Status report

Arathorn · Post by **Arathorn** » 01 Mar 2007 15:03

Could everyone who's involved with the project give some sort of a status report of what's been done (or not, that's useful too) for the past few months?

Purno · Post by **Purno** » 01 Mar 2007 16:11

I've done nothing.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 01 Mar 2007 16:47

Me neither, I lost the motivation when the feedback on the big "Rewrite the DD" dried up.

XeryusTC · Post by **XeryusTC** » 01 Mar 2007 20:27

I've been working a bit on TRoS, although it was mostly on parts that TE will not benefit from. Seniltai has almost finished the GUI though and also writen a GUI creater tool so there is a lot TE can benefit from

.

Post by **uzurpator** » 02 Mar 2007 06:24

For the last 3 months I haave been writing my own take on the engine. I have circa 200 kbytes of code now. ATM I am rewriting everything to be massively parallel (I will obtain a 2ghz quad core 4GB ram with sli graphics PC soonishly, so I have a place to test).

And, ofc, the TTDpatch terrain generator was written with TE as a target, and that is precisely where it works now.

DaleStan · Post by **DaleStan** » 02 Mar 2007 07:36

uzurpator wrote:And, ofc, the TTDpatch terrain generator was written with TE as a target, and that is precisely where it works now.

Except, of course, for the fact that the TTDPatch terrain generator is dead, quite frankly.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 02 Mar 2007 07:44

DaleStan wrote:
uzurpator wrote:And, ofc, the TTDpatch terrain generator was written with TE as a target, and that is precisely where it works now.
Except, of course, for the fact that the TTDPatch terrain generator is dead, quite frankly.

Can you please keep a discussion about that outside the TE forum section? Much appreciated.

Post by **uzurpator** » 02 Mar 2007 08:56

DaleStan wrote:
uzurpator wrote:And, ofc, the TTDpatch terrain generator was written with TE as a target, and that is precisely where it works now.
Except, of course, for the fact that the TTDPatch terrain generator is dead, quite frankly.

I talked to patchman over that issue. The deal is, that I cannot commit any changes up until half of may due to the fact that I only have internet access in work.

If I could, I'd fix it loooong time ago.

Arathorn · Post by **Arathorn** » 02 Mar 2007 09:07

Can't we use OTTD's terrain generator?

Post by **uzurpator** » 02 Mar 2007 09:16

Arathorn wrote:Can't we use OTTD's terrain generator?

No. Because I am now writing an implementation of terragen that will run multithreaded - so your new dual-core cpu will be fully utilized.

Besides - the terragen is perfectly operable, just not yet commited with newest fixes into TTDP

Zuu · Post by **Zuu** » 02 Mar 2007 15:53

I've done nothing, but I don't think I'm on the project anymore.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 12 Mar 2007 08:53

Nice to see the graphics coming to live (or so it seems) but where does TE go from here?!

Purno · Post by **Purno** » 12 Mar 2007 09:33

It seems both Xeryus and uzurpator are coding.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 12 Mar 2007 10:51

Did I miss the announcement of this wonderful news?!

Purno · Post by **Purno** » 12 Mar 2007 11:00

When reading this;

XeryusTC wrote:
uzurpator wrote:IThis is a declaration and a direction I take when developing my game engine. Because I am now doing just that.

BTW - i am using:

Ogre 3d rendering engine for graphics
OIS for input
Boost library

I am developing as multiplatform as possible.
We decided to go with TRoS some time ago. We had the unfortunate event of the SVN server (the TRoS one) going down but it is up again since two days and we're working on it quite hard again. I would also like to note that the engine will have some of the most advanced stuff you will come around, more advanced than Ogre 3D probably can. I have seen and heard all the ideas of Seniltai and seen the same white board over and over again .
And TRoS has finaly come to the stage where there are tools for creating content and you don't need to hack into it to use certain features (although some stuff stays for a while).
TRoS is based on SDL which means it is fast and cross platform, we further try to support as many operating systems as possible but cannot do that currently because we only have access to the most easily obtainable operating systems.

You can't force people to start working on TE now, everyone who offered help wants to do it in their spare time, only when you start paying people you can demand things.

it seems to me both are busy with each their own engine.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 12 Mar 2007 13:04

I got the same idea from seeing this resurrection. Resurrections are fine but you have to keep inmind the decisions we already made and the co-developers. And I still haven't found an official announcement by the way

.

Arathorn · Post by **Arathorn** » 12 Mar 2007 13:22

How about the top topic?

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 12 Mar 2007 13:49

Ah, lol. Silly me.

neroden · Post by **neroden** » 07 Apr 2007 07:30

Well, this is probably the wrong place to post this, but after looking at the status of things I had a major thought....

So from a coding perspective, the single hardest thing to get right is bridges and tunnels -- specifically making them fully 3d (so they can pass over and under each other). I believe the design decision was to make them pure civil engineering, placing tracks or roads in them spearately and afterwards.

Getting this right in a logically 3d (as 3d as Locomotion) *and* mostly freeform (not appearing tile-based) game requires work *really* early, because effectively bridges and tunnels have to act like *terrain* and their display has to be part of the *terrain display*. Locomotion basically solved the logical 3d problem by using cubes rather than tiles as its logical unit, and I doubt there's any other way to do it.

I also think this is going to be the first major coding challenge. The combination of a truly 3d world with modifiable terrain including tunnels and bridges, and freeform 3d graphics, hasn't been done before to my knowledge.

Even the basic polygon display tree is affected: if you naively hang everything off the "ground" the way you would with 2d game logic you're going to get serious display problems after a while (with parts of bridges or tunnels "vanishing" temporarily because they're hung off something far away). You probably have to have some form of master *3d* grid (not just 1024x1024, but 1024x1024x256 or whatever), and have to keep track of which parts of that have land surface/tunnel wall/bridge upper surface/bridge lower surface (which should all be largely interchangable, probably). It also requires keeping track of the "full" (earth/stone/masonry/etc) and "empty" (air) sides of each surface. And coding gravity -- specifically identifying the "down sides" of surfaces (suitable for tracks or roads), the "up sides" (not suitable), and the "side sides" (not suitable), and having data structures which are able to keep track of running track/roads along any "appropriate" surface.

So I guess I'm saying, the moment I see an engine which can handle that, even if it doesn't have any actual vehicles or tracks or anything like that, I'll jump on board; from that point on the coding should be pretty easy (basically it's all stock stuff which has been done in other transport games) and I'd love to help -- but writing a proper architecture (even just the data structures) for that part is genuinely hard, which is one reason I never got off the ground when trying to make a demo.

This is impossible to retrofit, as has been discovered by the authors of TTD (who wrote Locomotion from scratch because of this), SimCity 4 (everything seems like it should work -- until it doesn't), Simutrans, OpenTTD, etc. It has to be done right, logically 3d, at the beginning.

Word of warning to those people trying to code an engine: if you don't get this part right, you may well have to throw out your entire codebase and start over.

Looking at the bits I've seen published so far, I don't see any evidence that this has been seriously attempted yet. In fact, it looks suspiciously like the exact mistakes I'm warning about have already been made: if you're displaying terrain based on a flat grid, *you've probably already messed up*.

DaleStan · Post by **DaleStan** » 07 Apr 2007 10:44

neroden wrote:This is impossible to retrofit, as has been discovered by the authors of TTD (who wrote Locomotion from scratch because of this)

No "they" didn't. "They" yoinked RCT's engine, including its build system. Which is great for curvies, but absolutely horrible when you want to build a long section of straight track.

And "they" amounts to Chris Sawyer, basically.

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