It is an online part time collaborative project I am starting. It is, however, long term (potentially years). The general idea has been in the concept stages for some time. This is the project's criteria:

1. To develop a 3D engine that uses DX 9/OpenGL 2.0 from the ground up. The components to the engine are (1) a robust modular particle system that can handle a wide range of particle types, some of them unforeseen. (2) A physics engine robust enough to power a flight simulator and also able to simulate Young's Modulus and the fracturing/shearing characteristics of various materials for destructible terrain and world geometry with realistic detail. (3) A LOD system able to allow for the rendering of multi-hundred thousand or million polygon models from close up perspective while maintaining playable frame rates. (3) Implementation of a texture system that prevents textures from blurring close-up (a hardware version of this feature is implemented on 3D Labs latest workstation card). (4) A lighting system, similar to Doom III, that is able to simulate the read world optical characteristics of materials. (5) A combination of DX 9 shaders and a gamma/color system that would emulate camera filters. (6) A smart camera system that can produce cinematic angles and not impede game play.

2. To implement professional audio effects and music at a 24 bit resolution and 192 Kilohertz frequency range. This would include support of various major surround standards. If possible the system should be able to use a software driver to process and decode surround audio streams in real time and output them on any multi-channel sound card. A similar solution was implemented on the Playstation 2.

3. To write an engrossing story for the game that uses open ended level design that allows for emergent game play; i.e. new strategies and solutions beyond the designers intentions are developed by the player to solve problems. The game would take an unflinching look at evil, present Christians & non-Christians in an honest light present the Christian faith with the intellectual strength of C.S. Lewis, do it with a subtle and a deeply compelling emotional tale, and from a fresh perspective.

4. It will present the message of Christ with the power of Christ's message. This means that it will not just simply be a vehicle for regurgitating scripture. It will tackle doubts, arguments, and lay out the meaning of the Christian life clearly in plain language.

Ghosts By Starlight

By David Marcoe

© 2002

“What's your life worth?” He stood there with shoulders loose, arms outstretched, and gun in hand. “Is it really worth it to keep it from me? Huh?” Andrew sat there taped to the chair.

A wirey kid came in from outside, his hand wrapped around a bat. He stood trembling as he caught the site of the big letter-jacketed wall with the gun.

“What the hell are you doing?”
“I...uh...Do ya think someone might know he's missing?”
“He's not goin' anywhere.”
“But he has friends...”
“Like I give a flying f---.” Letter jacket waved over to a kid curled there on the floor with striped bruises that hash-marked his contorted face. “You wiggin' out on me? 'Cause if ya are I swear I'll break you.”
“Na, I'm fine. I'm in. I swear.”
“Good. Now get your a-- outside and keep watch. If anyone else has questions they can deal with me.”

Letter-Jacket turned back to him. Andrew's throat was a tube of cracked sandpaper, feeling like someone had pulled a wire brush through his airway.

“Tell me where the cash is.”
“What cash...”
“Tell me where it is.”
“I don't know.”
“Ya better tell me...”
“Tell you what?”
“Now dammit!”
“Huh? What did you want Kent?”

The crown of the barrel exploded across his jaw, sending sparks flying over the nerves. The ripples of pain pooled around the hematomas, throbbing against his migraine.

His mind tumbled along fractured roads until he bounced back to the memory of how he got here. It all started when one of his friends OD'd on some bad ecstasy they bought at a rave. Seeing his friend lie still for two weeks in a coma didn't make him very happy. He tracked down a few leads, greased a few palms, and ultimately traced it back to the guy standing in front of him.

The bruiser barking orders in his face was a high school all-american. On the surface he was a town hero, but the ugly truth is that Mr. Perfect has been running drugs for about two years and had every gutter rat on his pay-roll.

Five guys with sawed-off baseball bats and pool cues had ambushed them from the shadows of a rave they were coming out of, looking for him. A change in tone brought him out of his mental Walkabout.

“Listen 'Drew, we'll make a deal...” He squated on his haunches and pulled a toothy grin.”Your friend gets jacked up on some bad stuff and you put my guy in prison. We're even. But I need that cash. I have debts...”

