Author Archive

Hi all,

Denis covered all of the major features we’ve been working on recently in his last post a couple of days back, but only now have I gone through the hundreds of SVN and mercurial revisions and compiled a rough changelog (note; this is not complete and new features such as adaptive tonemapping and other features/fixes will be added before final release).

Alpha 2 (September 2010)
========================

Nutshell
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* Updater water shader
    o Fixed blackness
    o Improved refraction
* Fixed several engine exploits
* Improved rendering performance
* Updated VGUI (transition effects and improved stability)
* Added FP16 HDR
    o With luminance-based bloom
    o Controllable via ConVars
* Fixed terrain morphing
* Added background map support
* Updated post processing shaders
* Fixed all reproducible bug reports from Alpha 1
* Fixed BSP V19 and V20 loading algorithm
* Improved overall security of engine and closed several exploits

Common
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* [Engine] Fixed server crash exploit
* [Engine] Fixed model jitter when game is paused
* [Engine] Added background map support
* [Material System] Fixed “fullbright bug”
* [Material System] Improved rendering performance
* [Engine] Fixed dynamic lights rebuilding every frame
* [GameUI] Fixed loading dialog presuming singleplayer when starting a multiplayer server
* [GameUI] Fixed many KeyValues errors in Options dialog
* [GameUI] Updated multiplayer dialog layout
* [VGUI] Fixed ImagePanel crash
* [VGUI] Updated file open dialog
    o New icons
    o Completely fixed
* [Engine] Fixed “startmovie” saving corrupt TGA files
* [Engine] Fixed loading screen not rendering
* [VGUI] Added transition effects to all VGUI panels (fade in/fade out)
* [Material System] Added luminance-based bloom
* [GameUI] Fixed advanced video dialog title
* [VGUI] Added maximize/restore to native VGUI apps
    o Also features drag-to-restore (like Windows 7 Aero)
* [Material System] Added FP16 HDR
    o Can be disabled via –ldr command-line option
    o Added mat_bloom_vignette to control vignette
    o Added mat_bloom_multiplier to control bloom amount that is multiplied with framebuffer
* [Engine] Updated IP ban system
    o Clients are now informed of their remaining ban time
* [Engine] Minidumps now contain vital information such as modified ConVars and console log (see dumpinspect tool)
* [Engine] Greatly optimized code with industry-standard static code analyzers
* [Material System] Added vignette effect to create an awesome show of HDR+ToneMapping within the bloom shader
* [Material System] Added color correction
* [Engine] Nearly fully fixed terrain morphing
    o Physics objects now collide with the morphed terrain vertices
* [Engine] Flagged “host_timescale”, “host_framerate” and “host_speeds” as cheat ConVars
* [Engine] Fixed BSP V19 and V20 loading algorithm
* [Engine] Fixed “buildcubemaps”
* [GameUI] Fixed several leaks due to file contents being loaded into memory but not later being freed
* [Engine] Fixed ClientPrintf using an out-dated protocol
* [VGUI] Ctrl-A now selects all text in the text entry
* [VGUI] Fixed stack corruption when adding wide-char strings in AddItem

Game
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* Added red trail and glow to grenade
* Fixed shotgun shoot time
* Added cl_enable_player_sprays to enable/display player sprays
* Added “giveammo” and “giveammo_all” ConCommands
* Updated weapon icons for all retail weapons
* Updated post-processing shaders
    o Enable via pp_sobel, pp_monochrome, pp_grayscale
    o Also try pp_grayscale_fade to slowly fade from colour to grayscale
* Fixed water blackness as a result of a bad clipping plane
* Fixed flames not being removed when a player dies
* Updated rain precipitation
    o Updated rain tracer texture (now refracts)
    o Added rain splashes
* Fixed Kill entity I/O input on players resulting in a crash
* Fixed physics object crash on some maps
* Fixed AI follower crashes
* Bullets now have the same force on physics objects as retail
* Fixed weapon_sniperrifle taking a long time to autoreload
* Fixed bots not being kicked to make room for new bots in bot_create
* Optimized fire for lower end machines
* Fixed crash upon destroying client flame entities
* Fixed AR1 fire modes
* Added text to show AR1 fire mode switch
* HMG1 now does a 3 round burst when using secondary attack instead of switching between firemodes
* Fixed several leaks due to file contents being loaded into memory but not later being freed
* Increased damage for 357 weapon ammotype to 75
* New grenade model
* New 357 model
* Added reload function to HMG1
* Fixed AR2 fire animation

Tools
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* [mdldecompile] Added model decompiler which decompiles V37 models to SMD
* [mdlconverter] Added model converter to convert models from V36 to V37
* [studiomdl] Fixed studiomdl to write proper V37 models (with shared animation support)
* [WC] Fixed memory leak when using error.mdl
* [WC] Prevented infinite loop when unable to load error.mdl
* [dumpinspect] Added a little utility that reads the ASCII comment userstream of a minidump and prints it to console

Just so you know we have been working our asses off for the past few months! More news to come shortly (hopefully videos and screenshots).

On a side note, the rain update video was never publically posted on the blog, so here it is:

Peace out.

Update (16/08/10, 19:34 GMT): added approximately 15-20 more changes to the log.

Hi all,

Sorry for the huge delays, I’ve been extremely busy recently (as has the entire team) with IRL matters. But here’s a brief overview of what the team has been up to:

HUD Font support

In retail, many HUD icons use font characters as they are vectorized and don’t look “blocky” at high resolutions. After spending a couple of days playing around with the HUD code, we got it to work. This means the weapon selection HUD looks a lot better, and paves the way for a cleaner CS:S HUD, too.

Multiplayer AI

Ben has been busy getting AI to work in multiplayer, hopefully I’ll have some screenshots for this soon!

