LuciferStar very very early tech demo

[JeroMiya]

In keeping with the "release early, release often" policy, I've posted an extremely early tech demo of LuciferStar, which I picked back up again over the holidays. You can download it here:
http://homepage.mac.com/jeremybell/FluidLuciferTechDemo.dmg


The old project page is at http://www.umich.edu/~jeremyeb/LuciferStar but that page is very very out of date and will soon be moving to http://homepage.mac.com/jeremybell/LuciferStar/index.html

If the second link doesn't work, try the first.

This tech demo shoes off a few things:
Terrain engine (Using Demeter) with per vertex fog. Use z and x to toggle smooth shading and wire-frame to see the tessellation going on behind the scenes.

Projectiles: Projectile system with various mutators (like gravity and hovering). Press the mouse button to fire green projectiles. Move towards projectiles to push them around.

Hover physics: Main character and projectiles hover over the terrain somewhat realistically.

Dissipating magic system: Press spacebar to boost upwards. This uses magic, indicated by the small green bar (ignore the red bar for now). This puts magic into the system. Green bar regenerates as you absorb magic from the environment. Watch the magic flow and dissipate.

Next release:
ï right and left movement as well as forward and back (done).
ï Smart magic infusion using breadth first traversal. In other words, if you infuse a pixel with more magic than it can hold, the remaining magic will flow into neighbors, which will then overflow into their neighbors until no pixels overflow.
ï More projectile mutators.
ï Prettier mini-map. Larger magic and health bars. Magic bar changes from green to yellow.
ï*Laser. Uses demeter's ray tracer to intersect with the terrain.

Next next release:
ï Textures on the terrain. Terrain "editor" (just editing the detail texture splats). Compiled terrain format.
ï TBD

Jeremy Bell
WolverineSoft Project Coordinator
www.umich.edu/~wsoft

[igame3d]

Pretty cool. Thats a lot of freakin polygons!
Is the engine generating the map or is that imported from somewhere?
Ran ok...
Don't think your green ball thing is working as expected...looks to me like they were clumping. They need to be a tad smaller too..

The hover effect is ..hmm a little too real. Lots of bouncy bouncy. Would be interesting to see the effect with accelerating..you know like in a car.

until next time.

[AnotherJake]

I'm not an adaptive mesh fan because I dislike the terrain popping. The only game I've ever played where I lived with it was Delta Force and even that was annoying. I like the fog effect though. The physics seems to be working okay except the green balls don't get pushed around at all. Load time seems excessively long but I assume that for the terrain vertex generation. Keep going!

[JeroMiya]

Oops. The pusher mutator is in the current dev version and not the one linked to. I'm currently adding a feature which isn't done yet so I'll upload a new release when that's finished and working.

Jeremy Bell
WolverineSoft Project Coordinator
www.umich.edu/~wsoft

[Mark Levin]

Looks pretty cool... You should probably default smooth shading to on, the performance cost is almost nothing on modern hardware and it looks nicer :)

What's the purpose of the purple square behind the magic bars?

You should also stop people from walking off the edge of the world, that was confusing until I hovered back onto the terrain.

[JeroMiya]

New URL: http://homepage.mac.com/jeremybell/FluidLucifer.sit

This version uses SDL and SDL_Image (temporarily). A lot of people have been saying that it's not starting up because dyld can't find SDL or SDL_Image. I've embedded the frameworks in the application. It SHOULD work (it does on mine) but if it doesn't on yours please post the run log (console) and your OS version. Mine is a clean 10.3.2 install with xcode 1.1.

Changes in this version: Overall texture and detail texture. Note that the texture doesn't yet match the terrain. I just pulled a random terrain looking texture for testing. Also there is a detail texture.

Left and right movement.
Terrain is made to look larger. No longer can see the entire terrain when you boost. Still adjusting this, so don't worry.

Magic is added more intelligently when you boost. Uses a breadth first traversal to push magic into the system rather than just setting it to 1.0f. This makes more interesting effects when you boost in open areas.

