Voxel-based terrain

[L[0ne]R]

Just something that came to my mind and I got curious about.
Would voxel-based terrain be doable in Soldat and is it a good idea? For one, it would allow for destructible terrain, which would be a very fun feature. But seing how much Soldat's physics also rely on polygon angles, I'm not sure if it can be preserved with voxel-based maps. Your thoughts?

[Shoozza]

I don't think this will happen unless someone from the dev team really wants to push this (which I doubt anyone wants to).

Afaik voxel-based terrain needs faster pcs and some soldat players have PCs which barely run soldat.

Destructive terrain could be achieved by splitting a polys into multiple ones, no voxels necessary, but I don't think we will add this.

[Fryer]

IMO voxel-based terrain in Soldat would make it feel like a different game. It would completely destroy the smooth movement you get on polygons and it would either make it look very blocky or the voxels would have to be small enough to introduce an undesired performance hit. The randomness and chaos created from destroying such a terrain would also seriously mess things up.

If anything destructible is to be done at all (which I don't want to create any hype about; imagine it will never happen), it should be destructible polygons, because at least with them you can control the mess to some extent.

[Falcon`]

Just to sort this out, voxel is an equivalent of pixel in 3D space. Since soldat is 2D game, it might have at most pixel-based terrain.

[smiluu]

^ With a progressive gameplay like TTW this could be tits as long as you know where the limit goes.

[DarkCrusade]

Destructible polygons would be a lot of fun. I can imagine gamemodes that would be similiar to KAG for example, just with more modern weapons.

[Vucgy92]

In soldat 2 or Voxel-Soldat. It would be more then great !
You could dig underground , and use a SPAS to blast the tunnel free
or make "sandbags" and other cover to fire your LMG
or make a Tower and Snipe from it , or siple foxholes to bombard from them , All in all the possibilities are near infinite and so is the fun!

[Adam]

In soldat 2 or Voxel-Soldat. It would be more then great !
You could dig underground , and use a SPAS to blast the tunnel free
or make "sandbags" and other cover to fire your LMG
or make a Tower and Snipe from it , or siple foxholes to bombard from them , All in all the possibilities are near infinite and so is the fun!

this isn't ace of spades

[Vucgy92]

In soldat 2 or Voxel-Soldat. It would be more then great !
You could dig underground , and use a SPAS to blast the tunnel free
or make "sandbags" and other cover to fire your LMG
or make a Tower and Snipe from it , or siple foxholes to bombard from them , All in all the possibilities are near infinite and so is the fun!

this isn't ace of spades

Please my son read again I said in soldat-2 or Voxel-soldat (or however) not in Soldat

[Falcon`]

FYI, there's a game soldat-alike that has destructible terrain: Cortex Command. Too bad there's no multiplayer though.

[Shoozza]

Removed unnecessary/annoying offtopic posts. If you want continue to argue about what is and what isn't ace of spades do so via pm. Thanks.

FYI, there's a game soldat-alike that has destructible terrain: Cortex Command. Too bad there's no multiplayer though.

Note the collision/destruction in Cortex Command is pixel based

[P]

http://www.storm2d.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Eb-4QJHHeQ&list=UUyN3SzAPKMhGcip_Pt_jwFw

[L[0ne]R]

http://www.storm2d.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Eb-4QJHHeQ&list=UUyN3SzAPKMhGcip_Pt_jwFw

That looks very impressive. Of course lasers and black hole cannons don't exactly belong in Soldat, but the engine itself has potential. I'm seeing so many things made possible that many people have wanted in Soldat - smoke grenades, higher-res graphics, destructible terrain, better particle effects, some crazy weapon moding capabilities, mac and linux support.

*sigh* maybe someday...

[Vucgy92]

WOW 
Just a pity he made it look like some futuristic shit

[Adam]

http://www.storm2d.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Eb-4QJHHeQ&list=UUyN3SzAPKMhGcip_Pt_jwFw

That looks very impressive. Of course lasers and black hole cannons don't exactly belong in Soldat, but the engine itself has potential. I'm seeing so many things made possible that many people have wanted in Soldat - smoke grenades, higher-res graphics, destructible terrain, better particle effects, some crazy weapon moding capabilities, mac and linux support.

*sigh* maybe someday...

aint bazz could do some of that stuff

[AL]

Just a pity he made it look like some futuristic shit

Of course lasers and black hole cannons don't exactly belong in Soldat

And if that was all there was to it, I may be inclined to agree with you. Try to keep in mind just how early in development this game (Storm) is; most of the stuff currently in the game is more along the lines of "placeholder" rather than final product content. The "futuristic shit" was added primarily to test the limits of what is possible with the weapon engine, as well as to check for bugs in any new features added. That said, we will keep your feedback in mind if we ever get to the stage where we must make final decisions for the game.

A bit more on-topic: the destructible terrain currently implemented is somewhat buggy and probably needs revisiting, but it works well enough in most cases. I do agree however that dt can create a lot of chaos, so we have come up with a couple "solutions" to help counter that issue.

