Nice level design.
Some of the camera angles were great. Like when coming down the stairs.

But I really like the city.

Movement was sometimes difficult for two things I think...
1) Mouse pan too fast.
2) Controls were kinda weird, took a bit to get used to it.

For battles(or whatever you will have), will the camera move?
I think it would be cool if, when a enemy or whatever is present, the camera would move to place the player(at a slight angle) between itself and whatever the object is.
Maybe end up at player head level.

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Movement was sometimes difficult for two things I think...
1) Mouse pan too fast.
2) Controls were kinda weird, took a bit to get used to it.

For battles(or whatever you will have), will the camera move?
I think it would be cool if, when a enemy or whatever is present, the camera would move to place the player(at a slight angle) between itself and whatever the object is.
Maybe end up at player head level.

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1) The mouse sensitivity is set to "3" I think which works for me, but may not for you. If you want to change it, press "Tab" while in the game and type "mouse_sensitivity = 1" or "mouse_sensitivity = 2" and this will slow the pan speed down.

2) The controls are configured like a traditional 1st or 3rd person set up(forward/backward/strafing/rotating with mouse or keys). This title started out more like a Mafia or Max Payne and changed over to a typical survival horror view. I haven't adapted the controls fully, yet, which would be forward/backward/rotating with mouse or with a couple of keys. I'd love to have an "analog" style where the direction you press is the forward direction the player takes(like Devil May Cry, Silent Hill 2 and 3s alternate method(its default method is the traditional survival horror style)).

As for battles, well, this is the big stumbling block in the genre. One of the most consistent criticisms in otherwise very positive reviews is the combat. I would like to implement a Zelda style lock on system. If an enemy is within range, you hold down a button/key and the view changees to a traditional 3rd person view and the player and camera's pan is fixed on the enemy. I have most of the code, but it is a bit screwy and no collision detection occurs while locked on. Unacceptable and, of course, that wall collision thing fouls up the traditional 3rd person camera. Like I've already mentioned, there's a chance of a return to a traditional view, however that won't happen unless I can get a perfect wall management solution.

I've also toyed with a combat system like you mentioned. Positioning the camera in a certain spot or vicinity(and forgetting about directly locking onto the enemy) and having them battle it out. You win you proceed.

Camera manipulation is a big part of my current project.
If some of the stuff works out like I hope it does... I'll let ya in on it.

Just a quick update..

I've pretty much gotten the new controls in place. So far, so good.

I'm fairly close to completing my new camera system. It's different from what is on display in the posted demo and more closely resembles the views, in level 1, when you come down the first staircase and on either side of the front door corridor. In other words, they will still be cinematic in nature, only they will all be able to move instead of simply being glued in place.

I might do a website update this Sunday or sometime shortly thereafter. It's been about 3 months since the last one.

If you'd like to try out the old demo, feel free...it's still available:

http://www.orangebrat.com/thedisenfranchised.zip

Finally, a website update. Six screens, though nothing that hasn't been shown here in one form or another. New entry in Facts and a slightly tweaked Links are the rest. As always, comments/constructive criticism are welcomed.

www.thedisenfranchised.com

The walkthrough demo, from the previous post, is no longer active.

First off, thanks go to Dan for suggesting that I experiment with using flat shaded level surfaces. This is turning out to be a pretty huge breakthrough for the title. I've been playing around, and I'm now an official convert.....and to think I almost didn't do it.

I've set every level surface to FLAT. Combining this with face by face tweaking of albedo/ambient values and combining all of this with material scripting and dynamic lightsources is producing beautiful things.

You have almost complete control on how the actual level will behave in terms of shading and best of all you can change most of it in realtime to suit your needs.

There are disadvantages, of course.

One is that I lose the nice precalculated lightmaps that have been associated with this title forever. It's a huge change of direction and recreating the effect of patches of light on a wall(from a setting sun or an exterior lightsource, for example) are going to be tricky if not impossible to pull off.