Andrew had been religiously working away with a sharp piece of concrete on the duct tape that bound his hands. Once he had been dragged into this dank hole of a warehouse he had been trying to play a psychological game of rope-a-dope with Kent while his muscle nervously stood outside.

Kent had leaned in on the balls of his feet. The gun had languished a bit out of his grip. His hands were slicked with sweat. He was close. Close enough for him to smell his breath. He decided to make the move.

Andrew snapped his heel up underneath the gun and sent it flying above both their heads. He drove the heel of his shoe into his six-pack abdomen and folded the line-backer over, cutting off the air to yell. Shifting behind him he brought down his fist for a kidney shot and drove Kent out of consciousness before he hit the floor. Andrew pulsed had leapt up, leaving him trembling.

“Think your so damn smart line-backer? Just wait and see.”

He took his cell phone back from the football player's jacket pocket and hit the 911 speed dial.

“Yeah, there are some kids on 11th and Shire around the old warehouse. Their carrying some sticks or something. You need to get someone down here.”

He moved over to the beaten kid in the corner, wincing as he looked closer at his wounds.

“Joe, Joe, GET UP!”
“Huh?”, Joe muttered back through drool stained lips.

He rolled his eyes upward and gave a lazy glance at him from the floor. The stupid look never left his face as his vision followed Andrew across the room.

Scratching around a dark corner he picked up a warped piece wood from a long forgotten crate. Moving along the back wall he followed the shadows of Kent's thugs outside. He waited until the outline had moved away from the door. He slipped through to the outside and left a rock to jam it open. He moved behind the grunt and brought the stick around in a broad arc, connecting with his stomach. Curling his arms, he then brought it down on the base of his neck.

He bolted back in and through Joe over his shoulder and grunted under the weight. He exited and moved into the darkness as sirens peaked over the horizon...

He had moved a half mile across town, clammering over tracks and twisting into narrow alleys. His muscles raged against him, burning. With chest heaving he finally dank hole that he occasionally called home. Dropping Joe on a worn mattress he hit the floor in exhaustion. The hard wooden boards squeezed Andrew's aching muscles, but they eventually relaxed against the surface with nothing else to do.

“Joe?”
“Yeah...”, Joe stammered.
“How ya feelin'?”
“I...I got a headache...”
“I can imagine...there's some aspirin by the mattress. Its all I got.”, Andrew said.

Joe drug his arm outward sweeped at the aspirin bottle until he caught it between a couple of his fingers. He smashed the cap off and gulped several pills. Joe looked up scanned his surroundings.
“Nice digs 'Drew.”
“Thanks.”
“What is this place?”, Joe said
“An abandoned bank. She's been in limbo for twenty years. I figure the town will never get around to mowing her down so she's mine for the time being.”

Andrew eyes traced the shadows along with Joe, following the stairs that lead to the open balcony that hung over the main floor. Years of old paint and caked dust squated on the interior. The only thing that mattered was that it was his, something that his uncle couldn't take away from him. He tumbled down the rabbit hole of sleep as his thoughts drifted.

At six the buzz of an alarm clock went off.

“Joe, wake up...”
“...I'm up. I'm up.”
“You look like crap.”
“I feel like it...”, Joe said.
“Before class ask Jamie for some makeup so that they don't stick you with a counseling appointment about abuse or something.”
“What? You mean that snobby cheerleading bit--”
“Yes her.”, Andrew said. “And do you mind not ticking her off.”
“Sure...Man, I still have yet to figure you out 'Drew.”
“Hey, what can I say...”

Dawn stabbed throough the muddy windows and was shattered across the gloss of a steel vault door and patches of patina on the wooden floor boards.

[This message has been edited by D3565 (edited January 11, 2003).]

~Angel~

If you can only write you may want to look into adding at least one more skill to your list. Many here have links to getting into codeing. Just ask and they will hand out ample amount. If you want to do skins for 3D models and or model you should look into getting a prog. 3D modelers like Truespace are a good place to start and cheep. There are lots of options. Anyways im getting long winded here. (Thats what happens when your sitting around waiting on team memmbers)

Be blessed in all you do
~Angel~

Yes, it does add to the complexity of the project. Another option is to make the code open source mid-way through development to speed up the QA and bug squashing process. Another method is to use the High Level shading languages provided in DX 9 and OpenGL 2.0.

