Known bug: EMBM Bump Mapping

[OvermindDL1]

Actually, I've just always wanted to make a straight conversion of BZ2 into a completely new engine (and without all the flatness of the BZ2 class hierarchy).  Would be nicer if it could even use the same data, a literal drop-in.  That would allow you to then extend/expand it however you wanted, make new object types, etc... etc...  Wouldn't actually take that long, if I had all the info on all formats (most I have, things like the sprites, havn't even looked at...).  Definitally wouldn't be bug-for-bug, and a lot of the workaround people use for things (negative hover used to make elevator? - ZST) wouldn't work, but could be implimented in a new 'correct' way.  Think TASpring for TA...  Wouldn't actually take that long if we had a few programmers on it, mabye a few years (due to being in off-time) for something usable.

[Ultraken]

Before everybody starts assuming I'm going to DX8- or DX9-ify the game, it would be in a hypothetical "version 1.4", if even then.  As I mentioned before, I've never written a D3D application before, so it would pretty much be a disaster if I tried with BZ2. 

[Red Devil]

Hey, what better place to give it a whirl.  Definitely be a good challenge. 

[Ultraken]

Nathan is already concerned that I've raised people's hopes unnecessarily.  It's amusing to contemplate, but I'm not going to go tearing into anything that before 1.3 is final, and probably not even afterwards.  There's too much of a "Nathan fixes things, Ken breaks things" pattern for me to start ripping up large-scale systems like the renderer.  Little tweaks are fine, but I need to coordinate with Nathan to bring 1.3 to a close.  He has other things to do with his life than BZ2, and frankly I'm surprised he's stuck with it as long as he has...

[OvermindDL1]

Personally, just updating the renderer would seem a waste of time to me.  It would not allow further draw distances then so forth tiles, would not allow for self-lod'ed or paging terrain, probobly wouldn't even fix the bug of transparent mesh draw ordering issues, would just increase the speed due to hardware TnL, and I already get many hundreds of fps, so whats the point.  Really, to get use out of a good upgrade, you'd need to update the terrain system so it would not be limited to specific amount of tiles drawn at once, update the object system to give more power in full abilities, new vehicle AI system to allow people to make them, an overhaul of the networking system to prevent that full gamestate transfering, etc... etc...  At that point, why alter the old one, just make a new one.  Considering that, no point making changes, everything minor (and a few major's) are complete with 1.3, anything more would take far too much time.

BS-er is attempting a new BZ style game, if people want to help, asking him would probobly be best.

[Angstromicus]

Yeah. Considering BZII has kept such a long-standing community, it is a great game. Perhaps, if another game was made very similar to BZII, only overhauled by modern graphics... That probably would work and make great sales with proper advertising.

[Red Devil]

 I was more syaing that it would be a good way to delve into DX than anything, as a side/personal project.  We'd be more than happy to help you test it.   

[OvermindDL1]

I delved into DX; I figured out how it works; it is not an easy/fun thing with all that com stuff (good idea from microsoft, *bad* implimentation in my opinion).  However, take an abstraction layer like OGRE (Object-oriented Graphic Rendering Engine I think...), which is just a pure renderer, no game code at all, is an absolute wonder to work with compared to anything I've dealt with before, they did a very good job with it.  It can be used for open-source to commercial projects at no cost (and no need to release your code either as OGRE is under lgpl, so only any source that needs to be released is if you change anything in OGRE itself, not necessary at all, any add-ons, your code, and everything else do not have to be released).

[MowerMan]

Nathan is already concerned that I've raised people's hopes unnecessarily.  It's amusing to contemplate, but I'm not going to go tearing into anything that before 1.3 is final, and probably not even afterwards.  There's too much of a "Nathan fixes things, Ken breaks things" pattern for me to start ripping up large-scale systems like the renderer.  Little tweaks are fine, but I need to coordinate with Nathan to bring 1.3 to a close.  He has other things to do with his life than BZ2, and frankly I'm surprised he's stuck with it as long as he has...

Heh heh heh...  I was wondering who this Ul-traken guy was.

[Red Devil]

So, OM, you'd say use OGRE instead of DX?

[OvermindDL1]

Ogre is a graphical abstraction layer, removes all the main headaches from both DX and openGL, and let's you just start *doing* stuff.  In addition, because it is an abstraction layer, it can use any rendering solution that anyone writes a rendersystem for, so far they have a DX7 render system (been antiquated though), DX9 render system, and an OpenGL render system, so you can use any...