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Epsylon - The Guardians of Xendron takes the player on a journey to a futuristic world investigating a very special Science-Fiction setup. With a team of rather different characters the player investigates, and if required fights, his way through a large case. How you solve the case is though up to you. Combine the strength of your team members is important as no team member alone can crack the case alone.

Report RSS The long awaited news post

Usually I do not delay news posts for such a long time but in the last 2 month things went upside down at different places. Like always time has to be saved where it is the least damaging, which had been unfortunatly this project. This is a short summary so read this news post for the long version.

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Usually I do not delay news posts for such a long time but in the last 2 month things went upside down at different places. Like always time has to be saved where it is the least damaging, which had been unfortunatly this project. This is a short summary so read this news post for the long version.

The biggest work went into implementing physics into the engine using two different physics libraries: ODE and Bullet. Various troubles as well as beeing new to this topic caused some heavy delay until a somewhat working solution could be found. The current status is that the Bullet Physics Module is working to a point where you can toss around simple objects under physical influence against Triangle-Meshes ( Map, Objects ) and AI related collision routines are back working too.

Another big chunk of work went into optimizing the Graphic Module. It is still far from perfect but at last rendering works now with lighting and shadows on producing between 40 and 20 frames per second on my better machine depending on where you are in the map. I started also with a Portal-Engine for inside rooms but for more informations read the The Geometry Type system for Map Terrains topic.

Shadow casting has also been improved. The current graphic module uses now Shadow Maps instead of Shadow Volumes as this allows for transparent shadows.

Furthermore preparations have been done for supporting HDRR in the future. Only the tone mapping shaders remains for this system to be working.

Concerning the content part of the game things slowed down as most contributors lack time to do work. This is nothing unexpected to me but leaves more work on my own end and the day has only 24 hours in the end. Out of all Edwin remained for doing texture and models. The first map has been reworked a bit to suit rendering better. Also light placement has been improved including some nice ceiling lamps which are fully working with on-off skins and alike.

Work has also been done on the gameplay elements by adding some new objects to toy with including the notepad. Like the computer pad the text on this notepad is dynamic and can be changed. Only thing missing is to produce a hand-writing font to replace the default font there. Like the rest this is all realtime hence you can also read the notepad laying around or grabbing it. The plans for the next time include adding the lower floor of the building with elevators, doors and hatches as well as improving the game scripts to make adding content later on easier.

And finally the images I mentioned. More to come soon.

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Arxae
Arxae

me wants it :)
is it allso supported to have images/shapes on the notepad?

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SkitZaY
SkitZaY

Looking good Dragonlord, keep it up.

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Sallycin
Sallycin

Looks Good, I can't wait to see the notepad with a good handwriting font

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INtense! Staff
INtense!

Damn - I've gotten lazy with so many pics in the news these days!

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Dragonlord Author
Dragonlord

You can put there anything you can render ( text, images, 3d scenes, anything ). The current implementation simply takes a text-string and displays it to get it started. The idea is to provide in the end a "StyledText" Widget which operates using XML syntax to display formated text. Hence you can then provide as text using this syntax. Would then look something like this:
<styledText>
<paragraph align="center">Hi there, this is <italic>Dark_Raver9</italic>... Check out my w00t Image!</paragraph>
<paragraph align="center"><image src="/epsylon/images/w00t_Dark_Raver9.png"></paragraph>
</styledText>

Another idea floating around is doing a "HTMLText" Widget to handle html input but this might be a bit bloated. The first step is anyways to get this StyledText working first.

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franky21
franky21

cause it looks cool i hope it is a game :)

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Grogdon
Grogdon

It's a game

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