisingly enough.

This is my current ( 6 month ) project, I won't spend any longer on it but I don't think I'll need to. I'll post another worklog next month for completion comparison.

Here's what I got working so far.

 

[SpiderPig]

Looks pretty cool!  I'll be honest though I have never played any of those games.   Looking forward to giving it a go.  Good job!

 

[Thirsty Panther]

Nice work. Love to see the finished product.

Here is a link to the pack that Alien used for those interested.

[Marcousik]

Nice effects. Is there here a tuto or tipps on how to build the shaking / trembling effects (1.25 in the video) ??

 

[Alienhead]

5 hours ago, Marcousik said:

Nice effects. Is there here a tuto or tipps on how to build the shaking / trembling effects (1.25 in the video) ??

 

5 hours ago, Marcousik said:

Nice effects. Is there here a tuto or tipps on how to build the shaking / trembling effects (1.25 in the video) ??

I'll try and put some example code up later this week,  but to get you started I'll tell you that it's all pretty simple, I used lerp's to get the angles and bounces. Most of its done with shader however.

 

function LerpNumber(p0, p1, a)
	a = math.min(a, 1)
	return p0 + ((p1 - p0) * a)
end

 

[Alienhead]

Thanks for the comments guys. 

[StOneDOes]

This is really cool. Is it Leadwerks or Ultra?

[Alienhead]

4 hours ago, St0neD0es said:

This is really cool. Is it Leadwerks or Ultra?

Thanks...   this is LE.

[Russell]

Love this Alienhead!! Very nice and cool looking!! 😍😍😍😍

[Alienhead]

Finally got my zelda-like windwalker grass shader working.  I'm in the process of making the grass lay over when walked upon.  I got close to 10k grass patches, animated and working with the LE veg layer system.   This screenshot was taken on my test system using an elder 750GTX card and its capping between 55-60fps in gameplay time.  I'm currently writing a script that will place semi - dead, yellowish grass around the tree bases, falling leaves and fire fly sparkle emitters.  More later !

 

 

 

[SpiderPig]

Looking great!  Are you using the geometry shader to generate the grass?

[Alienhead]

Quote

Looking great!  Are you using the geometry shader to generate the grass?

Ty, a little bit of both actually..  I had to trim a lot of it out so it would still work nicely with the vegitation system in LE.  I'll show some specifics when I clean the code up some, this was all an experiment until I actually got it all working together, now it's time to go back over the code, clean it up and optimize in a few places.

I don't want to keep clogging up the forums with these pics so I'll host this one,  I got light filtering on in this pic, as well as the trees spawning foliage in their areas. 

http://abinary.life/temp/light.png

Give me a day or two to clean up some areas and I'll youtube a video of the grass in motion. Cya !

[Josh]

7 hours ago, Alienhead said:

I don't want to keep clogging up the forums with these pics so I'll host this one

We have plenty of space for images.  JPEG is best for screenshots.

[Russell]

11 hours ago, Alienhead said:

Give me a day or two to clean up some areas and I'll youtube a video of the grass in motion. Cya !

Can't wait for it!! I love your screenshots! 😍😍😍😍

[Alienhead]

I finished some major parts to my game this week, thought I go over a few points.  Created an entirely new vegetation system using gird pivots, AABB's and vicinity sensors. As you will see in the video it is very fast, it uses NO physics and the shadowing is done in one pass via single surface foliage / trees. 

Also on display in the video is my new Mech-bot character controller.  It pretty much can and does react with everything on the map at one point or another. I don't have water on this map but he also can handle water in a very natural way.

Also finished is my external scripting system, more or less a mod system but takes instructions via a soft-check interrupter which I was lucky enough to make work with Lua code.  Scripting stuff like npc's, paths, conversations etc.. is a snap now that this is in place.

I'm going to spend the next few weeks scripting quests, and ground missions for the game.  This is all part of fTYPE from the earlier videos, it's just the ground portion of the game. 

 

[Alienhead]

Bosses on the way! A few more weeks and I should have them lined out and and ready for live code.  ( I hope : )