I never finished the novel. I did it of my own compulsion. The story line just got stale to me. The sample provided is all that exists. It did go through several heavy editing jobs and minor and major re-writes before that point though. I guess you could say that most of my wriitng is online. Some articles, some solo work, and collaborative/semi-collaborative work. My offline work has mainly been fiction. My online work has been a majority informal of expository essays (i.e. forum postings) on everything from sci-fi concepts to counter-factual models (alternate history).

Does this sound amateurish or ridiculous? If it does then I ask you to consider this...Does an untrained layman who sits down one day and decides he can write hold any more credential then what I just mentioned? Angel, I'm not accusing you of anything, but just posting this response in general to those who might write me off. I worked on a game project about a year and a half back through online channels and I parted amicably with the group. However, one of the observations I made in retrospect was that we didn't have the drive, vision, or organization to pull a full game off.

What maddens me even more is that the Christian media industry sort of settles into the same rut. We settle for a comfortable and insulated mediocrity that fails to carry out work to the Secular world. I want to change that. If we are going to change that then we need to work twice as hard to do it. Myabe if this project does get off the ground then we could license the technology at a bargain rate to other Christian teams. I don't know what the long term effects of this project are going to be. I just hope that it makes waves.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Angel:
I forgot to ask, "Do you have any other skills"? I write (many story types), 2D draw, 3D model, and have a large library of two of these forms of art (2D drawing/skins, stories). Im not trying to discorage you in any ways Im just saying that the more you can offer the better. Coding is a big head ake. I couldnt get past the first chapter of VB. After the overly large book of VB is C and C++. That skill on its own is a large one to give to a team. 3D modeling characters/props/sceans and skinning them is a big skill. Stories are only useful if you can write something compeling and or something that grips people's hearts. I bite at codeing but I got the others down prity well now.
~Angel~

---

I do have some other resources. I have access to a music guy with a home studio and (I say this tentatively) I have access to some big name professional contacts with a recording studio, although I want to develop a much stronger relationship (I know through another person whom i am close to).

Good luck. You're going to need it - and at least a dozen or so developers, who will probably want to be paid for something like this. A lot of the stuff you're talking about is stuff that requires a lot of time and resources. Stuff that well-established, large companies have done, but small groups haven't.

OK, here's the lowdown, a feasibility study if you will:

quote:

---

1. To develop a 3D engine that uses DX 9/OpenGL 2.0 from the ground up. The components to the engine are

---

This is quite ambitious. First, you're going to need a layer of abstraction to hide DirectX or OpenGL, or some program that will do this for you. Cognitoy's MindRover does something like this, I believe. MindRover is OpenGL-based, but they have something added to make it DirectX compatible.

Supporting both is a good idea, BTW. It just takes some work.

Creating an advanced 3D/game engine is quite a dream - you're going to need a lot of people with SERIOUS dedication! We're talking "this is my job - I'm doing nothing else" dedication. Hence why they should be paid. This is not something you do in your free time.

quote:

---

(1) a robust modular particle system that can handle a wide range of particle types, some of them unforeseen.

---

Possible, if designed carefully. Generalize, and modularize. The ability to handle scripts and plugins would be in order.

quote:

---

(2) A physics engine robust enough to power a flight simulator and also able to simulate Young's Modulus and the fracturing/shearing characteristics of various materials for destructible terrain and world geometry with realistic detail.

---

Are you making a real-time engine or an engineering simulation? You're talking a LOT of math, not to mention research.

Remember, the more real the simulation, the more clock cycles it takes, and the lower the framerate.

quote:

---

(3) A LOD system able to allow for the rendering of multi-hundred thousand or million polygon models from close up perspective while maintaining playable frame rates.

---

Start by requiring the top-of-the-line graphics card, otherwise it won't be playable. Remember that 1024 * 768 = 786,432. Throwing more polygons than that means you're doing overdraw, or your polygon is smaller than a pixel. Either way, you're doing more work than neccessary (unless you're doing antialiasing, in which case small polys might be acceptable).

