My newest creation

I present to you, my newest, s**tty little game - Veil of Darkness!
Originally this game was made for a DirectSound module at uni, which
required us to build a game that featured no visuals and was played with
only sound. Our Direct3D module then built upon this by asking us to
add in visuals. I had planned to improve it a bit more but the deadline
has been and gone, so I figured I'd post it up here. I might consider
working on it more in the future, so suggestions, comments, bug finds,
or just posting your high score, are all welcome :smile:

Here is a screenshot of the game in progress (notice the use of HL2 textures :wink: )...



And my not very impressive high score (no these aren't saved, could be added easily enough though)...



Oh and I almost forgot the download link!

Download

One last minute thing to mention - this
does NOT support EAX sound, so be sure to turn it off if you are using
a sound card that has it or you will lack most of the sounds.

EDIT: Some people on IRC had trouble running this due to missing a
DirectX DLL file. I assume this is due to either having an outdated DX
version, or perhaps its a DLL that only comes with the DirectX SDK.
Either way, I've uploaded the missing DLL to my pit. If you are getting
the error, then unzip it to your windows/system32 folder and the game
should work.

http://www.snarkpit.net/pits/reno/random/d3dx9d_24.zip

Cool game! The ghost talking sound gets a little old after a
while, but its neat. I even played it again when i died cause it
was so good! :smile:

Score: 2448

As my score tells I didn't quite understand how to locate and fend of
the ghosts, but still a cool game. Nice, gloomy feeling. :smile:

Surround sound kinda helps, it must be said :smile: Best tip I can give
really is to look at the shadow movement to determine the direction the
ghost is moving. That and keep your ears open for the charging sound -
if you can hear it then you are looking at the ghost, and if its
getting higher frequency you know your charge is getting higher. The
ghost can be particularly hard to spot when it is close to you since
the light it emits with be all around you, which is troublesome given
that its when its close to you that you desperately need to find it and
shoot it backwards :biggrin: At this time try and use the positional sound to
find out where it is, since the ghost "static" noise will be really
obvious when it is close. Another way to play the game is just stare at
the charge indicator in the top left and rotate constantly, stopping
once you see it go up, but doing that kinda defeats the point :wink:

How many hours did you play it to get 80000 points?! Argh!

That door looks like a HL2 texture.

Here is a screenshot of the game in progress (notice the use of HL2 textures :wink: )...

All the textures are from HL2 actually :smile: I've never been great at 2D art!

Lep, it actually didn't take me long at all, I only reach the 5th ghost
or so. I just had another game though and only reach 20000 odd on the
4th ghost. It might be down to a bug in the scoring system I guess .

Can you move into the Wonderful World of Sprites, and get a crosshair and other effects if you do work on this in the future? And some Havoc physics, have those chairs fly around (if they don't already!)

Sprites would be an easy addition, and I was planning on putting in a
dynamic crosshair that changes colour if you are focused on the ghost,
and rotates clockwise / anticlockwise depending on which side the ghost
is on. Unfortunately I ran out of time for this due to the deadline.
I'd also like to add some additional visual effect for the ghost, such
as localised fogging or some sort of waving blur, but those are
somewhat more tricky to do and I haven't really looked into it. As for
physics - I haven't even got 3D collision detection going so you can
bugger off :razz:

damn it i just scored 3874 =(

Hey i cant even play the game :-(

Error about some missing dll named : d3dx9d_24.dll

Frissi said:
Hey i cant even play the game :-(

Error about some missing dll named : d3dx9d_24.dll

Frissi geeze bud, at least read the first post thoroughly..

Hey i cant even play the game :-(
Error about some missing dll named : d3dx9d_24.dll

ReNo mentions this problem in the post. He has a fix.

"

EDIT: Some people on IRC had trouble running this due to missing a
DirectX DLL file. I assume this is due to either having an outdated DX
version, or perhaps its a DLL that only comes with the DirectX SDK.
Either way, I've uploaded the missing DLL to my pit. If you are getting
the error, then unzip it to your windows/system32 folder and the game
should work.

http://www.snarkpit.net/pits/reno/random/d3dx9d_24.zip "

hehe me feels akward

Thanks its just when i saw IRC when i didnt have the interest of reading any further :razz:

Frissi said:
hehe me feels akward

Thanks its just when i saw IRC when i didnt have the interest of reading any further :razz:

If thats the worse thing you do, you will be one of the lucky few.

you should do as many stupid things as i have. :/

Hmmm....did I hear a bit of monk_helpme02.wav and a few others in there? :wink: . high score = 1948.

Pretty nifty Reno. You didn't happen to use FarCry sounds for the
ghosts did you, as they sounded like those big guys with the rocket
launcher hands.

Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:

Nah, as Dark Tree guessed, it was good old Father Grigori from HL2 :wink:

Today I present you with another little program - a terrain generator...







DOWNLOAD

Should work odn any computers with OpenGL installed, which should be any with even a
marginally modern graphics card. This was an OpenGL coursework in which
we had to create a dynamically generated landscape - no
heightmaps/presets allowed. I'm reasonably happy with it given I only
worked on it for a day. The jaggy edges of the textures is my main pet
hate of the program, but to work around it I would have had to do
texture blending either by adding multi-texturing or by dynamically
generating a texture from the others, and quite simply I didn't have time given the deadline is...very soon :smile:

No, it doesn't create terrain for levels (though theoretically it could be used to do so with ease) :razz:

I just wanted to comment again on 'Veil of Darkness.' Although it isn't exactly something I would go out and purchase for 49.99 at CompUSA, I justr wanted to add that I am very impressed with the game. I think it is very cool you made it, ReNo.

