Thomas, 2008-02-01, "HPL 2.0 - The beginning"

[Thomas]

Hi all!

This is the first post in our brand new Work Log subforum, which is going to act as a sort of blog where we show of how work progress on our upcoming projects! Hope you will enjoy it!

In this entry log I am going to tell you a little about the recent progress with HPL 2, which is going to be the new engine we will use in (atleast) one our upcoming projects.

Here are some of the fun features I have managed to plugin into it so far:

• Support for several inputs per action (for example you can have jump button on several keys in a game).
  
• Major upgrade of image loading. I have implemented devIL as the image loading library and can now support DXTC compression, cubemaps in one files, custom mipmaps and all other kinds of stuff.
  
• Added saving for many new formats and made it alot easier to save screens.
  
• Fixed sound system so you effects are easier to handle and also added better support for streamed 3D sounds.
  
• ALOT of cleanup in the code. It looks so much nicer now
  

Next week I am going to fix my TextureAltas system and also add support for Frambuffer obejcts which will allow the engine to render to textures a lot simpler. After that I am going to start the new renderer. More on that next time!

Have a nice weekend!

[Klayman]

What is the diffirence in FPS between then and now?

[Thomas]

What is the diffirence in FPS between then and now?

Not made any optimizations for rendering speed yet and when I do, it will not be possible to compare since the rendering will be quite different. There is gonna be a quite new "style" on the engine and the rendering pipeline quite different. The Penumbra code actually is already incompitable with the engine.

[WindexGlow]

Here's some suggestions:
-Command console (displays HPL scripts; entity changes, ect)
-Better particle collision (if possible; maybe my particles were just too heavy)
-Some color/light variables that can alter the look of the game slightly
-Increase amount of variables/options modders have for core gameplay (before you could just alter speed, turn, ect)
-Option to create a light source in HPL viewer (or 'night vision')
-Ability to add custom ingame filters that can increase/decrease light, such as HPL1's night vision)
-Ability to change height/width ingame, or remove collision (useful for creating dynamic camera angles)
-Ability to more easily set how far a light source can reach (instead of just increasing the power)
-More texture types (distortion mainly)


Can you tell us what style of game you are planning HPL2 to use?

Will HPL2 be based entirely off of HPL1 or is it almost entirely new?

Will it still encourage modders, and have tools for them?

Will .dae still be the preferred filetype?

What game do you think renders similar to HPL2 once finished?

[Thomas]

Some quick answers below, do not want to dig into stuff too much at this point.

- I have been thinking about console and such, but then perhaps more of an ingame gui that can be used to tweak various variables and spawn stuff. The engine already have (as you will see in Black Plague) an extensive GUI system, so wanna use that

- As for what game that will use HPL2, that is super secret

- When it comes to modding a goal with the next version of engine and tools is to make it ALOT more user friendly. Cannot say exactly how at this points since it is all boiling in the design pot

- Collada (dae) will still be used as a middle format, but a good binary format will be used for the final version and dae files should not even be present in the final build of a game using HPL2.

- Hard to say, but games like Bioshock, Crysis and Stalker all contain elements that are planned to use. No large scale enviromnets are planned though.

[WindexGlow]

Is this an entirely new engine; or just a major modification of HPL ?

[Thomas]

Is this an entirely new engine; or just a major modification of HPL ?

It is like Unreal -> Unreal2, it uses the same base as HPL1 but alot of changes are being made all over the code. So I am not rewriting everything from scratch

[Thib_G]

Ok, sounds interesting
Some questions, though:
- Is the binary format you plan to use an internal format, like serialized data? or an already used format?
- Are you going to release HPL1 ( or even HPL2.0 ) as a free software?

[Thomas]

- Binary format is going to be an internal format, that is made to be loaded as fast as possible by the engine.
- No plans on releasing HPL1 to the community yet I' m afraid.

[Yuhaney]

Any plans for new games after Penumbra serie?