Necro Mutex. Pre-Alpha Test 1

[mkultra333]

I take the start of my project as the day I joined the Ogre forums. That's exactly 4 years ago today. Wow, that's a long time.

Leading up to this date, I decided I was sick of just programming all the time and not having anything to show for it, so I committed to making a playable pre-alpha. It was a matter of trying to get all the little pieces together into a coherent whole and making one complete map. It isn't great, since I haven't gotten around to making much media yet. It's pretty threadbare, and I'd love to have another week, even a few days, to improve it. Gameplay is lacklustre, since there's been no tweaking and proper testing yet. Sound is terrible, just a few noises I threw together the last two nights after work. The textures are simple, and there aren't that many of them. But it was time to just get something out.

So I present Necro Mutex Pre-Alpha Test 1. Should work on Window XP and above, though Win7 is probably best.
Requires OpenAL for sound : http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/ ... Items.aspx
I guess you'll need the 2008 runtime too if you don't have it already: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... aspx?id=29

Use WASD to move, mouse to look around and shoot and change weapons, E to pick up items, R to reload, X to use a health pack, F to turn flashlight on and off (just leave it on for now). And very important, use B to set your current location as the new respawn point, and to make a green moving line appear on the ground that leads to your next objective. Collect keys to open door, leading up to finding a small teleporter object that finishes the level.

Oh, and I accidentally left testing graphs drawing on the screen, press O to cycle the info off. You can also press , and . to cycle through various different debug render screens, not that you'd want to.

A note to nVidia two card SLI users, performance will be really bad unless you make a change to the bzn.cfg file. Open that file, find r_maxgpuquery and change it from 0 to 2. Performance should be much better after that.

Only got the website a few days ago so it isn't set up yet, but you can download the file from there. Of course, being a pre-alpha, it might be a bit, er, crashy, so use with caution. Don't run it if you don't want to take any risks with your computer, and see the readme file. There's no install and it doesn't change the registry or anything, just unzip the folder and run the exe inside.

http://www.necromutex.com/NecroMutex_Pr ... 130808.zip

(Edit: Quick tip, you may get swarmed by zombies right at the start. If you're overwhelmed, switch to the shocker weapon, I gave it a little starting ammo to give the player a hand. A few zaps of that should give you some breathing room.)

And some pics.

[cybereality]

Hey mkultra333! I think I am going to have nightmares after playing this!

This needs a lot of work, I'm sure you know, but it has potential. Graphics seem fine but the gameplay seemed a little stiff.

Still, not bad.

[mkultra333]

Thanks cybereality. Yeah, it's rough, it's really just a test of the core rather than a proper game yet.

BTW, you can play it in stereoscopic 3DVision. In the bzn.cfg file, change r_use3dvisionrenderer to 1 and it should hopefully be good to go, although I haven't done any tests very recently so there's a chance some bugs may have snuck in.

[drwbns]

Honestly this looks kinda scary. Great job

[mkultra333]

Thanks drwbns. Hopefully it will be a bit unsettling to play.

[Alexiss]

It does look creepy, I haven't tested it yet but I'll definitely give it a try !
Keep up the good work.

[mkultra333]

Thanks Alexiss.

[TheSHEEEP]

You do need to turn down the bloom, however.

Besides of that, it really does look creepy. Really shows what good, atmospheric lighting can do

What kind of shadowing technique do you use?
Is it PSSM? I ask because I noticed that in the shotgun-screenshot, the shadows end abruptly.

[mkultra333]

Hmm, hadn't noticed that shadow cutoff. That's probably a bad spotlight cutoff setting, easy to fix.

I use custom VSM for the spotlights in a deferred shading setting, a distant evolution of nullsquared's old soft shadow code. In other words, typical variance shadow mapping shader code, but it reads from the GBuffer rather than from rendered geometry. There's a bounding box that is supposed to completely contain the area to be covered by that spotlight, and various settings for brightness, cutoff, colour, cone angle, etc. I don't use normal Ogre shadows at all, I handle it all myself via RTT.

As for the bloom, well, we'll see. It should be very bloomy where the light is particularly intense, that's the point of bloom.
But that'll be a tweaking thing further down the track, and easy enough to add a user control for people who don't like it.

Thanks for the atmospheric lighting comment. That's what I'm hoping for.

