Ok, an alpha has been posted

[L.C.]

I just made a large update to my last reply (Post #168). Be sure to read the new content.

 

 

By the way, I realized that having the levels and such in a Milkshape format is..well... I was able to open and edit any of the models/levels as I pleased with Milkshape (I've got registered v1.8.1) -- which was very convenient and nice to see. However there are many disadvantages also by using this method.

 

Let's make a quick talk about doors - they can be done. Either as literally "lasers" (like in Half-Life) or transparent walls/brushes that fade in and out (not completely) that at some point fades out completely to allow passage (and after x amount of time fades back into its fade-in-fade-out cycle [this cycle doesn't fade in or out to 100% or 0% opacity, but the fades alternate from some 40% to % in smooth blending]).

 

anyway can you optimize the game so i can play it? plzZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz plz plz plz plz. i really wanna play.

You REALLY need to get a video card, even if its a GeForce2 MX220 on a PCI slot. That graphics accelerator was far from designed for playing any 3D games. If your computer can't handle Thirdspace, it wouldn't even be able to handle Half-Life on the lowest resolution of 640x480 @ 16bit. Software mode on those settings would even be chuggy for you. Edited August 25, 2007 by L.C.

[MillenniumMan]

ok. so the gfx card is the problem. it's the default one, we've never switched. anyway can you optimize the game so i can play it? plzZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz plz plz plz plz. i really wanna play.

 

I'm still thinking a couple of settings might have to be changed (maybe not) to get it to run at all. First check to see if you have DX10 installed or not. Next, go into the TSconfig.xml file and see what you can modify in the color and resolution lines (it'd be easier if I had a copy of it on me so I could do a full walkthrough, can't install on library comp)

 

But to be honest, just go out and get a card, the older NV cards would just run you $10-15 and would help you run many other games (like GTA3 and VC )

 

There's just toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

.................... much work to be done jsut to redo something for one card.

 

Too many ooooo's?

[MillenniumMan]

Yeah, I considered the 3ds format and even reconsidered the v3d format that jab seemed to have fallen in lve with But without a proper 3ds exporter or access to 3drad 5.3 to make v3d models, neither would be viable. Not to mention the ease in editing.

 

I like your idea about the laser doors, kinda reminds me of the sentry equipment in resident evil, when that woman got sliced up into little itty bitty beef cubes just before she slid apart all over the floor I'm thinking sentries that can be placed in certain parts of the map (using stationary bots?) kinda like a Tak'uni'taga'mu'teron (laughs at those who don't get it)

 

I just made a large update to my last reply (Post #168). Be sure to read the new content.

 

 

By the way, I realized that having the levels and such in a Milkshape format is..well... I was able to open and edit any of the models/levels as I pleased with Milkshape (I've got registered v1.8.1) -- which was very convenient and nice to see. However there are many disadvantages also by using this method.

 

Let's make a quick talk about doors - they can be done. Either as literally "lasers" (like in Half-Life) or transparent walls/brushes that fade in and out (not completely) that at some point fades out completely to allow passage (and after x amount of time fades back into its fade-in-fade-out cycle [this cycle doesn't fade in or out to 100% or 0% opacity, but the fades alternate from some 40% to % in smooth blending]).

 

anyway can you optimize the game so i can play it? plzZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz plz plz plz plz. i really wanna play.

You REALLY need to get a video card, even if its a GeForce2 MX220 on a PCI slot. That graphics accelerator was far from designed for playing any 3D games. If your computer can't handle Thirdspace, it wouldn't even be able to handle Half-Life on the lowest resolution of 640x480 @ 16bit. Software mode on those settings would even be chuggy for you.

[Mr. Right]

wow MM, you've gone a long way since the CNL days. Future of this project looks bright. congrats.

 

but would thirdspace run on a Quadro card? I seem to have some problems running on hardware mode. Gives me an error/stopped working message. Could it be a vista thing (yeah, i know I was stupid enough to buy Vista)? I'll also try it out on my office computer to see if that might be it.

[MillenniumMan]

wow MM, you've gone a long way since the CNL days. Future of this project looks bright. congrats.

