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I've been thinking of a way to finally do this game in proper 3D where it truly belongs. So the other night, I started properly learning Irrlicht with VC6. Although far FAR from finished, I figured I'd show off the very first *working* shot of what I've been up to with this thing.



This shot is merely the very first room you see in the game...the small prison cell. The walls still use the same textures as the original "retro" version, except the new brick texture used in the lower righthand corner, where there will be an actual pool as intended in the original. I hadn't finished the southern wall before snapping this shot though.

The first level of the game won't be much different than the original game, as it's always meant to be an introduction to the game. However, the second level and all levels after it will get some major tweaks (most notably...height differences!). I'll try to recreate the enemies as closely as possible to the original sprites but I don't know if I'll be able to or not...worth a shot regardless (pun intended!).

looks cool... if progress continues, someday you could be able to use irrilicht from pure fb

That would be pretty cool.

irrilicht? :???:

Yeah...it's the only free 3D engine that doesn't suck and doesn't take a math degree to use.



Even a moron like me can get such a scene built rather quickly.

But have no fear, I'm still going to finish the original version. This 3D version is well over a year away, whereas the original could be as soon as 3 months away from completion.

I've spent a bit of time over the past few days doing the geometry for the first level. Irrlicht is taking some getting used to but all's well so far. No more screenshots for now, as the mtl file is incomplete and I can't monkey with it much until I finish the geometry of the level. Each level will take probably about three weeks to complete, mainly due to my lack of time plus inexperience with 3D editing. Anyways...at first, the game looks like the original Two Lords (just much higher resolution) until you leave the first room...and take the stairs down to the hallway, something I've never been able to do with a raycaster.

I found a model that I can use for Brutus...since he was originally a splice-job between Heretic's Golem and some character from Wolf3D, I've use the public domain md2 model of Golem and did some work on the texture file for it, producing a finished model that looks almost exactly like the original Brutus. I found some other md2 models that will suit other enemies in the game but any that I can't find, I'll just model them myself in Blender. I was going to use some Poser models but the md2 format (which Irrlicht supports natively, including its animations) has a max triangle limit of 4k and the Poser models use about 12k triangles, and using a decimator won't help much unless I attach a skeleton, in which case I'd skip using md2 altogether anyways. The item pickups and area props will be a breeze though...Blender makes it pretty easy.

As for the original Two Lords...a new game engine is being written for it that should be much faster than the slow one it has now, and hopefully it'll extend the game's capabilities as well. This will be my final FB project though...I figured out a long time ago that coding just isn't really my thing, I'm simply a game designer, not a coder, so I'm going to focus on game design rather than game code. I've always considered the product to be more important than the code used to produce it, which I guess is the polar opposite of what a "true coder" thinks. Ah well.

VC6... hifty: :evil:

Well I sure ain't gonna use mingw or VC7. Irrlicht is a pain to get working in mingw, and I don't feel like messing with a 23mb framework.

You use Blender? Cool!

You can still write unmanaged C++ in the latest Visual Studio, regardless of the .NET the marketing fellas put on the end of it, but that's a story for another time. Looks pretty cool!