For one, only certain weapons/bullets will damage the terrain, ie: explosives or extremely high-speed projectiles. Of course, this can be completely reconfigured through the weapon modding system to suit your liking.

A suggested idea (not yet implemented) was to give polys different "hardness" settings, which would basically determine how difficult it would be to put holes in it. This I think should quite elegantly solve the majority of the theorized problems, and provide the basis for some very interesting maps. For example, consider the classic soldat map "Ctf_Ash". The windows would have a low hardness setting and therefore be easily destroyed, while the buildings themselves are still possible to destroy, albeit with much greater effort. The "ground" and walls around the map would probably be set to indestructible to prevent offmapping or other unforeseen exploits.

Working in conjunction with the above was an idea to make trench war style maps where the ground was composed of several different layers of polys, each at a different hardness setting. Think something along the lines of a loose/top-soil layer which could be easily destroyed, a mid-level "stone" layer which would require significantly more effort to mark, and a bedrock layer which would be nearly impossible (or just plain impossible) to destroy. Of course this could be applied to different styles of maps as well, but it may require quite a lot more work...

[L[0ne]R]

And if that was all there was to it, I may be inclined to agree with you. Try to keep in mind just how early in development this game (Storm) is; most of the stuff currently in the game is more along the lines of "placeholder" rather than final product content. The "futuristic shit" was added primarily to test the limits of what is possible with the weapon engine, as well as to check for bugs in any new features added. That said, we will keep your feedback in mind if we ever get to the stage where we must make final decisions for the game.

I was guessing that this was the case.

So from "we" I'm assuming you're part of Storm2D's development team? If that's the case, I've got a couple of questions:
1) How do ricochets work with pixel-based terrain, if they even work at all?
2) Have you considered joining Soldat's development team and making all those modifications to terrain and weapon engines within actual Soldat instead of making an entirely new game?

[r0land]

And if that was all there was to it, I may be inclined to agree with you. Try to keep in mind just how early in development this game (Storm) is; most of the stuff currently in the game is more along the lines of "placeholder" rather than final product content. The "futuristic shit" was added primarily to test the limits of what is possible with the weapon engine, as well as to check for bugs in any new features added. That said, we will keep your feedback in mind if we ever get to the stage where we must make final decisions for the game.

I was guessing that this was the case.

So from "we" I'm assuming you're part of Storm2D's development team? If that's the case, I've got a couple of questions:
1) How do ricochets work with pixel-based terrain, if they even work at all?
2) Have you considered joining Soldat's development team and making all those modifications to terrain and weapon engines within actual Soldat instead of making an entirely new game?

AL and I are part of the (currently) very small Storm2D dev team.
I am the sole programmer of Storm2D. AL is currently focusing on game design and content development.

1) Although in the very early stages Storm2D, pixel based terrain was used, this is no longer the case. I guess ricochets could work with some sort of algorithm that calculates slope over pixels, but I don't think it would be very reliable.
Storm2D uses polygon terrain for many reasons such as compatibility with Soldat maps, simpler networking, better physics, faster destructible terrain etc.

2) Although it may not look like it at this stage, Storm2D already has most of the functionality of Soldat, and has been designed to surpass the game in every way. It will be entirely moddable, with much greater scripting capacity and many more game modes, as well as intended features such as multiplayer map editor, campaign and missions. Not to mention vehicles and other physics objects such as buildings.

As AL said above, ALL content is temporary. I have permission from Michal Marcinkowski to use content from Soldat(Sound effects,maps,textures,etc) for development purposes only, until new resources can be made.
How the game looks now is no indication of what the final product will look like. Although any input is appreciated. As said the game is designed to be completely moddable. Two mods could look and feel like two completely different games. The focus, like Soldat, is for the community to keep the game alive.

If anyone is interested in Storm2D please join the forum at http://storm2d.net/forum where you can see and comment on the latest developments.


Soldat is already a complete game, and I believe that although some things about it could be improved (such as bug fixing) which the dev team seems to be doing a good job at, the game should not be vastly modified. MM stated that features such as vehicles would not be part of Soldat, but would possibly be good for a future game. Soldat is already ten years old, programmed in delphi, isn't designed for Linux and Mac, etc. Although we need *new* features in order to bring players back, I don't think we should sacrifice the current game in order for this to happen.

Storm2D is currently at a very alpha stage and it is preferred that for the moment the general Soldat community do not know about it, as we are focusing on core development and fixing bugs rather than requested features. When the time is right we will release the game and make a post about it on these forums.

Until then, have a look at King Arthur's Gold (http://kag2d.com/en/), MM's new game. And keep playing Soldat. The best game of all time

[Adam]

sigh getting beat by a game identical to soldat already when soldat's been here for about 10 years for improvement

[DarkCrusade]

@r0land: Your project looks promising. How much time do you guys think you need for a first public version? I only looked at your site cursorily, so maybe I missed something.