 

but would thirdspace run on a Quadro card? I seem to have some problems running on hardware mode. Gives me an error/stopped working message. Could it be a vista thing (yeah, i know I was stupid enough to buy Vista)? I'll also try it out on my office computer to see if that might be it.

 

Thanks. I've been wondering what you've been up to. You're in the credits you know, still using some of the models you came up with (with minor tweaks)

 

Ike, careful of that. The bosses have eyes.... If they catch you playing games on your work PC, well, we've seen and heared of all the corporate horror stories lately.

[»jabjabjab]

Doors were my idea!

 

 

 

+ i made a ship on Milkshape (first thing ever lol Atleast i tried

Edited August 25, 2007 by jabjabjab

[MillenniumMan]

Doors were my idea!

 

 

Doors were originaly JeffP's idea

[»jabjabjab]

Lol I mean for TS the plasma Box remember? XD

[MillenniumMan]

Lol I mean for TS the plasma Box remember? XD

 

Ok, I thought you said "SHOE"box jk. But it didn't occur to me how to implement such a thing until L.C. mentioned that thing about the lasers. Then I remembered, some of the ops in the minor zones used to fill their pubs with turret bots (yes me too) in order to make a slight bit of a hassle for some of the players trying to score goals.

[L.C.]

Mill, what are the filenames for the levels? The way I like mapping sometimes is having the game and editor open at the same time; I modify something in the editor, save, then quickly load it up in the game to see what I've done. Then disconnect, make minor adjustment, save, loop.

 

I want to experiment with the mapping and do something.

Edited August 25, 2007 by L.C.

[»jabjabjab]

Once again i pop up that you should make a inside veiw of the !@#$%^&*pit (maybe even a walkaround) if you actually make turrets. id love to see it.

[»jabjabjab]

You rly outdid yourself MillMan.. though make the commands and entering stuff much easier.. and make sure to get a lock on mode for beginers thx for the jabjab pic $$

[rootbear75]

i went to Practice Offline, and it crashed my computer... i cant afford to lose anything on this machine. this has all my schoolwork on it....

 

do i need to put it in compatability mode for XP?

 

 

WELL?!

[Drake7707]

try it ? I don't have vista anymore so i can't tell, but if you still have problems maybe your video card is incompatible. If so, try lowering the hardware acceleration

[»jabjabjab]

lol I played it on XP and only problem i see the program failing from was when you went to practice offline and said "Pack fudge" and you cant hit enter when you want to host a server.

[MillenniumMan]

Mill, what are the filenames for the levels? The way I like mapping sometimes is having the game and editor open at the same time; I modify something in the editor, save, then quickly load it up in the game to see what I've done. Then disconnect, make minor adjustment, save, loop.

 

I want to experiment with the mapping and do something.

 

The map for the TW3D arena is station1.ms3d

Big Sky is shipyard.ms3d

Wormhole extreme is asteroid1.ms3d, gravwell.ms3d

the safezone model is safe-zone.ms3d

 

Some of the other arenas that have yet to be implemented because there aren't models for them are: Mining Colony, Graveyard (for zombies events ) and The Hood (fly around a bunch of buildings in a city)

 

jabjabjab Posted Today, 06:33 AM 
 You rly outdid yourself MillMan.. though make the commands and entering stuff much easier.. and make sure to get a lock on mode for beginers  thx for the jabjab pic $$

 

NP, you seem to enjoy your smileys at the end of your posts, and pacman kinda reminds me of that.

 

rootbear75 Posted Today, 07:31 AM 
 QUOTE(rootbear75 @ Aug 24 2007, 11:56 PM) 
i went to Practice Offline, and it crashed my computer... i cant afford to lose anything on this machine. this has all my schoolwork on it....

do i need to put it in compatability mode for XP?



WELL?!

 

Read about a page back, fudge packing leads to null, it prematurely kills the program, it won't harm your computer. If you're frustrated by fudge packing, then you know why it's so aptly named

[»jabjabjab]

You know... what about chatting? what about staff? what about powers and leaders? cant the thirdspace team be leaders of the zone(s)?

[MillenniumMan]

You know... what about chatting? what about staff? what about powers and leaders? cant the thirdspace team be leaders of the zone(s)?

