It's time to move on...

[Stoned]

So whats the final verdict? Will we continue to see MSC on gold source or do the cards for tell a new engine?

 

[Thothie]

MSC will continue on Goldsrc one way or the other - unless we find some miracle engine that is 100% HL1SDK compatible, yet has all the modern features and DirectX support, it still means doing a decade worth of work all over again, and thus cannot be justified. Tis more of a fantasy for MSS or equivalent.

 

[DarkTerror]

I like the "retro"-feel MSC gives me. It revives the feeling I had when I played HL 1.5 for the first time.

 

[ceriux]

dunno if u guys know about this....

http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... .google.de

 

[Orochi]

N-n-necropost, ceriux.

 

[Echo717]

hay guyz lets switch to a new engine

 

[Borya]

Necromancer man, necromancer man, HAADO GEI MAN - FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

 

[ceriux]

its a remake of the half-life engine... it would be useful in the fact that you dont have to remake anything as far as i know... i dont see why everyone here likes being held back..

 

[Borya]

Саи саи саи!

 

[jon50559]

I hate to revive this terrible thread, but:
http://www.moddb.com/engines/xash3d-engine

A custom GoldSrc engine built from scratch, supposedly it has much more functionality and higher engine limits, and has full support for all GoldSrc content. It looks interesting, thoughts?

EDIT: Lol the same one Ceriux brought up, but there are newer versions. Dunno why nobody took him seriously >.>

 

[TheOysterHippopotami]

I don't know how well this will work but I'll be the first to say that I think it's an exciting find. Good job lockdown!

 

[Jelly]

Sniffing around their forums I found that there's an official 0.9 final here and 0.91 beta here. I believe it uses the WON interface but I haven't tested. Could be interesting.

 

[Thothie]

I thought we mentioned Xash somewhere in this thread... (edit: Yes, yes we did, just four posts before.)

There's a number of problems with it. It's WON based - requires pre-Steam Half-Life (somewhat difficult to find, and illegal to distribute). It's also not based on the original engine, rather, they made their own based on the engine calls used in the SDK. Suffice to say, this approach does not lead to a very Half-Life compatible engine, much less one that can run MSC.

Even if it were, however, there's the other rather obvious hurdle: "How2FN?".

 

[The Man In Black]

That's not a hurdle at all, being that the majority of the code is in a few specifically named files that don't hinge on our version of the Half-Life engine

 

[Thothie]

Yeah, but with no authentication method - how do you ensure that each user has a unique ID they can't easily change?

Granted, I suppose there's the old name+password+ip method - but IP's change so much, you really need something more useful for uniquely identifying users.

...*Maybe* you could learn to put up with that... But there's still the fact that it's WON era Half-Life based, illegal, and no where near 100% compatible even with Half-Life of that age. If you can get it to work with this though, it might be worth looking into - especially for the day when Steam finally changes the core engine in some way as to make our game unlaunchable. Dun think I can pull it myself though. I canna get the thing to run even default Half-Life.

 

[Doommarine23]

As an FYI, Half-Life Zone is my Website, so I can Guarantee you its safe. hell, if you guys want I'll make a small MS:C section of the forum or anything you guys would want to see here.
Also to Clarify, sorry if I mislead you Thothie, I might have gotten the implementation tutorial confused with another engine mod on our website. But I believe Trinity has one or atleast a list of things to change, I can ask the creator and a close friend of his about it. If you are interested.
Well, I'm not too sure where to barge on this thread but seeing as Thothie suggested I post here...

But basically, I see we're all discussing Engines, now I think personally Master-Sword Continued would benefit A LOT from Trinity, which is a recent LGPL modification to the Half-Life Engine. (Yes its Steam and all that, no VAC bans). Basically, it allows much bigger maps, more polygons on screen (both model and world). Breaks the 512 entity limit, allows 3D and High-Res Skyboxes, better lighting, realtime reflections (like everything reflected) and real-time water with reflections (though it doesn't move up or down, in the sense of flooding. But that's a minor thing IMO.) It also has stuff such as Dynamic Lights, Dynamic Shadows (Right now only when your flash-light is casted, but he plans on adding them to all Dynamic Lights some day). It also improves the Default lighting quite a bit, making colors look much more alive. It is a very easy (asleast from what I heard) to implement engine mod and it has a tutorial. It is compatible with ZHLT/VHLT/SHLT and I believe any other compilers, it should work fine with your FGDs, but you'd need to add Trinity's custom stuff, but this engine is designed to be safe, it won't horribly ass chunk everything.

DO NOT WORRY IF ANY OF HLZ SAYS IT IS NOT BEING SUPPORTED OR UPDATED, IT STILL IS

http://www.halflifezone.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=192

FEATURE LIST

• Completely rewritten world and model renderers;
  A powerful and fully customizable particle engine;
  Shader based water;
  Real-time dynamic per pixel lighting for world;
  Real-time dynamic per vertex lighting for models;
  Real-time shadowmapping for world brushes/models, props and solid rendered surfaces;
  External .tga high resolution texture loader;
  New decal system;
  Client side entity manager that breaks the 512 entity limit the engine originally has;
  Real-time mirrors;
  Per pixel fog;
  External detail data to load external geometry into the map;
  High resolution as well as 3D skyboxes.

