hogsy's Blog

Want To Help?

hogsy — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:41:35 +0000

We’re currently looking for someone with experience in level design to help with work on creating and designing both singleplayer and multiplayer levels for OpenKatana and possibly another future project. I’m unable to find the time to commit to doing this myself.
If there are any real requirements then it would be to at least have some experience with Worldcraft/Hammer or any similar application, an eye for detail, creativity, good use of lighting and the ability to provide at least some helpful feedback on documentation and tools.

If you’re up to the task then please contact me with an example of your work at:
hogsy@oldtimes-software.com

Coloured Lighting…

hogsy — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:18:32 +0000

Back in 1997 and 1998 there was quite a huge use of coloured lighting in games, personally I myself love this as it adds more style, makes levels appear more unique and technically interesting to look at. These days such use of lighting is often dismissed as it’s not considered realistic but clearly in something like Daikatana there is no pursuit for realism. Personally I think Daikatana’s problem in the end in regard to coloured lighting was that it made very poor use of it, notable usage would be in the episode one levels as there is almost constant use of yellow, green and blue in perhaps the worst places or areas which makes it far too apparent and ruins the overall design of the levels.

Daikatana’s disgusting yellow and green

For OpenKatana we probably will make use of coloured lighting but certainly will put more effort and consideration into it than was done for most of the levels in Daikatana, or I hope so anyway. Something I find quite a nice reference and good source of inspiration of coloured lighting right now is probably its usage in both Unreal and 3D Realm’s cancelled Prey, Unreal made very simple use of coloured lighting and didn’t do too much major with it however Prey on the other hand made quite a heavy use of it which very much suited the environments and overall “off-world” style that they were going for.

Prey’s use of coloured lighting based on light-sources

As can be seen unlike in Daikatana, Prey used coloured lighting only on particular light sources rather than globally like what was done in Daikatana, which makes everything much more believable while also remaining unique and as said interesting to look at which I think is the real key to coloured lighting.
Anyway thanks for reading, I really want to go into things like this more in the future as I think it helps me put into words what I’ve learnt so far just from working on such a weird project as OpenKatana.

OpenKatana Weekly Update…

hogsy — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:46:16 +0000

Yeah it’s Monday, I’m a day late… I know! Anyway progress on OpenKatana is going pretty smooth at the moment and we’re doing bits and bobs pretty much everyday. I’d say this month has been the most productive in a long time
Yesterday we gave out our tools and a build of OpenKatana to a very skilled mapper to see what he can come up with as a deathmatch level, it’s certainly very exciting as it’s a chance to see an actual living and breathing level for once! It’ll also be a good chance to get an idea of what kind of tools or details a mapper might want to add to their map. This is also great as it’s going to force me to get my ass in gear about sorting out our in-engine editing tools which I’ll go into more in the future.
While that’s all great we have had at least some problems recently, most namely a horrible problem in FitzQuake which has become pretty clear recently as we’ve made the move to support full-coloured lightmaps and ditched the older standard Quake format, it’s not stopping us from working but it is a large problem which I’ll have to look into at some point.
Over on the game-side of things we’re still rewriting a lot of the game-logic and weapons are pretty much sorted, still need to finish adding them in but we have some problems (and mysteries) solved now. I’ve been mainly working on monsters myself since I have some rather big plans right now but I just haven’t had the time to commit to working on them. Something I recently decided to do, sometime ago, was see if I could work on an entirely new gamemode only making changes to the game module and it went pretty well, It also gave me a chance to fix some very important bugs or mistakes I had made. Last time I had worked on the ctf mode (earlier this week) I had decided to try working with using states for the flags, for example if the player picks the flag up then that flags state will be changed to STATE_PICKEDUP, think, add in the necessary effects and such, then keep on checking we still are being carried, and then upon taking the flag over to the other flag we would change that to STATE_CAPTURED which once again we would then go into our think function and then quickly reset the flags position. Simple concept but its turning out to actually be rather messy… Anyway I’ll let you know how things are coming along next week

OpenKatana Weekly Update…

hogsy — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:40:10 +0000

OpenKatana Weekly Update…

hogsy — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:09:40 +0000

Merry Christmas!

hogsy — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 18:44:18 +0000

Merry Christmas from the OpenKatana team!

