Upcoming Beta and Changes March 22, 2011

Since my last blog post, I have been spending a lot of my free time working on DaggerXL version 0.20. The plan was to work on the DarkXL Beta at the same time, but until this week my hectic schedule hasn’t let up as much as I originally thought. However I am once again working on the Beta release for DarkXL, with all the features discussed in the previous article. A release should finally be made within the next couple of weeks, assuming “real life” behaves for a while.

As for changes, I’ve reconsidered the goals of the Pure Renderer. While the prospect of having the GPU renderer display the game almost exactly like the DOS version is cool, and matches the original goals, it doesn’t really completely solve the problem. And that problem is that there are many people with older systems or newer systems with terrible GPUs and/or drivers that would like to use something like DarkXL but can’t due to under-performing parts, drivers or just the age of their GPU. So despite my original plans, the Pure Renderer will become a software renderer. It’ll still support the DOS-like mode (i.e. 320×200 8bit) but also support higher resolutions, 8 bit and 32 bit modes.

The Pure Renderer will share the mesh rendering and blitting code with DaggerXL (which is also getting a software renderer for the same reasons) but will, of course, use a specialized renderer for the sector geometry. With all that said, the hardware renderer will continue to be optimized and improved but this will give people another option. This means that fixed-function GPUs will not be supported (and they are not currently), but the Pure Renderer will be available instead.

This also means that DarkXL will have a software voxel rendering implementation after all as well. Though the current hardware implementation will remain of course.

Crunch Time Ending March 2, 2011

My deadline for my current work is coming up this week at which point I’ll finally be able to resume normal working hours. This means that DarkXL and DaggerXL will resume active development next week.

For DarkXL – I will finish the UI script system, which is mostly complete and then fix some bugs for the Beta. The Beta will include the Pure Renderer, all the weapons including secondary fire, all the enemies with proper AI, all levels fully playable, the ending working correctly, cut-scene bugs fixed and potentially an OS X client (if this doesn’t make it in the first Beta build, it will follow shortly afterwards). Oh and I almost forgot, the voxel support among a bunch of other things I’m forgetting too…  In addition all of the source code will be available on the CodePlex site once the Beta is released, some of it is already up there. Once Beta is released DarkXL should be a complete replacement for Dark Forces in Dos Box for vanilla game play.

In addition, the Beta build will be more helpful to people setting it up for the first time. There are multiple ways it will do this: when you run it will try and determine if it can load all the necessary files. If not a dialog will pop up where you can select paths to the Dark Forces game data. This means that you won’t set the path in the text file anymore and it means that the game can tell you what’s missing right away and let you look for those files on your system.

In addition, the first time you run the program, a dialog will popup where you can put in your general preferences for how you want DarkXL to behave. This will setup all the options as outlined below, but at anytime you can still bring up the Configuration dialog in-game to tweak individual settings. This is done so people will have a positive initial experience with DarkXL that (hopefully) closely matches what they want to get out of the program without having to mess with a bunch of options – unless they want to of course.

Original controls: key board turning, key board look up and down, auto-aim

Modern Controls: full mouse look, no auto-aim by default (for most weapons)

Options will include:

Visuals     (Controls – either Original or Modern for all visual options.)

Dos-like

(Default “Pure Renderer”) Emulated 320×200, emulated palette support, no texture filtering, forced perspective (i.e. the original skewed perspective when looking up and down), palette based effects.

Mac-like

Very similar to the Dos-like mode, but with the Pure Renderer running in emulated 640×400/480 mode.

Hi-res, minimal FX

Full resolution, color depth and texture filtering. Note that texture filtering can be disabled and other tweaks can be made through the Configuration menu (modes are just initial settings that can be tweaked at anytime).

Hi-res, modern FX

Full resolution, color depth and high quality texture filtering. Additional, modern effects, are enabled by default. These include dynamic lighting and bloom/glow.

Thank you for your patience everyone, hopefully people will consider the Beta (and future support for Outlaws and Blood) to be worth the wait.