[MMO] The first demo (Windows ONLY)

Here's my "roadmap".
Items marked "Y" were planned and have been done.
Items marked "*" were not planned but they just sort of happened as I went along.
Items marked "N" are not yet done.

Y Flat client with walking.
Y Load a map.
Y Room w static tables and collision.
* Head bob.
* Trivial text HUD.
* Mouse input.
* Mouse hide/show control.
* Save/load keymap.
* Rightclick menu.
* Esc menu.
* Loading entities.
* Polite sleeping when lose focus.
(release as tech test demo)
N Static skybox.
N Strafing.
N Crouching.
N Jumping.
N Rightclick create entities.
N Fix Bug: speed changes when look up/down.
N Fix Bug: speed scales with fps
N Fix Bug: uses 100% CPU.
(release tech test demo 2)
N Networking - connect to test channel, get namelist and gamelist and display as text.
N Display people as items
(public test r1).
N Respect change messages for above.
N Accept user chat input
(public test r2).
N Allow challenge (space@person).
N Allow accept.
N Play ThudGame itself
(public test r3).
N Save world changes to server.
N Rightclick on item and display menu.
N Allow various mesh move/scale/rotate operations from rightclick.
(public test r4)
N Add item browser with credits and derivation.
N Allow create/place item from rightclick.
(public test r5)
N Add texture browser with credits and derivation.
N Allow create/place/move texture from rightclick.
(public test r6)
N Allow submit textures and items with credits and derivation.
N Sound/music browser.
N Zone/entity placement.
N Graphical HUD.
N Dynamic skybox.
N Loading resources over the net.
N Cacheing stuff loaded.
N Marking resources with date used, and culling old cached stuff.
N Option in texture/item browsers to download items (browser just displays "thumbnails" unless local copy exists).
N Option to download entire library.
N ...and so on. But by this point, it may have "exploded", so I can't project beyond here.

I am hoping to have at most a week between releases.

i can't find the room.exe. i've got a temp.exe, which can't be started because d3dx9_35.dll is missing, a source and a world folder. in the source folder there's 3 .dba's (loadworld, room and types) and a room.dbpro. in world there's 3 bitmaps, a keys.dat, room.3dw and room.dbo.

ditto what the ratster said

I also had the same prob as Ratty and hex.

~64 FPS Textures show up fine.

It may be way early to consider asking for Dxdiag.txt but otherwise you are going to see some wildly varying FPS values.

I'm actually getting ~64 across the board now, which is nice.

I forgot to rename the exe, so yes, it's called temp.exe not room.exe

I'm hoping the "missing dll" problems will be due to running with an old version of DirectX? Try updating it with the link I gave in the first post and see if it fixes it.

I've been working on getting much better physics on the player controller: this has given me a surprising number of headaches, mostly because all the "Dark PhysX" functions I needed were undocumented. But I've almost got it apart from crouching, which I want to be non-instant, and to change the player height for collision detection. That part at least should be relatively simple (I'll probably just switch to a "crouched" player object, though I might have to delete and recreate the object from scratch). I hope to have an update out sometime tomorrow.

After that, a few more "boring" bits of code, and then I can start making something a bit more interesting, interactive, and networked.

i'm pretty sure i'm running that version of directx already. i think that's what we installed with the drivers of my new graphics card only some weeks ago. but i'll check again tonight.

just checked, it is indeed directx 9.0c

In that case, I don't know what could be causing it to not find the DLL. I shall ask on various programming forums, but if anyone here has a clue to throw me, that would make be happy too

What version of windows are you running?

Aha! Seems there are two things that could cause this.

First is that the dll just didn't get registered properly. If the file exists on your machine somewhere, then Start -> run -> "dxdllreg d3dx9_35.dll" may well fix this.

If that doesn't fix it, because it doesn't exist, then you have an old "DirectX 9.0c". There are apparently many versions of "DirectX 9.0c" going back for about four years, earlier ones didn't have this DLL, later ones do. You'd think they'd change the version number when they update it, but apparently not.

Downloading the latest version either from microsoft.com or the links above should fix you up. I think I'll see if there's a way to autodetect the DX version and offer to upgrade if it's not recent enough. Depending on where you get it from, the file you download might just unzip the files, not install them, so you might also need to run "DXSETUP.exe" from the folder it unzipped to.

*mutters about Microsoft*

ok, so installing from one of the links did the trick. it's working perfectly fine. fps is variing between 63 and 64. textures are there i assume (radeon x1650pro). i took a screenshot.

Perfect, thanks! So, the basics work. Now once I have finished entity loading and player physics and networking, I can get the fun stuff done.

