Re: [Help-liquidwar6] Web page, team profiles, weapons & voxels

[Christian Mauduit]

Hi,

Le 03/09/11 20:22, Kasper Hviid a écrit :
> Hello again!
>
> Christian, I still haven't got that final website worked out, but in
> the meantime heres some quick feedback. I'm truly impressed by your
> recent activity ... wave effects, respawn-delay ... amazing! :-O
Attached a capture of the wave effect (not very impressive in static 
mode, but well...) and the wrap/polarity mode enabled on X-axis. Still 
needs some debugging as scrolling is still broken in some ways, but I do 
hope it will be OK for 0.0.11beta.

> VOXELS
> ------
>
> This is great news! I considered asking about the visual appearence of
> fighters, but felt that you had too many balls in the air already. I
> have played Minecraft, but I didn't even knew it was called voxels.
> I'm very new to this. Designing 3D pixelart really sounds like fun ..
> but a static 16*16*16 voxel seen from above is impossible to tell
> apart from a 16*16 bitmap sprite ... how should we take advantage of
> the 3D shape?
Well, there's still a difference. I think Blood and some other 
end-of-the-90's did use Voxel. AFAIK, Ken Silverman 
(http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm) who developped the Build engine for 
Duke Nukem 3D did those "voxels in an otherwise classic FPS" trick. 
Well, anyway, the problem with sprites is that, like in DOOM, you end up 
drawing sprite at angle 0, then sprite at angle 45, 90, 135, well, 8 
frames per sprite at least, and it does always look like a sprite. A 
voxel map will always look "as good" from any angle. And, if we have (I 
said "if") a voxel engine for LW, then we can view the map at any angle, 
have the camera rotate, zoom, whatsoever.

BTW, Minecraft engine, ain't a full voxel-based renderer, in fact the 
information is *stored* as voxels but renders the as vextices. It's fine 
and wise because triangles rendering is soooo accelerated these days. 
However, with the arrival of OpenMP (simplified interface to 
multithreaded/parralelized applications), OpenCL (access to video 
hardware for regular apps) voxel engines might use the recent hardware 
in a better way than in the 80s. Jon Olick has a nice demo on modern 
voxel capabilities: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI

Additionnally, using nice voxel sprites might actually allow us to 
*downscale* maps. Let me explain: today a 320x180 map (the logicial one) 
might look pixelized, and naturally, the game tries to push the 
resolution to the maximum, resulting in melting CPUs and choppy 
animation. But the reality is that game is fun in 160x90, only finer 
resolution is here for eye candy, except on some very peculiar maps, but 
generally speaking, more than 100 000 points/squares in a map is just 
too much. So if we have a 320x180 map with voxel fighters, thenin a 
global view, with the perspective and such, we can imagine the closest 
fighters take something like 10x10 pixels, and the farest ones 2x2 
pixels. This is very fine, the fighters in the back are mere points, the 
ones in the front appear with detail, that's all we want. And if you 
zoom, you can see the fight is hard between real fighters, the idea is 
to give the impression of a massive battle with many contenders, which 
is not only an impression, it's what LW really is, only current renderer 
doesn't show this obviously.

Makes sense?

> SPECIAL EFFECTS
> ---------------
>
> Some brainstorm about which visual effects could be applied when a
> player uses his special action:
>
> - Shaking of the screen
> - Music video zoom: The camera zooms in and out quickly
> - Fighters changes brightness randomly.
> - Team cursors changes.
> - Sound effects.
> - Different wave effect
Yeah, thanks for those ideas, any special action should indeed have a 
customized (colorfull!) effect. I note your ideas.

> TEAM COLORS
> -----------
>
> A few points irritates me, but I'm not sure anything can be done:
>
> It is a bit confusing that Fast also increases the numbers of attacks
> and thus makes the attacks stronger. So if I just want to make the
> team move around faster, I would have to increase Fast, but I would
> have to decrease Aggressive to make it stay somewhat the same.
I can change this, the "only" step it is divide the attack if speed is 
up. Might require an update on your rules.xml anyway...

> I think Attack, Defence and Speed would sound more logical than
> Aggressive, Vulnerable and Fast. But we have used those words for
> other concepts ... sword, shield and shoes?
Well, that is programmer stuff, or at least my habits. I chose 
vulnerable because defense is already used somewhere (in the global 
settings) this way I know very fastm, when reading the code, when I read 
aggressive, that we're talking about the attack, but in the "attack per 
team, for profiles" context. I greatly simplifies coding and helps 
tracking bug, updating code etc.

> Anyways ...
>
> I have created a new set of team settings. It is based on the colors
> position in the color circle. Long wavelength equals faster speed.
Cool, and thanks for the PDF, nice to have the explanation.

> The settings are not perfect and adjustment will be needed, but each
> team has a fixed concept, like "EXTREMELY fast, but also very
> vulnerable." Red, green, and yellow has a single strong point. The
> rest of the teams has a single strong point and a single weak point.
I'll try those, BTW it's easier to try with the current work in 
progress, which has a no-brainer "put me 9 bots on this map" option ;)

> I have not used any neutral team this time. I felt it was an illusion
> to declare a certain team the normal one. Sure, we could give a team
> some average values and call it "normal". But calculating the average
> skin color of humans does not mean that we have discovered the skin
> color of "normal" humans. I felt that a "normal" color worked against
> the asymmetrical concept.
I agree, neutral doesn't make sense. It's a theoricall "defaults" but 
probably does not have many practical applications. And it's 
conceptually disturbing.

> The upload also contains a new fumes.png with a mirrored sky theme,
> created with widescreen monitors in mind.
Does that mean there's something special to do in "widescreen" mode, do 
you think I should check for some width/height ratio before using this?

Have a nice day,

Christian.

--
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://www.ufoot.org/ ___ __/\__
Liquid War 6 - http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/     / _")\~ \~/
"Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non _/ /   /_ o_\
ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée" - Condorcet     (__/      \/

waves-and-wrap.jpg
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