The other trouble spot is that light produced by dynamic sources isn't stopped by walls(or anything else). If it is shining on a wall and illuminating the floor...well...the floor on the other side of the wall is also going to have some light on it. Fortunetely, the backside of the lit wall will be shaded correctly. I've seen this occur in many commercial titles, so I suppose it is impossible to workaround, though if anyone knows one, please fill me in.

The advantages outweigh the disadvantages and I don't see myself returning to the way it was before.

Anyway, here's a sneak peek...keep in mind that this is simply a test shot and I haven't tweaked or finessed it in any way. I still haven't totally gotten the hang of everything and this level wouldn't have a light like that anyway:

I was gabbing about "happy accidents" over in another thread. I've been playing with combining Shaded lightmap map entities, dynamic lights, dynamically moving the sun around(but not using it as a sun), plus what I'm experimenting on in the flat world.

One thing I never realized is that the light emitted by the sun really operates on two levels. If you are standing on a lit up area(lightmap) then the model is shaded correctly(IF you use the appropriate material settings...without them it simply brights up the whole model as you would expect). If you're standing in a darker area, then it still gets shaded, though it is much much less(again, because of the use of materials overriding the value on the floor). By moving the sun around and not using it as a sun, you can fake radiosity on models, globally(or individually if you use alot of materials).

I've also been playing with dynamic lights and using them to fake radiosity. If you use the right combo of RGB, lightrange, and positioning it is pretty convincing. It takse some tweaking, but I've had nice results.

The only problem with dynamic lights is that I get some pretty major league banding...esp in the falloff zone. I don't know if that is an engine fluke or just the way these lights operate. I've never seen that effect in commercial games. Perhaps it has something to do with level textures being 16-bit as opposed to 24-bit.

Basically, it can be summed up like this(noobs should live by what I'm going to say)...learn to adapt and don't stick to the gameplan. In the last post I said I didn't see myself going back to the way it was before....before that, I could never see myself in a million years using flat shading in a major way. I've come up with this weird and wonderful hybrid style because I loosened the reigns and decided to take some chances. There's all kinds of "hidden" flexibility just waiting out there, and this is yet another reason why A6 is such a great tool for the little people.

Here are a couple of new shots...actually you've seen the shots or very similar ones, before, but this is using the new fake radiosity method...there's also some atmospheric fog and fullscreen filmgrain but those can't really be seen too well in screenshots. My main complaint is the dynamic light banding. I hope Conitec can improve it...if it's possible, anyway. You can esp. make it out in the bottom pic:





Todo list: Tweak what I have until it is right...implement light beam sprites in the windows, swaying, tattered curtain in the top shot, replace the hanging lamp in top shot with the final model, implement floating dust particles, among others.

I still have some jaggies, but I've managed to come up with a compromise...it has caused my overexposed lightmap patches to sort of look like they're made of thick paint(that's the best description I can think of). You can see this on the floor of the bottom pick.

Once I nail my new approach, I'll start in on levels and get away from these 2 that I've spent so much time on(too much time). I have everything planned out both in my script and in my head, so it is just a matter of doing it.

looks great! which method do you use now for lighting? is it all dynamic? ...i don't see jaggies anymore!

I actually just edited the post, but there are jaggies. I scaled what I needed to 0.5 and it is basically the best I can get it. I'm currently playing with your sphere of light idea(I'm doing so this very instant), so hopefully I can eliminate them completely with practice.

The really bright spots kind of look like someone spilled some white paint on the ground/wall and smudged it around with their foot. I suppose I can call that my painterly style, now. There's a small amount of jagginess around the paint looking part, but I can live with it. If Conitec implements the ability for us to directly fiddle with lightmaps, I'm hoping I can work some magic there.

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which method do you use now for lighting? is it all dynamic?

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Most of what you see is regular shaded lightmaps...the dynamic lights are what give it that "glow" or faked radiosity. It actually looks really nice during gameplay. If the player walks by a window, they will be shaded by the external lightsources...the way I have the materials set up keeps the model from lighting up completely. All it is is tweaking the model ambient and diffuse settings.

There aren't any flat surfaces shown. I basically was able to apply what I've learned with my original shaded version.