Jeremy Bell
WolverineSoft Project Coordinator
www.umich.edu/~wsoft

[Josh]

Crashes for me. Log below:

[CODE]dyld: /Users/joshaber/Desktop/FluidLucifer/FluidLucifer.app/Contents/MacOS/FluidLucifer Undefined symbols:
/Users/joshaber/Desktop/FluidLucifer/FluidLucifer.app/Contents/MacOS/../Plugins/SDLTextureLoader.bundle undefined reference to _btowc expected to be defined in /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
/Users/joshaber/Desktop/FluidLucifer/FluidLucifer.app/Contents/MacOS/../Plugins/SDLTextureLoader.bundle undefined reference to _iswctype expected to be defined in /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
/Users/joshaber/Desktop/FluidLucifer/FluidLucifer.app/Contents/MacOS/../Plugins/SDLTextureLoader.bundle undefined reference to _mbsrtowcs expected to be defined in /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
/Users/joshaber/Desktop/FluidLucifer/FluidLucifer.app/Contents/MacOS/../Plugins/SDLTextureLoader.bundle undefined reference to _towlower expected to be defined in /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
/Users/joshaber/Desktop/FluidLucifer/FluidLucifer.app/Contents/MacOS/../Plugins/SDLTextureLoader.bundle undefined reference to _towupp

[JeroMiya]

For those of you with 10.2, until I can fix the problem with libSystem, just use this link instead:
http://homepage.mac.com/jeremybell/FluidLuciferNT.sit

[codemattic]

Works ok on my paltry g4/400 ati128 tower with panther. It gets maybe 5-10 fps (Im guesstimating - is there any way to tell?). It takes a very long time to start up - and this is while the app icon is still bouncing in the dock - which is a bad thing imo since many users will assume its frozen. A progress bar while its loading would be nice.

I dont like the mouse control - its *very* hard for me to control - Im often stuck looking at the floor or sky - or I zoom way past the direction I wanted to see. This could partly be because of my slow system and the engine compensating for the low fps. I think jumping the mouse to the center of the window and then measuring how far it strays is a bad way to read the mouse. Cant you read the delta mouse instead? There are methods in both cocoa and carbon to do that.

Anyway JM, you have created some nice terrain - it looks like a really good start. Unlike igame3d. I liked the bounciness of it - so to each his own. The way magic can be collected and dissipated is very clever and I imagine will make for some cool gameplay possibilities. I wish you could "see" the magic somehow on the terrain as opposed to just in the 'radar' screen. But cool nonetheless.

go man go,
Codemattic

[codemattic]

OK - Ive switched mouses - and now I have much better control. The mouse I was using was the wacom tablet mouse which uses absolute positioning which I guess clashes with how LuciferStar reads mouse moves. When I plugged in the apple puck mouse it ran much smoother.

[JeroMiya]

New in this release:
Terrain matches the terrain texture. (still just using Demeter sample data)
This terrain also demonstrates detail texture painting. Look close at the difference between the green grass and the muddy dirty areas on the map. They have different detail textures. Neato.

Overall fog instead of per vertex fog. temporarily.

A laser pusher. Fire a bunch of green bullets into the same area, then point towards that group and press t. They'll go flying. Just testing applying mutators for new effects. In this case, the mutator I wrote to implement the hovering camera is used to implement an explosion force. Next version will have the same effect tied to the ship from the green things to simulate the effect of the boost engines on the projectiles.

This version runs on 10.2! I had to change the SDK to 10.2, but in fact I think I just needed to link against -lc, that may work.

Jeremy Bell
WolverineSoft Project Coordinator
www.umich.edu/~wsoft

[JeroMiya]

The mouse movement way is the only way to do a continuos mouse look with GLUT. Taking mouse deltas with Carbon make it more difficult to port to other platforms. The final game will be full screen and have the cursor hidden.

[JeroMiya]

Oops, forgot to mention. the link is the same:
http://homepage.mac.com/jeremybell/FluidLucifer.sit

It's 9MB this time. It'll go down again. I'll switch back over to the old terrain. I want to keep the terrain about the same size, 512x512 for stress testing as I add features.