| Blurb |
Airlock is a 3D multiplayer space trade, exploration, combat, and business
simulation. It will be an immersive experience that will allow you to own
and pilot any class of space craft, including space stations, trading cogs,
fighters, capital ships and luxury liners. A supply/demand system will be
implemented to drive the persistent universe in persuit of profit. Cooperation
between players will be encouraged through trade, business, cooperative
craft operation, and community spirit.
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| Screenshots |
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Screenshot gallery
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| Downloads |
Download Technology Demo
v1.0 (Win32, 2.5MB)
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| Introduction |
Elite made a real impression on me as a young game player. It didn't
force anything down your throat, immersed you in a huge universe which appeared
to live, and promised you all of it. There were no annoying cut scenes to
remind you that it was a game. This in my opinion increased the immersiveness
of the game greatly. My hope is to make a game that expands on the concept
of Elite to give you an immersive, complex, customisable, and multilayered
world that is not restricted by missions or broken by cut scenes.
The focus will be much less on combat than other games. While weapons will
be available for self-defence, there will be penalties for destroying innocent
vessels. The game will center more on earning money and coexisting with
fellow players for mutual benefit.
Recent development includes using inverse kinematics to track a target vector.
Applications of this are steering AI craft, steering guided missiles, and
making turrets track targets. Since I developed this the project has taken
on a new life! I can have ships dogfight in the background - they can chase
and attack you with lasers and guided missiles, then fly away to return
for another pass (although they have no qualms about ramming you in the
process). They are pretty damn accurate too! The missiles compensate for
their own velocity, lead the target, and have a pretty high hit/miss ratio,
but they need some more tweaking. They look very cool in a swarm.
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| Planned features |
The goals of the final game are summarised as follows:
- Support for large numbers of players in a persistent world via TCP/IP
- Ownership and operation of any game object including fighters, cargo
vessels, space buses, luxury liners, space stations and capital ships
- Cooperation, diplomacy, and conflict between players
- Communities and Corporations simulated to create a dynamic and living
universe with real demands
- Simulation of real life - the need to eat and sleep, and mundane living
expenses
- Law inforcement and government - break the law and become a fugitive,
get a permit to fly a class of ship
- Exploration of and interaction with the interiors of space stations
using a portal engine
- Exploration of and interaction with planet surfaces and cities using
a terrain engine
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| Progress |
The work done so far is summarised in the following list:
- 3D Studio Max model export, and import into game engine
- Rendering of vertex colour blended, flat colour, translucent colour,
textured, and alpha textured 3D Studio models
- Directional lighting
- 3D camera movement (cockpit, rear, left, right, external, rotating,
free floating)
- Six degrees of freedom using quaternions (no Euler angles!)
- Input via DirectInput (keyboard, mouse and joystick)
- 3D Sound Effects and MP3 music using the fmod sound library
- Particles, Sprites, and Stretched Sprites
- Particle Sources
- Text display
- Skybox and sun (with occlusion bloom)
- Projectiles
- Event passing architecture
- GUI control heirarchy and page stacks
- Space station docking
- Planets and asteroids
- Level of detail (LOD) for objects
- Virtual cockpit
- Specular Lighting
- Environment Mapping
- Hyperspace Tunnel Effect
- Starfield
- Target brackets, target direction indicator, inertial target tracking
system
- Steering AI/Guided missiles
- Simple finite state machine AI
- Capital ship mounted laser and missile turrets that lead their target
(mounted at any orientation)
- Fast triangle perfect collision detection using Photon's
excellent library
- Laser reflection (for a bit of fun, but will make them reflect off
particular surfaces)
- Engine trails, flames, and directional glow
- Beam lasers
- Animated lights that are obscured by ray collision tests (photon again)
- Permanent or fading decals caused by projectile or beam impacts
- Debris sparks from explosions
- Setup utility supporting multiple screen resolutions, window/fullscreen,
audio settings
Progress since tech demo v1.0
- External world description file
- Support for multiple suns
- Motion blurred stars
- Cloud layer on planet
- BSP indoor rendering (will develop portal system)
- Object culling
- Lens flares
- Powerful console (history, autocomplete, variables, key bindings,
configurable appearance, etc.)
- Spawn/delete objects via console
- Change map via console
- Low-level networking (TCP and UDP)
- Chat system via console
- First pass multiplayer (tested between Australia and Canada)
- Afterburner
- LOD on weapon and trail effects
- Elite-style radar
- Combination key bindings (e.g. Ctrl-Alt-B)
- Planet atmosphere effect with specular highlight and configuration
file
- Scripted explosion object (controls sprites, sound effects, shockwaves,
sparks and old engine trails)
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| Compatibility |
This is a Windows OpenGL game, currently tested on win98 and winME and
the following video cards:
- Diamond TNT Viper V550
- Diamond TNT2 Viper V770
- Diamond Savage2000 Viper II
- ASUS GeForce 2 MX
- MSI GeForce 2 MX
- S3 Savage 4 PCI 16MB
- STB Velocity 128 AGP (Riva 128)
- Unknown 3DFx Card
- ATI Radeon 9X00 series
Some problems have been reported regarding Windows 2000 not using hardware
acceleration. It uses the software renderer instead, which is extremely
slow: ~1fps. I'm investigating why this happens. I've run it myself on Windows
2000 with a GeForce 2 MX without a problem.
Windows NT has been reported to lock up at the menu screen. I've never run
it myself on NT, but I will be investigating a resolution to this problem.
There rendering artifacts associated with the Matrox G400 cards. Some of
these have been fixed.
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| Valuable Resources |
| The following pages have helped me to make this game:
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