Anachronox Extensions Fix…

hogsy — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:22:30 +0000

So you’ve probably started Anachronox up on a modern computer and found that it crashes whenever you start it… Despite applying all the patches the problem continues to persist and it feels like all hope is lost, you probably read that you could limit the extensions via your graphics cards control panel but thats not really fixing the problem perminately, so may I present my patched ref_gl.dll! This stops the engine from printing all those extensions into the console and thus solves the problem.

Download

OpenKatana Teaser #1

hogsy — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:16:39 +0000

OpenKatana and Multi-platform…

hogsy — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 13:56:21 +0000

To sum up our view on this, no we will not be supporting other platforms. Today a lot of Quake based games are trying to support both the PSP and PC, on one hand you have a huge behemoth of unlimited power and on the other… Well you don’t have much so you should really either develop for either one or the other otherwise you’re going to find yourself just tweaking things to get them working right which is going to take a huge amount of time and in my view just be a waste. If we do decide to work on a PSP version then we would do that after the release of the PC version so that we can easily shrink everything down so that it works on the PSP more quickly and easily. Anyway thats just my view on the issue…

OpenKatana November Progress…

hogsy — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 01:16:55 +0000

There are quite a few unlisted changes such as a launcher which Eukos created and some other content changes. Sadly for most of this month I have been unable to work on the engine due to some problems with my computer (which as of the 26th as you can see were pretty much resolved) and then after that we had some problems with the svn…
Development screenshots can be found here!

——————-

30/11/2011 hogsy - Made several improvements to particles + Performance fixes! + Fixed a crash which occured after current weapon is switched - Made many changes to the menu + Menu will no longer cause a crash if left open + Added in some experimental stuff and some stability tests (missing texture in the main menu and scaling texture during gameplay)


29/11/2011 Eukos 

 - Added deco_vase, which is seen on a screenshot and

   also mentioned in the pre-alpha. Strange thing is

   that the ent doesn't appear in any version of e2m3

   from the development hardrive.
26/11/2011 hogsy 

 - Ah it's gewd to be back! Moved QC code into

   its own seperate folder so that it doesn't

   get mixed up with the new game dll code
22/11/2011 Eukos 

 - Added powerups into the game (uses placeholder sounds)

 - Added axe.md2 and implemented it

 - Added vital.md2
21/11/2011 Eukos 

 - Added acroboost.md2, power.md2, speed.md2 and attack.md2

 - Updated crossbow.md2

 - Updated shotcycler.md2
20/11/2011 hogsy 

 - Fixed the attack sound for monster_skeleton

 - monster_skeleton will now inflict damage

   when attacking
19/11/2011 hogsy 

 - Did some more work on monster_skeleton

	+ Added in missing attack frames
17/11/2011 hogsy 

 - Did some more work on monster_skeleton

	+ Fixed the animations

	+ Will now die correctly
16/11/2011 Eukos 

 - Changed alot stuff in the metamaser code

 - Fixed the discus of daedalus

 - Began working on the sidewinder
11/11/2011 hogsy 

 - Added r_nocull which disables model culling

 - Models now support transparent textures

 - Did some work on directional lighting for

   models
11/11/2011 Eukos 

 - Added glock.md2, it's glock.mdl but with

   draw and reload animations (alpha)
10/11/2011 hogsy 

 - Made some changes to how particles are

   handled

	+ Any particles that do not have a texure

	  assigned will automatically be given

	  a missing texture instead (rather than

	  using the last texture)
8/11/2011 Eukos 

 - Added the C4Viz viewmodel
6/11/2011 Eukos 

 - Added the daikatana (daikatana.qc)

 - C4Viz now uses c4ammo.mdl for its bombs
6/11/2011 hogsy 

 - Fixed a bug with widescreen resolutions

   (only for 1600 for now, let me know how

   1400 etc fair)
5/11/2011 hogsy 

 - Added skeleton.qc
5/11/2011 Eukos 

 - Fixed the C4-Viz

 - Began working on the metamaser

 - Added one test decoration model to deco_e1
3/11/2011 hogsy 

 - Fixed skya skybox
2/11/2011 hogsy 

 - Did some more work on the menu

	+ Textures can now be resized correctly

 - Missing texture frames will no longer

   cause the game to close

1/11/2011 Eukos - Made some changes to the crossbow qc code + Added wet arrow impact sounds