[areay]

75 minutes, 28 deaths. Man, what sort of sick bastard gives the zombies the ability to spawn camp? I got camped hard at the first scorpion bot encounter, stuck with just a pistol.

I'd been wondering what you've been working on mkultra, I can't fairly judge it though because the PC I was using only got 10fps but here's some things I noticed that might be related to the engine and not the level content itself,

- Got heaps of motion blur effect (due to low fps?).
- The scorpion bots get stuck pretty easily against walls or about half-way under the floor, in some rooms it was like I was being chased by jaws; with just the tail poking through the floor.
- Sometimes the models would be invisible at certain angles.
- Having to aim down and press a key to pickup ammo became tiresome pretty quickly
+ Shadows looked great
+ Metal fountains look great
+ Enemy models look great, I especially liked how the zombies fall apart, and especially especially that their implants keep pumping/pulsing while in that state

FYI, I was running on Win7 pro 64 on a 3-year-old Sony i3 laptop with ATI graphics @ 1366 x 768 fullscreen 0xAA.

[mkultra333]

Ha! Thanks a lot for playing, areay. I'm amazed you persisted when you had such terrible performance, so double thanks! Yeah, the spawning at the moment can be brutal, it's not exactly a well balanced piece of gameplay. More like a totally random level... which it is.

Regarding the framerate, probably a laptop at that resolution is really going to stress the system. My main "reference" machine is a PC Win7 3.4GHz quad core with twin nvidia GTX 560 1 gig cards. I generally get 40 to 60 fps at 1920 x 1080 resolution. I think this system is good but not top of the line, so a good reference point. Lowering the resolution to 1600 x 900 (or 1280 x 720) speeds things up a fair bit, so slightly lower spec machines can play at those resolutions.

For systems a lot below this, which usually includes laptops, more extreme measures are necessary. When I'm away from my PC I use a laptop with ATI card. This is below what I expect the consumer to use, and I run at 800 x 640 resolution. Also, I use a different config file that cuts down things like shadow resolution and stuff, as well as cutting physics rate down from 60Hz to 30Hz. In the folder you'll notice bzn.cfg and also bzn_LAPTOP.cfg.

Delete bzn.cfg, make a copy of bzn_LAPTOP.cfg and rename it to bzn.cfg. Play at 800 x 640 resolution and you should get 20 to 30 fps on a laptop with a dedicated graphics card. Again, this is below what I consider good quality, it's just for situations where you have to play on a laptop. Another thing to remember about laptops is that the CPU and graphics cards are often set to drop in power once they start to overheat, they just don't run at 100% constant usage well for very long. My own laptop has a sudden 50% drop in performance after about 7 minutes of playing the game, due to overheating. At that point I consider the game unplayable.

The motion blur is almost unnoticeable at 30-60 fps, but at 10 fps it is going to be extremely prominent. 10 fps isn't really a desirable framerate.

Basically, playing on a laptop isn't recommended, unless it's a monster gaming laptop.

Regarding the scorpions (and tanks) getting stuck on walls and things, yeah, I knew that was a bug. I'd been working on the humanoid monsters and hadn't tested the "tank-like" monsters in a while, so didn't realize bugs had emerged until I added them at the last moment. It was too late to fix it for the 4th anniversary pre-alpha release, so I just left it. I fixed the issue in the last couple of days. I haven't seen them go under the floor though, so that might be a different bug, possibly related to framerate, I'm not sure.

Models being invisible from some angles, hmm, I haven't seen that so I'll have to keep an eye out and see if I can fix it.
[Edit: Was it monsters, items, or was it body/wreckage parts? Now that I think about it, I remember there are situations where body parts might get falsely culled. Perhaps items too.]

Picking up stuff, yeah, it is a pain. One of those things I'll fix for the next pre-alpha.

Glad you liked the fountains, that's metaball code I added recently while trying to think of other ways to use multi-threading. And the zombies and monsters falling apart is something I spent a while working on, I wanted a game where wreckage and body parts tended to pile up rather than dead enemies just disappearing, so glad it made an impression.

Really, I'm not that pleased with pre-alpha 1, it was there to force me to make a completed system on the 4th anniversary, instead of just wandering around in development hell forever. So I'm happy if people don't totally hate it. Pre-Alpha 2 will be much improved, I promise.

[Nauk]

great stuff, very atmospheric

[mkultra333]

Thanks Nauk.

