ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: QUARANTINE

[AllTinker]

18 minutes ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

How big would a full res, whole view of the map be, in one screenshot? (either top down, or in some kind of isometric view, like those giant Minecraft web browser maps).

Hmmn good question; if each pixel in an isometric screenshot corresponds to one pixel of wall texture, some quick math suggests the levels would be something in the order of:

• Kemo City - 101888 x 32256
• The Park - 51200 x 51200
• Old Town - 37376 x 32256
• Projects - 51200 x 39424
• The Wharf - 100864 x 29696

This is based on each wall (i.e. one edge of a block) being a maximum of 512 texels long. Objects can be smaller than this, but map-wise you wouldn't be missing anything major. So fitting that to the overview map you see in full in Ross's episode, it might be something in the order of 120k x 80k, at a guess.

 

There is a problem though - most blocks do not have roofs, since you only ever see them from near ground level. I'm fairly sure I can robustly generate a roof wherever one is needed though, but I haven't attempted it yet.

 

3 minutes ago, BTGBullseye said:

I'm actually very interested... Especially if you can get it to run with Vulkan and use some of the newer post processing effects available.

Baby steps, but who knows! Some ambient occlusion might work well, and some dynamic lighting wouldn't hurt... API-wise right now I've gone for broadest support, so it'll run on anything that supports OpenGL 2.1 or ES 2, but it'll use GL3/4 features if they're available.

 

My main focus right now is getting the systems up and running - physics/collisions, NPC logic/path-finding, GUI components etc. Then it's into recreating (and subsequently tweaking) gameplay.

[AllTinker]

1 hour ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

Part of me wants to see, what the whole city would look like with the draw distance increased, or completely removed.

Eventually I'd like to do just that, be able to render out a nicely anti-aliased (8K?) shot with all five maps loaded at once with proper roofing etc. But for now here's some quick'n'dirty previews with no culling/distance fogging...

Kemo City:

Spoiler

The Park:

Spoiler

Old Town:

Note that this map actually has quite a few blocks with proper roofing since it has bridges where you can see (and fall) down onto them.

Spoiler

The Projects:

Spoiler

The Wharf:

Spoiler

 

[Steve the Pocket]

Crap on a stick, that's a huge game world. I wonder how it stacks up to the likes of, say, GTA V, or at the other end of the huge-worlds timeline, The Elder Scrolls: Arena.

[ThatDarnOwl]

On 5/23/2019 at 10:56 AM, AllTinker said:

Eventually I'd like to do just that, be able to render out a nicely anti-aliased (8K?) shot with all five maps loaded at once with proper roofing etc. But for now here's some quick'n'dirty previews with no culling/distance fogging...

Kemo City:

  Reveal hidden contents

The Park:

  Reveal hidden contents

Old Town:

Note that this map actually has quite a few blocks with proper roofing since it has bridges where you can see (and fall) down onto them.

  Reveal hidden contents

The Projects:

  Reveal hidden contents

The Wharf:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Question can you release these files as .obj or something similar so we can port them into other games? (such as GTA San Andreas)

[Cherno]

On 5/23/2019 at 4:48 PM, AllTinker said:

I'd love to see the original editors they used to make them and so on, but sadly those seem likely to be - along with the game source code - long gone. (I can see the StarCraft vibe too; quite a similar grungy tech look.)

 

I'm very close to the point now where I could make a new block/map editor for the original game... Although that's not the direction I'm going, since I'd rather work towards a new version which runs on modern OSes and lets me fix bugs/issues and generally tweak things.

 

I probably shouldn't spam the thread with crap about my random hobby project, but I'll just drop a quick video I recorded today showing a "drive" through parts of each of the five levels:

Still very early days, just having fun with it. Rendering at twice the resolution of the original game in that demo; I actually think a little chunkiness suits it. Also the FOV is significantly wider than the original... Anywho.

Hey there, it'S nice to see someone else besides me taking an interest in bringing this old game back to life! I started working on a Quarantine TC for GZDoom a while ago, I hope I will find the time to complete it someday!

 

 

 

I wonder what your own project is doing and if you could share what you accomplished so far? I am currently working on a Desert Strike TC but after that, it'll probably be either Hunter or Quarantine I'll come back to...

Edited November 3, 2019 by Cherno (see edit history)

[AllTinker]

Yeah so life decided to do its thing and blow up in my face not that long after my last post. Losing my job and my house were the main highlights... But I'm still not dead so there is at least that.
Happily things are approaching pleasantly mundane again though, so I'm hoping to resume hobby project stuff ASAP!

 

As far as progress goes:

• I've implemented a first pass at collisions/physics, I basically just need to implement the elevators now on that front.
• The driver cabin is mostly functional (e.g. radar, steering wheel), and I dropped in an optional full-screen (no cabin) mode too.
• The basic vehicle AI/path-finding is essentially done, but I haven't implemented any combat/mission-specific behaviours yet (e.g. bosses).
• I'm using the same engine for other projects (hobby+commercial) and it's undergoing a bit of a refactor at the moment, but I'm hoping that won't take much longer.

As for the bigger picture I'm wondering if I'll have two modes - original and custom - where the former will recreate the game more faithfully, and the latter will be balanced to be fun for the long haul through the whole story (i.e. avoid the frustrations Ross discussed in his episode). Either way I'd like to implement numerous options to tweak the experience.

 

Regarding dumping the levels to .OBJ format - that's definitely doable. My engine builds a texture atlas for each environment on the fly so I could also dump those out.
The main issue is how much of the level detail comes from billboard sprites, which can't really be represented in .OBJ in a useful way. Perhaps I could dump out the object data in a different (e.g. CSV) format...

[Cherno]

I'm sure things will work out for you! Glad to hear you are still working on your project. The OBJ format is fairly limited, I try to avoid it and use FBX instead, but maybe it supports multiple named mesh objects, so that sprite objects could be represented by simple cubes or whatever, with the correct sprite name?

[Coreyrn]

Review of Quarantine / Quarantine II by Grim Beard

 

Nice little review of Quarantine and Quarantine II with a shoutout to Ross at about 1:58 in the video.

Quarantine II somehow looks worse with its change to comic cutscenes and higher resolution during the actual gameplay.

Edited April 29, 2020 by Coreyrn (see edit history)

[dashofweak]

Been a few years but I finally got art of a citizen I could see being in Quarantine!