Now, I know this post is lengthy as hell, but lemme get you a few screenshots from some of my very very ghetto and quick test maps. (They don't represent my skill or Trinity's features fully, obviously also ignore the 3rd screenshot's stolen models )



Uploaded with ImageShack.us



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

 

[Thothie]

This here be more along the lines of what we need.

...But, despite the disclaimer in the header, you went and said it again later in the same post... I don't see a tutorial for integrating anything but the sound system. (A modified sound system would be kinda nice, as ours has been a bit funky, ever since someone played around with the ambient_generic in some way I've only been partly able to fix... But it says it's single player only, and even when in single player mode, our mod uses the multiplayer network system.)

So... Unless we can find a coder sophisticated enough to work that out, I dunno. We've not been very successful in integrating even Spirit of Half-Life code into our mod, though admittedly, looking it over, it isn't nearly as modular as it should be, considering its intent to be used in just that fashion.

The Bloom mod, and fake HDR/auto-exposure layers we've stuck in, were constructed from an old "Tron Bloom" tutorial, with some trial and error. We do have a reflective surface function already, written up by our old Dogg, and it can even be used on water, but it kinda sucks ass, being quite unpredictable, in addition to rendering everywhere, reflecting non-visible entities (such as triggers), and being all around extraordinarily un-FPS friendly. However, needless to say, we have no water like that offered by this renderer, nor any way to detach our entities from the engine's edict system, the latter being the most critical need.

I dunno if anyone in those forums would be willing to help us out working this system into our mod. Would go a long ways to fixing many of our stability woes, even if it wouldn't save us from the tyranny of Steam.

(Looks at coder contact e-mail...) BoSchitt? ...as in THIS BoSchitt?

 

[Doommarine23]

This here be more along the lines of what we need.

...But, despite the disclaimer in the header, you went and said it again later in the same post... I don't see a tutorial for integrating anything but the sound system. (A modified sound system would be kinda nice, as ours has been a bit funky, ever since someone played around with the ambient_generic in some way I've only been partly able to fix... But it says it's single player only, and even when in single player mode, our mod uses the multiplayer network system.)

So... Unless we can find a coder sophisticated enough to work that out, I dunno. We've not been very successful in integrating even Spirit of Half-Life code into our mod, though admittedly, looking it over, it isn't nearly as modular as it should be, considering its intent to be used in just that fashion.

The Bloom mod, and fake HDR/auto-exposure layers we've stuck in, were constructed from an old "Tron Bloom" tutorial, with some trial and error. We do have a reflective surface function already, written up by our old Dogg, and it can even be used on water, but it kinda sucks ass, being quite unpredictable, in addition to rendering everywhere, reflecting non-visible entities (such as triggers), and being all around extraordinarily un-FPS friendly. However, needless to say, we have no water like that offered by this renderer, nor any way to detach our entities from the engine's edict system, the latter being the most critical need.

I dunno if anyone in those forums would be willing to help us out working this system into our mod. Would go a long ways to fixing many of our stability woes, even if it wouldn't save us from the tyranny of Steam.

(Looks at coder contact e-mail...) BoSchitt? ...as in THIS BoSchitt?

I apologize for the header, I should have proof-read my own work, I guess it was just a stream of conscious, you know? If you want I'll revise and edit the whole post.

But no, BoSchiit is just some random name he made up for Trinity's support email, I could pass along things to one of his friends if you wish. Should be a bit faster. and if you really want to try giving Trinity a test, I could ask his close friend about how to integrate it, apparently from what he said way before, its easy. But that was HL SDK base. So we'd have to see how MS:C's old base complicates it. Also Trinity's water and reflections are a bit different, as its mirrors reflect the whole world, (and all models)I've only seen MS:C's reflect models. I also don't know how bad your FPS drops are with water, but Trinity has never dropped my frame-rate with its water. As for that sound engine? Yeah I was going to mention that. I am barely in contact with the creator, but I'll try and ask him whats wrong with it being in MP. Or yet again, the close friend. (Guy knows both Castlebravo and Richard) Cause I think this mod could really benefit from sounds.

Sadly I don't know really what to say, MS:C is an old old mod, and none of us here I assume are very sophisticated coders, I'm willing to learn but I'm not great at this stuff, not even decent. So any help I can give is limited. even if you did move to Trinity, you'd probably have to rid of the Fake bloom, though I am not too sure on that. (though I highly doubt some Fake bloom eyecandy is worth it in comparison ). I'm sure this isn't impossible, I think it is just going to have to take time. But I think if we were to get this working, it would be very beneficial. But we'll have to see I suppose.

 

[Thothie]

If you paint a face with reflect_full, it'll reflect the world (including any invisible brushes lacking the "renderless" zhlt_invisible 1 flag). Problem is, it doesn't occlude proper, and seems to be trying to reflect whatever area you are in at the time. So, even a small reflect_full mirror on the opposite end of the map causes a major FPS hit, even when you can't see the mirror itself, whenever you look in its general direction. Thus they are pretty much never used. The models-only mirrors are, needless to say, much kinder - though still pretty nasty.

Additionally, it seems our damn mirrors just break at certain angles or in certain lighting environments, depending on how they intersect vis nodes, or something. Not really figured that one out. So even the model-only mirrors are hit-or-miss.