[mkultra333]

Saw the "scorpion under the ground with only tail showing" bug today. Assuming this is the same thing that areay saw, it's nothing too dire, it's just bad monster placement. It happens when a scorpion is placed underneath a platform that is too low for the scorpion to fit, so its tail pokes up from underneath the platform. So fortunately just a level design issue rather than an engine bug.

[areay]

Just played it again at 800x600 with the laptop config file. Got 22fps. Was a lot more fun playing through again at a better frame rate, that motion blur effect is gone too.

I took notice of where the models turned invisible; seems to always happen at doorways and on staircases. Most of these times I'd have just entered a room and was retreating while firing. As they walk through the door they'd go invisible until they had been fully drawn out into the 'old' room. Another situation was when the scorpion bots are crowding you with their melee(?) attack.

Just niggles, but as an official pre-alpha tester I'd like a sprint key added and it would be nice if 'B' also saved your orientation.

Sincerely,
Entitled Tester

[mkultra333]

Thanks a lot for the feedback, areay. Glad you got a better framerate.

Monsters disappearing? Damn, that's bad. I've never seen it happen, weird. I'll try being more aggressive in making sure that if there's any chance that a monster is visible, it gets rendered.

Sprinting, yes, I've been thinking it needs that too. For the orientation, I'll add that for now. The final game will probably handle post death spawning entirely differently, the current method was a last minute addition just so the player didn't start all the way back at the beginning.

BTW, if anyone tries the 3DVision renderer, I tried it the other day and unfortunately it has developed a bug related to the players torch, the torch shadows are wrong and sometimes show metaball shadows where there shouldn't be any. The player torch was another last minute addition. So another thing for the fix list.

[cbibejs]

Great work, looking incredible.

I have Windows 7 ,AMD5750 ,core 2 duo CPU ,I have average 38 fps in 1280*1024 resolution,full screen.

I haven't saw a game breaking bug only some minor things,like Scorpion npc keep pushing you forward,never stop.Npcs stuck near doors can't find a way through door.Instant death under elevators a bit annoying:)
You could use an check point system it's annoying start from beginning of level after every death:)

Loved the ammo icons and when they turning to blue when you close.Performance incredible game easily handle lots of npcs,particles,rigid bodies.

[mkultra333]

Hi cbibejs, thanks a lot for playing, giving feedback and the fps info. Most appreciated. Good to see you got a decent rate.

For the various little bugs and things, I'm working on them. Instant death under elevators is probably a bit cruel, I agree. At least for players anyway, ok to squash monsters. At the moment the game mostly considers the player just another monster, but I can add special rules easy enough.

You don't need to start all the way back at the beginning. Pressing 'B' sets your current location as the next respawn point, as well as creating a line to the next objective.

I continue working, next update will hopefully be more interesting architecturally, not just a bunch of boxes with monsters in them. Might be a little while though, real life is intruding with my day job possibly requiring I work 7 days a week for a while.

[Jabberwocky]

The shaders, lighting, and shadows in those screenshots look very good.
Cool name, too.

[mkultra333]

Thanks Jabberwocky. I thought of the name while working on multithreading...

[jacmoe]

I just want to say: this is so incredibly good, and could be exactly what Doom3 should have been, and then some.

[mkultra333]

Wow, thanks a lot jacmoe. I have a long way to go before it looks as detailed and professional as Doom3, but your support is most appreciated.

[alexiusnexus]

I have to repeat some previous posts: good job on lighting and atmosphere!
I played the demo, it lacks a bit of care for the training: I felt a little puzzled at the begin.

however, a challenging job!

[mkultra333]

Thank you very much for playing, alexiusnexus. Feedback is taken on board, future versions will hopefully be less chaotic and a bit friendlier to new player.

At the moment I'm still working on getting some furniture and structure into the map. My original way of doing it, by building it into bsp itself, broke down once the map got large, it took too much memory for the mesh and physics since every repeated computer or pipe was treated as a unique, original piece of geometry.

Now I'm using pre-built meshes instead, rendered together in groups in much the same way the monsters are. This means better memory efficiency at the cost of worse batching, but I've been very focused on low batching from the beginning so I fortunately have a bit of slack in the batching department and should be able to get away with it.

Real life work is going to seriously cut into my programming time soon, so I'm trying to get as much done as possible in the week or so remaining.

[alexiusnexus]

(...)Real life work is going to seriously cut into my programming time(...)

sounds familiar