The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Yesterday I watched on TV the movie "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly", a so called spaghetti-western by Sergio Leone. The plot, the long sequences, the emblematic characters, the awesome sountrack, make it one of the best movies of the italian director.
This is the right occasion to remember two small APOCALYX demos that take from that genre of movies their atmosphere. They are the "El Paso level" and "Sure as a Gun".

The former shows the town of El Paso, as depicted in a "For a few Dollars More". The latter shows the most famous characters of Sergio Leone's westerns, performed by Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef.
Both the BSP levels and the MD3 models of those demos were taken from the great "WesternQ3", a MOD for the old Quake III.

The demos are very schematic, just a simple fly-through. However, as already explained, it's not impossible for users with some programming skills to improve them and recreate those unforgettable duels represented in Sergio Leone's movies.

Goldrake model

Yesterday I show some pictures of the Gundam-like robots available at InGame.de where a large collection of MD3 models is available, free to use in the old Quake III Arena.
Since we already made a big jump back in time, I recall another great japanese TV serie that I used to watch when I was a little child: Goldrake. Here is a screenshot of the giant robot driven by Actarus, always taken from InGame.de.

At the time of the TV serie, I coudn't imagine a videogame looking better than the cartoon itself (or better I coudn't imagine a videogame at all), but now it's even possible to create such a game at home, given enough programming skills and a free engine like APOCALYX. The result will not be comparable to commercial titles, but what a giant leap from the schematic ball and pads moving on a black & white TV screen of the seventies.

Gundam models

In my continuous search for good free animated 3D characters, I look for large repositories of MD2, MD3 and MDL models, that are the most common because they were the formats supported by Quake2, Quake3 and Half-Life. A large one was PolyCount, but in the past years it suffered a redesign and the links to the most interesting models are not available yet.

Anyway, looking carefully, there are other large free collections out there. A very interesting one is InGame.de. There you can find some of the most famous MD3 models, but also some that I could find only there. For example, you can see in the screeshots some nice Gundam-like robots very useful for some space combat game.

As usual, these models are explicitly provided for free when used in Quake3. For other purposes, such as the inclusion in other games, one has to ask for permission to their authors. In my experience, it's not too difficult to obtain the permission, asking kindly and giving proper credits, because every artist wants that his models still survive in the ages and does not fade away when the environment where they lived becomes obsolete. Of course, the model should not be too similar to copyrighted material, as the robots in the screenshots, because in that case one may incur in problems difficult to solve without paying a lot of money.

Models formats (POLL)

I have no news about the projects that I started in the past days. The scheduled activities are delayed, but I hope to find more time for their development soon.
Anyway, now it's the time for a new poll. Since the available time is limited and I want to improve the engine especially for what regards features really used, I want to ask about the animated models formats that are going to be used in your projects.

As you know, the model format currently supported are: Cal3D (the well known library), MD2 (Quake2 format), MD3 (Quake3 format), MDL (Half-Life 1 format) and MS3D (MilkShape3D format). There are also 3DS and OBJ, but they are not animated (at least not in the flavor that the engine supports). If you want that some of them are the one improved first (I mean higher rendering speeds and better final results), vote them. Then I add also to the list the X (DirectX) and MD5 (Doom3) formats, that are not supported yet, but I have found in the past source code that can help in their implementation. If you think that also the last two are important in your project, vote for them, too. You can also suggest other formats, but in that case you must also suggest some free source code that explains how to load and render that format using OpenGL.
You can vote at will any number of formats, but choose only the ones you absolutely need, so I can focus my efforts (and my spare time) in a useful direction.

MS3D vs MD3 performances

The comparison between different model formats supported by APOCALYX continues.
This time I compare the same dog model in its original MS3D format against its MD3 version. The MD3 format is the old vertex-based Quake3 format, while MS3D is the native format used by the MilkShape3D modeller. The latter uses skeletal animation.

MS3D above, MD3 below

In the screenshots above, you can see two scenes rendered at the same frame rate. It’s evident that the engine performs the MS3D rendering at poor speed, compared to MD3 rendering, in fact the first loses 25 dogs against 225!
The main reasons are two: MS3D, being skeleton-based, require more computations than MD3 to place each vertex; then MS3D does not support yet the clone function and every dog in the picture is a different model with its own animation data, while similar MD3 models share the same data, so the impact on memory allocation is reduced.
I think there is room for a lot of speed improvements in the MS3D animator, but in the meantime I suggest, if you own some MS3D model, to convert them to MD3 (if there are only a few animation sequences) or MDL, because they are currently faster.

Wrokdam, the gladiator

In the last posts I always talked about MD2 and MDL model formats, even BSP level format, but never about MD3 models. They were the main source for my first demos and also the first version of GUN TACTYX was based upon such a kind of model: Wrokdam.

To celebrate the format I'll publish here the Wrokdam's story, that is also the background of GUN-TACTYX. Now another story is necessary for GUN-TACTYX-2, but before the poll between "The Trenches" or "The Specialists" models must be closed: You have still a few days to vote.

WROKDAM by Grant Struthers

Wrokdam Von Gadmoore was a legendary arena gladiator in his time. He had no greater love than the glory of combat and spent his entire life shaping his body and mind into the perfect weapon. Tragically, a warrior's prime fades quickly.
Wrokdam could feel the years catching up and it infuriated him. He swore he would never allow weakness to prevail even if his body betrayed him. He decided to combat death itself through the use of cybernetics and began replacing parts of his body he felt had grown too weak to be useful in battle. He thought he had found true immortality. He was terribly mistaken.
As time passed, Wrokdam slowly slipped into madness. His mind could not endure the time his new body could and he soon lost himself to the machine.
Now the monster known as Wrokdam wanders the world in search of combat and no one knows if any part of his soul still lives.

THE STORY SO FAR... by Leonardo Boselli

In a few decades people lost memory of Wrokdam and his past glory faded away. The cyber-gladiator's story became a legend known only by the oldest arena warriors, until Wrokdam was found still fighting in a provincial arena on a far planet at the border of the Empire.
A young researcher of ZYX Corporation apprehended the military application of a body so highly trained for combat, so the mad warrior was captured and transferred to a gun-fight training area known as GUN-TACTYX.
The researcher discovered that Wrokdam's body could become the perfect combat machine, but his brain was too weak, slow and mad to drive effectively his powerful devices. A hard decision was taken and an artificial brain was installed in place of Wrokdam's carbon-based one. Then his body was cloned hundreds of time to form teams of clones fighting each other to pick out the perfect warrior through natural selection.
Only one thing lacks to make Wrokdam the strongest arena gladiator of every time: The best gun-fighting algorithm for his artificial brain!

GUN-TACTYX: Now it's your play!

The reader may ask where Wrokdam's original brain is now, but the answer is obvious if you know that ZYX Corporation's philosophy is: "Throw Away Nothing".
Wrokdam's brain is now employed as a consultant at ZYX Corporation and mainly keeps up running commentary of the fights among the clones taking place in the arenas of the GUN-TACTYX area. His deep experience in gun tactics is very useful to the developers that tune up the fighting algorithms.
I don't know if he is really dissatisfied with his new condition, but I'm sure that he is a little envious of those artificially brained fighters that resemble the aspect of a warrior once know as Wrokdam: A legendary arena gladiator in his time.