It took a little while, but now the list of issues is down two items :-).

• It is not animate
• It has badly mixed up texture coordinates[DONE]
• It is not world oriented
• It has no physics whatsoever
• It is way too dark[DONE]
• It has no bolter!

+++udate+++

Plus I've added a lovely little RSS feed button to the page and cleaned the links at the top. Another noteworthy thing might be that I'm making progress on killing the spambots on the forum. Once none of them is slipping through my filters anymore, I can activate it again.

The site revamp is not completely done yet (the forum theme still shows a lot of Call of Duty stuff) but I managed to make it consistent with the web page :-).

On other news, the level rendering is coming along and now includes rendermodes, yay! Now what should I choose next... ligts or sky? Anyways, here comes some eyecandy (I'm sticking to the established pattern of showing the original besides the current state in JMonkey):




+++udate+++

As you may have realized, I've switched on the lights and updated the screenshot above with a more recent version of my efforts! By this time around, the list of open issues has been reduced and the current state is as follows:

• The textures are only the color of their first pixel [DONE]
• The view distance is too short [DONE]
• There is no skybox[DONE]
• There are no lights[DONE]
• There are no transparency effects[DONE]
• There are no map models
• Textures turned upside down and all around [DONE]
• Different texture scales [DONE]

There were some major issues with the lighting so that I couldn't really complete the step. JMonkey currently rerenders the complete scene for each light. Which means with the current amount of lights on Fortress that it will play at roughly one frame in ten seconds. They will of course fix that but I'll have to wait for that before I can progress with rendering. In the meantime, you can support the case! If you have a google account, then I urgently suggest you take a look at this list: http://code.google.com/p/jmonkeyengine/issues/list?cursor=jmonkeyengine%3A510 and click a star on issue number 510. I've already posted mine, but some more attention might help ;-).

So what is next? There is one step remaining in the list above and that is actually a whole new chapter: Loading models! I may turn silent again for a while until I answered the main questions concerning that and resolved the basic functionality. In the meantime, I'll try and improve the website and hopefully free us from the plague of spambots so that I can let you loose on the forum again. Until then, you can still comment on each news post ;-).

It took only a few days to achieve a fix for the first issue mentioned i the foregoing news post. And I intend to use these news as somewhat of a blog as long as I have only very few 'readers' (and little to show off). So here comes an update that obviously fixes the textures.. and adds a new problem :-).

As you can see, texture drawing quality will be higher than in HL1 and I will be able to use increased resolutions wherever the original resources are avialable. As you can also see, I still have new issues with

• Textures turned upside down and all around
• Different texture scales

But it is still an enjoyable progress! And for reference purposes I'm throwing in a screenshot of the same view with the good old HalfLife engine:

Ah well, you might have recognized the recent slowdown in development and events... and practially everything ;-). To be more precise, this mod has been dead since about two years (and walking dead for years already then). But that doesn't mean I will stop doing things with it! Haha, nooo, I can still feed it to the monkeys!

So since about a year I'm occupied with that, feeding the core game logic costed about half a year. Afterwards it was time for the scenic content and just these days I had a break through in that area :-). Here you can see the results of it:



So what is that you may ask? Well, that is the JMonkey engine! And the most important thing was to read the HalfLife map files into the format of that engine. For that, I needed to do some old school math and it took a while.

So what's in it for you? If you are an old times player and fan of Rival Species then you will possibly recognize that this is the first line of defense in the map called Fortress. You can also see that its latest rendition is far from complete:

• The textures are only the color of their first pixel
• The view distance is too short
• There is no skybox
• There are no lights
• There are no transparancy effects
• There are no map models

All that will keep me busy for a while, but why is it worth it? On the IRC channel of our only remaining clan Ordo Xenos, old time player Razielk received an answer to that question:

<]OX[Razielk> so what are the benefits of this new engine?
<Bahl> the benefits are for once that it is being updated
<Bahl> which means it keeps up with recent developments
<Bahl> the HL1 engine is static...
<Bahl> the second thing is, I can modify or read whatever bit of code of it that I need
<Bahl> the third is, it is in Java which has better tools freely available and more software technology to use in combination
<Bahl> that's roughly it ^^