This version has the "finished" character controller. At least, as "finished" as I can get it. I am happy enough that the remaining bugs are either insoluble (with my level of knowledge), or cosmetic.

Features:
* Forward, back, strafe left/right, turn left/right. Typical WASD stuff.
* Crouch - changes height of the character controller smoothly over time at a configurable speed. Crouching can be configured to affect a number of things including walk speed, jump height, and bob height.
* Gravity - player falls at the correct (configurable) acceleration and no longer flies.
* Jump - Correctly collides with ceiling and floor and tracks velocity. Can only jump when standing on something, not while jumping/falling.
* Third person camera toggle.
* Head bob. I find it annoying but people like it, so I'll have it turnoffable in the settings.
* Auto-Crouch. When you move towards a low ceiling you will duck under it.
* Auto-Stand. When you are crouching and move somewhere you can stand up, you will stand unless you are holding down the crouch key.
* Sliding collision on meshes and primitives.
* Always-vertical.

Known bugs:

* When using the third person camera it does not respect mesh collision.
* When climbing steps the camera is not smoothed.
* When using mouselook, the camera is not smoothed.
* A better system than raycasting is needed for auto-stand. In certain circumstances you can stand when under the corner of a table and have all of the rays miss the corner. Then you get pushed into the ground as you stretch.

Despite the bugs, I consider this "finished", at least for the time being. Next, I want people able to map their own keys and configure a few settings, (which should be a lot faster to code than the player controller was, since it's just GUI, not physics), and then I'll work on networking, seeing other people in the room, and chat. Once that's all in, I think it'll start getting interesting instead of merely academic, as it is at the moment.

For the time being, the controls are WASD and cursors. Alt-F4 or Esc to quit. I'll update the link in the initial post.

working fine. nice work.
head bob is this up and down of everything on the screen when i walk? i find it highly irritating...

I think that the use of the NUM pad in games is generally good, and leaves the keyboard open, although I am aware that some people dont have NUM pads (laptops etc.) so this may not work well.

I would suggest NUM 8 instead of w
NUM 2 as oppose to s
NUM 4 as oppose to a
NUM 6 as oppose to d

And NUM 5 is left open for an action e.g. crouch, jump, fight, enter door

Just an idea

Hexmeister

Windows ONLY?? Blasphemy!
"Yet another geek", yeah right...

I did a test run however. Had to install DX as well, even on this fairly new Vista laptop (dual bootable!). 64 FPS all along, with occasional lower count when walking around, though only to 47 FPS lowest. And 32610 polygons.

Starting point was facing the wall and where a table should be, so there was none there. It ended up upside down perched on and in between two other tables. I can provide you with a screenshot if needed, just holler.

Happy Thudding!

Oh yeah, I moved the tables around to demonstrate the "auto-crouch" (you should automatically crouch if you go under the high table) and the "auto-stand", and jumping and such.

i'm not sure it went auto-crouch for me. i think i just ran against it. but maybe i didn't try hard enough, will try again later. crouching manually as well as jumping on the table worked though.

It does, at least for me. Only if I approach the higher of the two tables though, not the lower one. However, it (I?) crouches under the lower one when I approach it from under the higher one. Do I still make sence?
So it performs a two step crouch, first one then the other, but not two at once.

Excellent. When you walk up to a table, you do not expect to duck under it, so you do not. When you approach a low archway, you do expect to duck, so you do.

But if you're already ducking and you approach a table, you *do* expect to pass under it, if you can duck low enough. The normal tables are too low, so you can't, but the upturned table is just high enough, so you can, with a little effort. If you manually duck, it's easier.

The idea is that it does what you intend in all cases, intuitively, so you don't have to think about it. If you aren't holding the duck key and walk out from a low area, you straighten up.

The "auto-duck range" is something that should/shall be user-configurable, of course, as are the other behaviours, like automatically stepping up small steps without needing to jump You can step for floor to chair, and from chair to table, without jumping up - or you can jump manually directly onto the table. The duck behaviour is sort of the opposite of this.

All the functions appear to work as intended still getting ~64 FPS.

ASDW are pretty standard keys for movement, especially in MMORPG's (I've played a few in my time! ) as most people use their mouse with their right hand, and so you want the keyboard stuff you use on the left side of your keyboard!

@ Dewi > I would guess the option to remap the command keys (or have more than one command key per action) would be quite a good idea at some point?

Yup! My roadmap for this app at the moment goes roughly:
1) Remappable keys (50% done).
2) Networking.
3) Object creation.

I'm also working on the terrain generation app in parallel, though.

Unfortunately every time I sit down to work on either of these, someone gives me other work instead. This is becoming really, really annoying.

Tomorrow I start my new job, so this is only going to get worse