I''ve been in this exact same situation... All I can say it that it sucks and you''re probably screwed . A simple action\shooting game is probably the best idea, just make sure everything works well.

quote: Original post by redeyegames
please use ''wasd'' instead of ''wesd''... its what we''re all used to.

Sorry, but I disagree. With forwards/backwards control independantly on both tracks you can turn in different ways:
- left track forward turns you right whilst still moving forwards
- left forward and right backward turns you rapidly on the spot
- right backward allows you to turn and back off at the same time!

Perhaps more importantly, it gives a more authentic tank-like feel to the game; if you have forward/back/left/right keys for a tank it feels like a slow racing car with a big gun, not like a tank. Admittedly, the track-controls will take a few minutes to get used to, but in the long run they''re actually nicer to use - go on, learn a new skill!

Oh, and I don''t think the person who suggested WESD originally ment that this ruled out reconfiguring the keys ...

I''d better stop, this is totally off-topic.

On what is that deadline of 2 weeks based if I may ask?

Thanks everyone for your posts. Great ideas all of them !!!
I almost could''t decide on what to use,
so i picked the most easyest but the most eye capturing of them.
I decided to whip up a small flight simulator, with a small story line.
Kindo'' like an arcade game, but with a little taste of "magic"
Here are a few screenshots, check''em out. Theese are YOUR ideas, all i did, was to place them in my engine ^_^
























"Find the path, follow the Master... Follow the master, understand the master... Overcome the master !"

A few constructive criticisms based entirely on the screenshots:

1. The skybox looks wrong. Mainly because the fogged geometry looks weird in front of the terrain in the skybox. I'd recommend one of the following...

a) get rid of the fogging.
b) get rid of the terrain in the skybox texture, so contains ONLY sky.
c) do some fancy blending with the skybox. Probably not something you'll get done in 2 weeks, but worth looking at just so you can see what can be done. (see these threads: Sky-rendering techniques, Terrain->Fog->Sky)

2. The helicopter model looks a bit messed up - is it being loaded properly?

3. Your frame rates are very low, apparently regardless of the direction you are pointing. In the 4th screenshot there should only be about 2 polygons + the helicopter being rendered, so you should have a frame rate of at least 60fps on pretty much any half respectable card, but you're only getting 7. Unless there is some other reason (lots of debug logging, or as a result of taking the screenshot) I think you'd need to speed things up a bit. Consider view frustum culling, rescaling your terrain, and dynamic LOD reduction (in that order) to speed things up.


[edited by - Sandman on January 30, 2003 9:20:49 AM]

I think you should either limit the allowed height of your helicopter or render more terrain (assuming you can get framerate up). When you go high you should be able to see miles of terrain not the same 100m.

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
I think you should either limit the allowed height of your helicopter or render more terrain (assuming you can get framerate up). When you go high you should be able to see miles of terrain not the same 100m.

This would probably require distance-based LOD just to give you a tip on it.

Terrain looks really good I think, but the moderator (forgot the name) was right about your skybox... the terrain should be stripped of cause it looks really weird now... and the framerate is too low indeed... if you''re already using an octree or something, I''d suggest cutting back on detail (making the polygons bigger so you have less) the fps should be 30 at least (unless you took the screenshots on an old pc)

Yeah... I know that the skybox doesn''t look too good...Infect it REALLY sucks
I made a box, and mapped it with quake2 skybox maps, downloaded from the net.
And it looks werry bad. Infact the mapping coordinates are wrong,
and i don''t really know why, because i mapped it with 3DSmax planar mapping, and set the coordinate length to the bitmap length, and the TU and TV as are allright too...
Anyway, i want to change the sky, but i have hard time doing it, because there are just so many things i don''t now yet...
I also tried to put a skyDome, exported from 3Dsmax, and with shrink wrap mapping.
It looked nice, but the problem was, that i could''t insert it, without graphical glitches and artifacts

And the terrain still needs a LOT of work.
It is a simple heightmap with lots of triangles.
And to gain moore FPS''s, i have indexed the triangles into quads,
and made a 2D vector, just like in an old smooth scrolling tile game.
And the renderer takes the camera position, looks for it''s tileCoordinate on the 2D vector,
and displays a range of quads, surrounding it.
For example:

0 - quad
1 - rendered quad
P - camera Position

00000000
00000000
00111110
00111110
0011P110
00111110
00111110
00000000

So only a part of the original map is displayed, wich is surrounding the camera.
But this algorithm sucks...
Anyway i used this, because i am still a beginner, and i code in Visual Basic, and have really hard time finding tutorials for VB...

Moore help/comments/critics are welcomed...(i know it''s a little off topic...)

PS: The framerate was verry low, because i have a K6-350Mhz, with 64 Mbytes of Ram, and the cheapest 3D accelerator: nVidia Vanta 16 Mb...
Oh and i had Winamp rockin'' my PC, with my soundcards software 3D sound effect option enabled.
Also my engine was rendering wave files(the chopper chopping).
And let''s not forget that the game was running in windowed mode...
So i''m not really surprised because of the low framerate...You should see how commercial games run on this old piece of collecters item




"Find the path, follow the Master... Follow the master, understand the master... Overcome the master !"

Oh ! And the model of the chopper has 1720 polygons
(i will definatly change that )

Quads are generally best avoided IMHO, they are often SLOWER than drawing two separate triangles, and they are error prone - get one point slightly off the plane and your whole quad gets messed up.

The agp bus is a massive bottleneck, and by rendering your terrain quad by quad you''re spending a lot of time transferring data, and not much time actually rendering stuff. Try splitting the terrain into tiles, of say, 8x8 vertices. (9x9 if you count the edge vertices) Each of these tiles can be rendered as a single triangle strip or indexed mesh. You''ll probably see a fourfold increase in frame rate just switching to indexed meshes or tri strips.

Your terrain culling algorithm could also be more efficient - if your field of view is 90 degrees then this you''re sending an additional 4x more data than you need to the card. If you can cut this down to something closer to the viewable area, then you can potentially get another fourfold increase in frame rate. Even if you only get rid of the stuff behind the viewer, you''ll roughly double your performance.