Latest Truespace freely available.

Hi guys, sorry but I'm going to be really busy with work related stuff over the next few months so updates are going to be very slow.

In the meantime, if you haven't found out about this yet, then check out the free copy of TrueSpace which has now been made available for download.

http://cart1.caligari.com/web/Truespacemainreg.aspx

I never really got into Blender3D in a big way, but it seems TrueSpace offers a new opportunity to do 3D modelling for free.

Header. ta-da! RSS-tastical.

There have been some requests for a video showing the current status of the remake. The original video was reasonably good quality, but uploading to Youtube has a habit of butchering the quality.

Anyway, this is probably the last stage before the really hard stuff is put in. i.e., the game logic, individual character logic, etc. etc.

This is probably going to take the best part of a year just to get a rudimentary world logic in place where individual characters go about their day to day business and captains take the initiative to recruit from friendly villages and be intelligent about who to invade.

Lots and lots and lots of stuff to do, so be prepared for long pauses between updates.

Old ways not always the best.

Powermonger had a novel way of texturing the landscape. It wasn't conventional texture mapping at all. Basically, each triangle was a cut-out of a repeating 2D pattern. Imagine cutting a triangle out of a piece of paper and then putting it on a wallpaper pattern and seeing the pattern come through. This meant that instead of flat shaded polygons, you could actually have something meaningful like grass, beach etc. without having to do the perspective and distortion calculations that are used in conventional 3D texture mapping (and would have been impossible on 16bit hardware, though I have seen a good Wolfenstein Atari ST demo).

Being a nerd when it comes to nostalgia, I implemented a function to draw the map in the old-fashioned way. In a way it's kinda nice because, now that the textures are facing you directly, you don't need mipmaps.

However... it's darn confusing when you rotate the map! The polygons rotate around an origin, but the patterns on the triangles remain static (as in the original Powermonger). You could kinda see this in the original, but because everything was so pixelated (320x200), it didn't really matter much. When you're running this at 4 times the resolution, it looks like a magic-eye picture as you rotate the landscape. :D

Hehe, I'll probably keep it as an *.cfg file option, but it's quite a wierd effect when you see it in action rotating (like a cinefilm projector showing a film on a white rotating teapot).

Here's a small clip from the original:

White Christmas

One of the fun things about Powermonger was that the weather changed throughout the game. Green grass gave way to autumn ochre and then onto the snowy white of winter.

Seems a simple enough affair of using glTexSubImage() to replace bits of the current terrain texture with pixels from the next season's texture (from our Paris collection...).

Only 2 problems:
1. This has to be done not just for the original texture but also the mipmaps as well.
2. You can see a pattern emerging as the same alterations are used across each tile. I may use a large terrain texture and stretch it across several tiles at a time to solve this.

Anyway, even with a couple of minutes coding, I'm getting rather nostalgic about it. :d

Sprites are now aligned correctly depending on their direction and the rotation of the 3D map... which is nice. You can currently send the captain around on the map and the soldiers will follow him and try to stay in formation. There's no ocean detection yet, so they walk straight over it. :) That'll require a little more thought as they need path-finding algorithms. In powermonger, if they couldn't get to their destination, they seemed to pick another destination near them and then try again.

You know, the more I work on this game, the more admiration I have, not just for the original programmers, but all the early programmers who had to cram so much information into what was back then quite a restricted runtime environment. I dread to think what my version would've run like on Atari ST... =P

Flip flop.

After some thought, I've decided to keep the sprites. The code is already there, the sprites are already there, and it'll allow me to concentrate on the task of coding the ai, etc. There'll be an option to play "Deluxe-monger" or "Retro-monger" depending on whether you want the original sprites / backgrounds or re-made art and 3d models.

Back to square one.

Meh. Ditching the sprites. Going the 3D route.

This project is drifting further and further from my original desire which was to do a remake with upgraded graphics but keeping the spirit of the original gameplay.

For those who wanted the original sprites, background graphics etc. I guess DOSbox/Steem etc. is the way forward. (and powermonger works fine in both of them)

This remake is going to be new graphics all round.