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25May
Progress report #1
Posted in: progressSo, I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I've finally got the time to write up a quick post on recent developements in OpenApoc! Hopefully this is the first of a regular feature...
First: A caveat. OpenApoc is at a very early stage - a lot of the frameworks behind the scenes are still being designed and built - hopefully the rate at which we can implement the 'game' itself will speed up as we get these behind-the-scene structures in shape.
So with a progress report, we have to have something to progress from, so I'll start this with not-so-recent developments. So, currently implemented features (as of a couple of weeks ago, or so. I'm not very good with dates, clearly). We had got to the point where we have decoded ~90% of the image files used in Apocalypse, and could emulate the UI to show the main menu and start a new game.
We also have implemented enough of the city to read the apocalypse city map files and render them (at any resolution - no longer are you limited to 640x480!).The renderer should be quite fast and efficient, using OpenGL 3.0 acceleration, which should hopefully work on any (relatively modern) system.
We also have some prototype code for vehicles, with somewhat simple pathfinding around the city.
A decent representation of what this looks like can be seen in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0DevD4ufSE
Finally, that brings us up to date (mostly) - so onwards to:
Recent developments
- Full unicode support in the font renderer and string handling
We load the font files directly from the Apocalypse resource files, and they contain a number of glyphs outside the basic ASCII range. Our old renderer indexed these as bytes, which wasn't correct for anything outside this range, at best causing weird artifacts (at worst crashing). We finally moved to a full-unicode text pipeline, and allowed fonts to define any unicode glyph. Due to us using the Apocalypse font files, we're currently restricted to what glyphs they contain, which is rather limited. A rather dull change, but a big backend cleanup, and required for any non-english characters, which I'm sure some people will appreciate. It is also easy to add new glyphs to these fonts in the future, leaving the door open to translating to more languages.
Here is a screenshot of the main menu using our french translation (thanks to 5thAvenue!). It might not look like much, but those accented letters caused me a world of pain!
- Day/Night palette swap
This is kind of a cheat - all the work had already been done for palette swaps in the renderer backend. Just nothing was using it yet! So I hacked a quick test (the 1,2,3 keys in the cityscape) to swap the palette, and it actually worked!
There have been a number of behind-the-scenes changes recently too, which aren't that interesting to show, so I won't bother (Unless I do a horrendously nerdy implementation deep-dive post later, of course).
Put all together, you get this:
Hopefully the first of many progress reports!
Signing off,
JonnyH
OpenApoc is planned as an open source remake of the original XCOM: Apocalypse game.
Further down the line, it will hopefully get additional changes such as higher resolution and mod support.
At this early juncture, there's nothing for players to use, but if you want to get involved, there's plans for language packs, and when something gets released, it'll need testing.
Hopefully you stay around for the ride, and we can do for Apoc what OpenXCOM did for UFO: Enemy Unknown
Exciting Links:
Official Source Code (github)
OpenApoc's Facebook page
Further down the line, it will hopefully get additional changes such as higher resolution and mod support.
At this early juncture, there's nothing for players to use, but if you want to get involved, there's plans for language packs, and when something gets released, it'll need testing.
Hopefully you stay around for the ride, and we can do for Apoc what OpenXCOM did for UFO: Enemy Unknown
Exciting Links:
Official Source Code (github)
OpenApoc's Facebook page