Monthly Archive for November, 2008

Finished some work on map manager. Now it builds table of maps in data folder, and loads approporiate map from cache when it’s requested.

There’s no rendering yet – one of next things to do is setting up render output, and possibly some kind of vertex buffer. Also functions to generate map geometry data (for both rendering and physics).

Funny thing, uncompressed entire city takes 72mb (textures and map geometry), while compressed with winzip that lowers down to 2.4mb (2.1mb are textures, and 300kb is map geometry). Game files will be compressed in later versions. This gives me idea I should universalize chunk loader mechanism… or maybe not (so I could implement compression for every chunked file OpenGTA2 uses).

I decided to return to this project, as it seems the most perspective developement for nearest future. The direction changed a bit – now it’s a overly complicated tech demo rather than a game (well it IS a game).

Most of game objects and maps will be ran & serviced by game script.

Physics are now full 3d physics (angle-limited, and stuff like that), graphics are entirely based on shaders, gameplay is sandbox, and game editor is entirely in-game and in realtime (it even writes city changes to disk in realtime).

Map format has grown from 877KB to 3MB+ (uncompressed!), to include interior map (yes, you will be able to go inside buildings & subway tunnels), which compresses to like… 30 to 300kb. Each map/block is 16x64x64 cells in size, and each column can have variable height (you can even change it from script!).

Right now I’m setting up developement envrioment, doing some engine planning, and I rewrote sound unpacker & map convertor. They are working from console line now:

I have no idea how voice samples are encoded. Any ideas? They are 5500 frequency samples, but they sound like garbles. Maybe they are 8-bit or something like that….