[OpenDeadlock Community Discussion] - Terrain Rendering
Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2017 6:32 am
Dear members,
I have received several requests to mimic the Terrain Rendering of the original games.
I do not want to post the quantities yet to avoid affecting poll results.
I am afraid that I must declare that there are problems about this feature.
What are the options:
1- Make it just like the originals, as requested:
Thanks to RenanSPH, it has been considered to "learn how the originals do it" (avoiding that correct engineering term) during decode tasks since the early days of OpenDeadlock.
This is not really easy to do and the biggest problem is that we do not have permission to do this.
We cannot mimic it and then release the rewritten code as "ours".
Why not just use the existing code? The originals are monolithic (most code is mixed into a single block) and it is not easy to simply invoke existing code.
Existing code is also dependent on the operating system.
That is why it is also discouraged because OpenDeadlock is not only for Windows or only for Mac.
There could be other issues that may arise that I would not like to write about.
2- Make it from scratch, trying to mimic the look-and-feel (be similar):
This could even improve things if we had specialists, since there is better hardware available.
However, we do not have specialists on this kind of rendering available, so we are not planning to do this right now.
3- Use a 3D library to render the terrain:
That was my suggestion only because it is somewhat easy and we are well capable of doing it.
It would make it easier to adapt to high resolution and take advantage of rendering hardware.
However, there is a lot of resistance against this idea, for two reasons:
Firstly, this could make the terrain look "much more modern" than players who want a faithful look-a-like would like (too different).
Secondly, more libraries dependencies mean less compatibility. It might look like a simple sentence, but it could cause some trouble later. That means that some versions/operating systems could support it correctly while others could not. Using hardware rendering also affects the results, it could look nicer depending on each one's hardware.
TL;DR: We are sorry but we cannot mimic the terrain rendering exactly.
Note: It is not the priority for initial alpha versions. They would use a fixed pre-rendered background instead.
If there is anyone wishing to contribute code for terrain rendering, please tell us.
Thanks.
I have received several requests to mimic the Terrain Rendering of the original games.
I do not want to post the quantities yet to avoid affecting poll results.
I am afraid that I must declare that there are problems about this feature.
What are the options:
1- Make it just like the originals, as requested:
Thanks to RenanSPH, it has been considered to "learn how the originals do it" (avoiding that correct engineering term) during decode tasks since the early days of OpenDeadlock.
This is not really easy to do and the biggest problem is that we do not have permission to do this.
We cannot mimic it and then release the rewritten code as "ours".
Why not just use the existing code? The originals are monolithic (most code is mixed into a single block) and it is not easy to simply invoke existing code.
Existing code is also dependent on the operating system.
That is why it is also discouraged because OpenDeadlock is not only for Windows or only for Mac.
There could be other issues that may arise that I would not like to write about.
2- Make it from scratch, trying to mimic the look-and-feel (be similar):
This could even improve things if we had specialists, since there is better hardware available.
However, we do not have specialists on this kind of rendering available, so we are not planning to do this right now.
3- Use a 3D library to render the terrain:
That was my suggestion only because it is somewhat easy and we are well capable of doing it.
It would make it easier to adapt to high resolution and take advantage of rendering hardware.
However, there is a lot of resistance against this idea, for two reasons:
Firstly, this could make the terrain look "much more modern" than players who want a faithful look-a-like would like (too different).
Secondly, more libraries dependencies mean less compatibility. It might look like a simple sentence, but it could cause some trouble later. That means that some versions/operating systems could support it correctly while others could not. Using hardware rendering also affects the results, it could look nicer depending on each one's hardware.
TL;DR: We are sorry but we cannot mimic the terrain rendering exactly.
Note: It is not the priority for initial alpha versions. They would use a fixed pre-rendered background instead.
If there is anyone wishing to contribute code for terrain rendering, please tell us.
Thanks.