 

To chat, hit enter and type, same as the previous version of CNL. It's only pub chat so far, but I'll see about private. The only power will be from the server, maybe sometime in the future I'll get something like a sysop.txt together for the zone server. As for thirdspace team members having access to those powers, your schwartz is as big as mine. (spaceballs for the reference)

[»jabjabjab]

lol. I'm sure setting that up will be no problem.. but is hitting enter nessecary? BTW if i cant do gfx, i could help around the staff corner and im still in for ideas/Beta testing. Edited August 30, 2007 by jabjabjab

[L.C.]

lol. By the way, MP3 is open source I believe. Ever heard of FMOD? FMOD allows MP3 support. No license required.

 

Milkshape is a piece of !@#$%^&*. Get a better format for levels. Man, even give Valve Hammer Editor a go. Brushes are very easy to work with. *.map is a human readable format (RMF might be open-source or something). If you take this into thought, you could even create a little compiler for *.map that basically optimizes the file and renames it to something like *.lvl.

 

Follow the Half-Life style; have FGD and MAP->LVL support. A FGD would contain all the en!@#$%^&*ies for point and brush based en!@#$%^&*ies. Point based en!@#$%^&*ies are like light spots, light (sphere-style), or an environmental light (global across the entire map). Nothing fancy at all. It is completely possible and doable to make a FGD that isn't really usable by Half-Life or a Half-Life mod. Infact one possible advantage to this is that you could allow mappers (for map properties, aka "worldspawn" en!@#$%^&*y) to put in a passcode that would allow an Official Thirdspace LVL decompiler to decompile it. Prevent map stealing, eh? 3D work becomes more of a value to mappers than it does 2D maps (based on witty tiles) in Subspace.

 

generic (brush)

door (brush)

door_rotating (brush)

light (point)

light_environment (point)

light_spot (point)

model (point)

sound (point)

spawn (point, not required)

sprite (point)

teleport (brush)

teleport_destina (point)

trigger (brush)

worldspawn (point, not included in FGD, you goto Map Properties in Valve Hammer Editor)

 

generic - applies for any or all brushes. Use this to control the opacity/transparency, illumination, color, etc of a brush. Even styles such as imitating a door fade-in-fade-out effect.

door - Obviously a door. Ability to set opacity/transparency, illumination, color, etc. Possibly even set that it has to be triggered by a trigger_button or trigger_field.

door_rotating - Also a door, but has the special ability of rotating around the brush origin or an !@#$%^&*igned origin on the x, y, or z axis.

light - Featuring the color of the light, brightness, intensity, maximum light distance (can be as far as it needs to go; can set whether this is the border and it will fade the light to the border or nastily "freezes" or "stops" the light at that point).

light_environment - Same thing as above but you can define the XYZ angle that its pointing towards. Kind of like a sun; it will light the entire map in a linear form, just like the way the sun lights the earth.

light_spot - Same thing as above, but is more like a like. The difference is that this point en!@#$%^&*y is the origin of where the light is being casted or shined from.

model - Browse/indicate which model will be in the placeholder here. Can be a Milkshape file (which makes this all the more easier). Can control the opacity/transparency, color, and brightness.

sound - Define a sound file (*.wav, *.mp3, or *.ogg). Then set its maximum distance (and be able to set whether the volume fades out the farther you move away [aka move towards its max distance] or rudely toggles on and off), its initial volume (scale of 0 to 10).

spawn - In case someone wants to have fixed spawn points, wherever these are will be where players spawn or warp. In the settings you can define whether players warp perfectly and precisely at this point, or spawn randomly within a specific range (this is in the arena settings, not en!@#$%^&*y properties). In the settings you can also disable whether players ever spawn at these en!@#$%^&*ies. However, this would be very effective for a *warpto shortcut; ie. *warpto baseTrenchFR

sprite - Define the destination of a sprite. Be able to set the opacity/transparency, brightness, color, and framerate.

teleport - If a player runs into this space, then they are warped to this en!@#$%^&*y's target (it can be teleport_destina or a spawn)

teleport_destina - This is the "exit" of a teleportal field.

trigger - Be able to set whether this is triggered by touching or bumping into it, shooting it, shooting a bomb or gun, or projectile. It will target whatever is specified. You can create a field using this brush based en!@#$%^&*y, where if a player flies into this field (they'll go right through it by the way), then it will trigger whatever you specified.

