Well, I’ve had a week of rather nothing has happened! It’s amazing how, when you try to think of things to write about, you realise how dull your life can be… despite the fact that my life seems rather busy. It’s kinda like when something moves so fast that it looks static; I can think my life has so much going on that it seems dull.

We’re in the middle of house improvements at the moment, so that is a bit tiresome. Builders and mess everywhere. I’ll be glad when it’s all finished, but thats weeks away… oh well.

I’m at a wedding tomorrow, which is also a bit tiresome. I’d rather stay at home with a good book, or a bad one come to think of it!

Another update on DDR, I’ll try and keep these frequent…

I had a large batch of graphics from Jure today. And the results as you would expect are stunning. The new skies really make a difference.

We all know how much impact the initial dawn shot has in Doomdark’s; it was so different than LOM but that Red and Yellow colouring was so atmospheric.

After much messing around with the Dawn shot myself I felt I was going to be in big trouble trying to recreate that feel. Some of you may remember me asking in the group if I could drop that look… to be told emphatically no!

Anyway, I’m glad to say; Jure hit the nail on the head and the result I found to be breathtaking. I’ll try and upload a screenshot soon.

The new haze effect is really working, and I know how two styles of moon, night and evening/day. I also have a separate sun to drop in as an overlay this time rather than having it painted onto the backdrop.

Anyway, more later.

Well, Jean Yves put up beta 0.2 of Midnight/Mu yesterday. Fantastic night of frantic gaming ensued. I was up till 2am playing my games and trying to keep up with the forum. It’s a large step forward and almost there now, so hopefully not long before it gets an open release.

Just a quick update on Doomdark’s Revenge.

Work has been usually slow, however the graphical changes that Jure and I are making are increasing the visual appeal all the time.

I fixed a number of issues with the tunnel rendering code and this is now almost complete. Just to give you and update on the issues; they are one of view angle. In DDR we took the decision to only allow N E S W view points. This is in keeping with the original in that only movement is allowed on these axis. However we extended this to the UI in order to avoid looking in directions that are not valid.

A point of interest that came up during testing is that of the old DOOM 2d sprite view. ie: Whichever way you look, the sprite faces you. This is the same for the original LOM and DDR. We have kept this mechanic on the landscaping view, however we found that applying this technique in tunnels really jars. The problem is in simplicity that if looking north along a tunnel, there is a stone pillar on your left. When you move up the tunnel and look south it should be on your right. When this is not the case it looks just plain wrong… however your mind seems to except this in the landscaping view, ie: You should see the back of a keep etc…

We added coded haze between all the landscape terrain scales. This has a big impact on the visual quality of the graphics.

Jure is currently working on all the time states skies and floors etc.

I think most of the landscape graphics are done now, and all the dynamic stuff to give multiple terrain variations works really well. Jure has worked hard on this area; the amount of work put into the forests is amazing. You really won’t feel like it’s a tile forest anymore.

I would be interested to hear people’s views on 3d cards. I am considering taking TME over to use 3d hardware, not in a real 3d way but harnessing the power of the GPU to help process the increasing graphical workload. I know that older machines do not all have the luxury or 3d cards, but I would be interesting in hearing from anyone interested in playing LOM and DDR who do not have 3d support or have very old support.

I have had a number of talks with Matt Davies ( sorry can’t remember the correct number id! ) about the future of TME, and I have to say that there are some really interesting possibilities. However I will wait until DDR is out with you before I start the major overhaul that TME will be getting!

I have posted an article that I wrote on the Summer Solstice. I’ve placed it in the June archive where it rightly belongs.