Albeit small, it shows pretty creative thinking...infact, I haven't played a similar game. Those closest thing I can think of is Luigi's Mansion for GameCube.

I just wanted to applaud you on this little creativity and even though you borrowed pretty much all your textures and sounds, it is pretty neat.

Great job, as I had a bit of fun with a few loud F words as I played it, when ever I lose my chance for a bit hit.....and a chuckle noticing where the largely muffled and warped 'help me brother' came from.

ReNo said:
No, it doesn't create terrain for levels (though theoretically it could be used to do so with ease) :razz:

Don't suppose.....? :biggrin:

You got the source of that terrain generator, Reno ?

I'm into C++ / OpenGL programming myself too, and I'm interested to take a look at the code, for learning sake. :smile:

Sure, and feel free to give me a shout if you wanna ask about any of it
:smile: I'm not much of a programmer, but I'm getting more into it at the
moment.

http://www.snarkpit.net/pits/reno/random/terrain_source.zip

I also uploaded the source to the Direct3D game I posted previously, so if you are interested you can take a look at that too.

http://www.snarkpit.net/pits/reno/random/source.zip

Seems like I can't start terrain_gen.exe:

"This application has failed to start because glut32.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem."

God, making programs is more hassle than its worth, you never know if
its gonna work on other's PC's :S I wouldn't have expected it, but I
guess that means you may need to have GLUT installed, which is an
OpenGL library that aids in the creation of OpenGL programs. Not sure
what to do about it just now - has anybody else tried it out, or could
they to find out if it works?

Of all the mapping concepts involved with HL, terrain gives me the most trouble. If you could (or anyone really) come up with a reliable mesh between this program and Hammer, I would be very grateful. I would even consider naming my next born cat or dog after you. :heee:

Albeit small, it shows pretty creative thinking...infact, I
haven't played a similar game. Those closest thing I can think of is
Luigi's Mansion for GameCube.

There was a Japanese game that came out a year or two back that was
vaguely similar, in which you played a girl with a camera and the only
way to see and kill ghosts was with that camera. It was pretty boring
though, I actually found VoD to be more fun.

Pfff, how dare you criticise Project Zero/Fatal Frame, even if you were
complimenting me in the process :biggrin: But yeah, as Agent said, the game is
far from original :razz: I pretty much ripped the concept right outta that
game, because to put it bluntly, it is pure sex.

I uploaded the missing glut32.dll that was causing people trouble. Its
only 65k, so will only take a few seconds to download if you are
interested. Unzip it do your windows/system32 folder and hopefully the
app should run.

http://www.snarkpit.net/pits/reno/random/glut32.zip

Very nicely done on the terrain generator Reno, especially given the timeframe for it. Just a few questions. Are you planning to add any spatial partioning to it(Quad/Octree)? Also are there any LOD algorithms used while rendering? (I'd look through the source code but my computer that could handle this isn't working right now, using an old AMD K6 450 right now, with a vid card that hates both OGL and DX)

And yes working with GLUT is a pain in the ass if you don't have it installed. Once you know how to setup a basic window with OGL, make an app shell so you can avoid GLUT and get better performance out of it.

Thanks mate, and long time no see :smile: I might work on this some more in
time, but for the time being I've got other things on my plate to work
on unfortunately. There is no partitioning involved, but it might be a
nice thing to add. We've done theory work on Octrees and Quad trees but
I've never implemented them before, so its something I really ought to
try. No LOD'ing either I'm afraid.

I've got a framework OpenGL application that I wrote a while back that
doesn't use GLUT, but it was a bit of a mess and I chose to start from
an example program we were provided with instead (which happened to use
GLUT). I may well strip out all of the GLUT functionality and tie my
own window handling class into it, but again, other things to think
about right now. I'll definately do that in the future though - I had
no idea it would cause compatablity issues for end users.

If you're interested in exporting out the mesh for other editors to use, www.gamedev.net would be a good place to start looking. I remember somewhere on that site there was a link to another site that had a lot of documentation on file structures of many file formats. I've used the site to write custom texture loaders, .3ds, Q3BSP, MD2 and MD3 file importers. Ticked me off later when I found www.gametutorials.com and found tutorials on all the stuff I needed. They went much more indepth in showing me how to actually animate the files though.

Wow, my original message just got there, I wrote it almost 4 hours ago...

Well I got Lep's message a week or two ago reminding me about the address change and I'd thought I'd stop by.

I actually have an Octree class ready to go...it just needs some vertices:D. Right now it just loads in vertices stored from a raw data file. Also it still needs to split polygons that lie on more than one side of a partitioning plane.

I'm comptemplating mixing it with my bsp loader and foregoing the PVS system it uses now so I can use Radiant for terrain maps that have lightmaps generated for it. Also it will force me to back and clean up my collision code which is a train wreck right now, I can only make objects not climb walls if the wall surface is axis aligned. Even then I still get the occasional falling through the world bug happening.

Can you make this terrain generator output an height map so we CAN use it for source?