I wonder if even the highest-end graphics card is capable of it, even with every fancy thing turned off. Perhaps, but you lose a lot of features.

Oh, you'll need a LOT of time (and money for paychecks) for the artists to create all those details!

quote:

---

(3) Implementation of a texture system that prevents textures from blurring close-up (a hardware version of this feature is implemented on 3D Labs latest workstation card).

---

Unless you're using procedural textures, the texture will ALWAYS do one of two things with a closeup:
1. Pixelate
2. Blur

I think the 3D Labs card does procedural texturing - correct me if I'm wrong.

Pick your poison, or expect to attempt to create a real-time procedural texturemap creator.

Unless the user has the 3D Labs card, this is likely to be slow . . .

Using high-resolution textures will also help. Again, the artists will need a lot of time to create that much detail.

You'll need mipmapping to allow those textures to look good at a distance also. That's no problem - even games made by a single person will do that.

quote:

---

(4) A lighting system, similar to Doom III, that is able to simulate the read world optical characteristics of materials.

---

Remember the limitations of hardware - the more real you want it to look, the more you have to do in software, and the slower it will be. They probably used a lot of tricks, BTW. I haven't seen the game itself, but games that have realistic lighting generally have it pre-calculated, as doing real-time calculations is often beyond the capabilities of the computer.

quote:

---

(5) A combination of DX 9 shaders and a gamma/color system that would emulate camera filters.

---

Gamma/color wouldn't be too hard, but I'm not sure about more advanced stuff.

quote:

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(6) A smart camera system that can produce cinematic angles and not impede game play.

---

Use quaternions and you'll be fine.

In conclusion:
You're expecting a lot. I've seen projects far less ambitious than what you're proposing fail. You'd better have an Ace up your sleeve .

BTW, I've seen my share of "potentially years" projects becoming "never"s . . . word of warning . . .

BTW, after you mentioned it, I looked for an article about Doom III's ligting, and I ran across this . . .

quote:

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"The characters are not REALLY high-polygonal, but the bump-mapping provides proper picture. This is how we intended to cram tens of monsters onscreen without damaging performance."

---

The screenshots confirm this - I can see the edges of the polys . . .

I'd love to see graphics this good in a Christian game . . .

There's a project with variable LOD - it emphasizes throwing more polys at edges, to get rid of the angular look of the silhouette found in Doom III - that could be interesting. That plus something similar to the bump mapping found in Doom III might make even the professionals jump .

Found an interesting page in the lighting in Doom III here.

Ready for a HUGE project ?

[This message has been edited by CobraA1 (edited January 12, 2003).]

I know Java quite well, and may be a bit rusty in C/C++, since I haven't used it for a while.

No, I can't spend major time on a project like this, unless you are willing to pay a major portion of my tuition . I do, however, like experimenting with algotithms and stuff. I might throw an idea around every now and then, if I have time.

Im currently working with someone on a game. I would help you out with what I can but ive already tried what you mentioned. As stated in some of the other post programers with that sort of high end skill dont come without payment. Then the ones who dont care about pay and offer to help already have jobs. More often then not they have to bail so they can keep their jobs.

So what is the sum of all this bull? Im very busy so I cant really help out. The programer im working with wants to work his way up. I think thats the best way. So im working with him on a Platform game. That will probly be a year or two of work. Then go from there. You deffenitly have spirit and if you are good at story telling then there are some that need help. Some people here consider themselfs writers but a really good one can move you. Ive been complemented by people for having that skill. I dont know anyone else here who can claim that but who knows Anyone? Im sure someone here has that tallent as well to move someone.

Well back to work with me. Idol hands are the Devils workshop.
~Angel~

Unfortunately for you, I'm only getting started in game programming
and cannot contribute the level of knowledge and experience you are
needing.

I do pray that you succeed. And I encourage you to not give up!

[This message has been edited by D3565 (edited January 12, 2003).]

[This message has been edited by D3565 (edited January 12, 2003).]