> I realized recently that here on this list (and > maybe not on this list), I have access to some of the best and brightest in > the > game development world. So... any ideas?
Ummm, I'm hardly the best or the brightest, and I'm not even in the professional game development world, but I've been doing an awful lot of OpenGL research just now for a freeware game I'm writing. So I thought I'd post . . . With respect to the Spectrum/SAM, I did the 'not very good' partial Chaos remake, Anarchy about three years ago, and the slightly more recent 'fun but not brilliant' OpenGL Deathchase 3d remake with the exact same name. My current project is, continuing my immense lack of imagination, an OpenGL remake of the old PC game, Sports 4d Driving. But enough about me! > I know this is a vague request, but currently we're > looking at doing any one of three different things - a 1st person > puzzlesolver/shooter, a real-time strategy game, or an updated port of > Tempest > ;-) Did you play Tempest 4000, or 3000, or whatever it was called, the one that runs on those slightly upmarket DVD players? That was pure quality! This is speaking as someone who still has Tempest 2000 installed. Anyway, in games with a first person display (or anything in a closed environment), people still slavishly follow whatever iD are doing in technology terms. Which means BSP trees, shadow volumes rendered using the stencil buffer (NVidia have some good papers on this), and if you have the latest GeForce or Radeon, per pixel lighting effects (everywhere on the whole internet seems to have papers on this). For an open environment (which I assume you would use for a real time strategy game?) ROAM is a very simple but very good adaptive meshing approach for heightfield maps, although obviously it won't help a lot if you are using mostly an overhead view. Mind you, in that case a simple quad or octree would probably do, since surely level of detail isn't going to be an issue? On the topic of octrees, HP and NVidia have occlusion extensions (in GL at least) which can really speed these up. NVidia support the HP extension as a subset of their own, the main difference being that with HP you describe a polygon and it tells you if any of it would be visible, whereas the NVidia extension tells you how much would be visible, allowing you to do some LOD stuff there too. I don't think there is much to say about a Tempest update . . . volumetric shadows and per-pixel stuff would look nice, but I guess LOD and visibility is not an issue in such an engine, unless I am not thinking of something? -Thomas ______________________________________________________ Check out all the latest outrageous email attachments on the Outrageous Email Chart! - http://viral.lycos.co.uk