 

The trigger en!@#$%^&*y has a "Target" field.

All en!@#$%^&*ies have a "Name" field.

 

Thirdspace would dynamically render or generate lightmaps. Unlike Half-Life maps, there wouldn't be a need for compiling lightmaps. Thirdspace should be able to execute *.map and *.lvl, but must use the proper FGD in order to load/player in the map correctly (trying to load Half-Life *.map's might be cool and weird).

 

As for textures, there are two methods that can be chosen (forced or free decision): (1) have all textures contained in WADs for Thirdspace, (2) have all textures be contained inside a textures folder as raw TGA/BMP/PNG/JPGs, but require the mapper to put them into a *.WAD for editting and making maps in Valve Hammer Editor.

 

Sprites could be multiple textures with a special prefix in their filenames. For example: -0test, -1test (-0 is the first frame, -1 the second; any texture on any brush can be animated as long as...)

 

One thing that I forgot. For all brushes you can set whether the textures on its faces are animated or not, if possible.

 

For most of these en!@#$%^&*ies, the mapper should have the ability to decide whether they are turned off at first (which would then require them to be triggered to turn them on).

 

There are a few special textures that Thirdspace will interpret differently. A texture !@#$%^&*led 'null,' and 'function.' Null simply tells the engine "don't render this face." Function does the same, basically, but is there to seperate nulled faces from brush-based en!@#$%^&*ies like trigger (that might be an invisible field or space of area that a player would have to fly into to trigger).

 

When Thirdspace loads a *.map, it will do atleast a few things that compiling tools would: it will generate a resources file that basically contains locations to all the images, textures, sprites, models, sounds, etc used in the map so that next time it won't have to figure it out from scratch, but would be able to preload all those resources into memory in the loading process as quick as possible. It will also "generate" all the nulled faces; next time the client wouldn't have to calculate all the faces it shouldn't render, so that it will effortlessly not render those faces.

 

Difference between Thirdspace generation and compiling: when you compile, you save the time of having to generate anything in Thirdspace and do it for you, plus have the additional feature of having your map optimized (filesize-wise).

 

Because this reply is so enourmas, I can't think of anything that I've left out. A FGD isn't that hard to make.

 

One big PLUS to using *.MAP/LVL rather than Milkshape files is that it is far easier to learn and handle than it is modeling. One disadvantage though is that you can't make spheres very easily (even if it is a geo-sphere) in Hammer v3.4/3.5b - but if you ask me, after weighing the advantages and disadvantages, this would be better than using Milkshape files. One advantage of this versus Half-Life is that you don't need to have a skybox in the *.map/lvl, as Thirdspace automatically handles that stuff. However a player could make an invisible wall to create map borders.

 

Player sizes in the grid (for an average Subspace ship) could be something like 64x32x64 (64 in length, 32 in heighth, 64 in width), which is far from hard to remember. A mapper would have to play around with this if they used a custom model exceeding these limits (or was smaller).

 

 

NOW I ran out of things to say.

[»jabjabjab]

Banners? Flags? PowerBalls? Names for chats...

[rootbear75]

Make a list of features that are currently in Thirdspace that are in SS.

Make a checklist...

[MillenniumMan]

Make a list of features that are currently in Thirdspace that are in SS.

Make a checklist...

 

 

Typing a list as we speak, may take a while though. Have to remember ALL of what's in continuum. Most of the basics have been covered.

[MillenniumMan]

Didn't know about FMOD. Kinda late now though. But it's just a matter of DLL dependencies, so we'll see.

 

I've been using MS3D for years, and while it has it's drawbacks it still has advantages. I've also been looking at MODO but no idea how that'll work out.

 

At this point, you've brought up HL quite a bit. I'm starting to think using the HL engine might be an appropriate means of getting some of these other features in the game, but after all this work.... why?

 

Head hurts reading all that... STOP IT STOP IT!!!!!

Edited August 31, 2007 by Smong
removed quote of entire previous post

[MillenniumMan]

Edited August 30, 2007 by MillenniumMan