Client logos

In the leak engine, there are several exploits related to file uploads, which can result in filling up a server’s hard-drive or even uploading viruses to Windows servers (not good!). Files which clients can upload are now a lot more strict in size, type and location.

Initializing screen

If you’ve used Anon leak, you will have realised the loading screen (before the main menu) is ugly and bland, with a simple “Loading…” on a gray background. This is all performed with GDI, and with GDI it is also possible to draw bitmaps on screen, too. So we read the image data out of the VTF, convert it to a GDI bitmap, stretch it to the window size and paint. Magic!

Congratulations Pat!

Congratulations to our project leader, Pat, who is now the proud father of a baby girl, born on 4th February. During all this, Pat has had the time to build a game distribution network, which will soon be integrated into the engine (hopefully today). More information from the man himself when he has time.

Conclusion

Once again sorry for the late update, I probably won’t be able to make these as regular as I hoped– bi-monthly at the least. Stay tuned for Soda info soon. Peace out!

Hey all! Not much to talk about, but basically a review of what I and the team been doing over the past few days:

Server-side bots

If you’ve ever played Counter-Strike: Source, then you will surely know about server-side bots. These bots are surprisingly good and fun to play with, however this is not the reason we decided to implement them in Axel. As our team lives around the world and none of us have particularily good upload speeds, it’s quite hard to test multiplayer with someone with a ping <100ms. Therefore Pat asked for a test bot framework, “for testing out the engine and net code as well as dm/coop”.

As I know there is bot code in the Source SDK, I took a shot at copy and pasting the bot files over from the EP1 SDK. After a couple of hours fiddling with file includes and changing some functions around, I got the code to compile. However in the game the bots would not move. At all. As I hate copy and pasting code, I decided to scrap that idea and make my own, using the SDK bot as inspiration. If you’ve  been following the blog, you should have noticed the link I put to the bot images directory several days ago. This contained screenshots of some very basic (and bad) bots in a square map. The bot:

• If further than x units away from the target player:

Look at the player’s origin

Simulate pressing “forward”

• If within x units to the player:

Move backwards

However the bot had a huge flaw: the player must be in the line of sight of the bot. The bot could, however, climb over objects.

Not being content with the results, I decided to implement the navigation mesh system available in the Episode 1 SDK. I showed a screenshot of the working navigation mesh editor on the blog, too. This was a huge result for me and had taken several grueling hours of porting over EP1 functions and classes, however it paid off. This meant I could now set to work on pathfinding, which I completed today. Take a look at the bot navigating towards me:

Although the bot’s pathfinding isn’t perfect, it’s very ‘fixable’.

Alex is back!

After being away for several months (bad internet connection), Alex AKA G0rdan is back on the team. He immediately set to work on bringing proper animations to HL2DM. Hopefully, HL2DM animations will soon look like this (except with proper weapon detection):

Upcoming code review

If you’ve ever been part of any mod/project team involving coding, you’ll notice that you get off track and start implementing features while the bugs mount up. YNH decided that enough was enough and we’re going to start a code review. In the bug tracker, there are currently six Immediate urgency issues, and four Urgent. These are the “show stopper” bugs that are delaying release. The majority of these bugs can be easily fixed if all of the team’s programmers put their mind to it… so wish us luck!

Conclusion

For once I’ve managed to wrap up everything the team has been up to in the past week, and I’m hoping to make the “Dev update” blog posts more ritual. Therefore dev updates will now be every Sunday (instead of just randomly). This will hopefully allow me to cover everything, plus I’m usually free on Sundays. Peace out.

Stay tuned for more!

There’s nothing better than a bot that can follow you and avoid grenades, so I decided to spend a couple of hours today and it (surprisingly) worked very well. Check the bot folder in the images directory to see more!

Hey all, it’s me again. True to my word I’m updating the blog with recent SVN updates!

Anti-aliasing (again)

If you saw the last blog post you’ll see that anti-aliasing was hard to implement as a ConVar… well we  cracked it! Anti-aliasing is now available in several modes (MSAA 2x through 16x and CSAA 8x through 16x):

Note: in the screenshot above you can only see MSAA modes, this is because the graphics card of whoever took the screenshot doesn’t support any CSAA modes.

But anti-aliasing isn’t totally fixed. DirectX is crying…

Direct3D9: (ERROR) :MultiSampleType between DepthStencil Buffer and RenderTarget must match.

when bloom or another screen-space effect is enabled (or render targets). I’ll post another blog entry when we completely fix this.

Screenshots

Whilst flicking through the issue tracker, I found a bug that Logan posted several months ago, which seemed very easy to fix (don’t know why I couldn’t do it earlier). Basically he wanted PNG or JPG screenshot support in the engine, which seems simple, right? Well it is. D3DXSaveSurfaceToFile does this for us, however the only slight issue was that this function requires an absolute path. Therefore I had to mess around with filesystem to get the absolute path to <launcher dir>/<mod>/screenshots. There are now 7 file formats to save screenshots in (woohoo!):

Model decompiler

We all know about CannonFodder’s MDLDecompiler, which is very useful for decompiling V44 models and using our studiomdl to compile them into V37, but decompiling V37 models is currently impossible. So I set about coding my own, which seemed very useful at first thanks to this brilliant VDC article. However, I’m currently failing to export triangles correctly (as well as the skeleton). Hopefully more updates on this soon.

Conclusion

Things which I don’t have time to write up:

• Ben is in the process of fixing the tracker;
• Not much more!

This has been a lot shorter than the previous article, but fear not, more updates Pat’s Steam clone, Soda soon! Peace out.

I don’t think I’ve introduced myself on here before, but I’m Saul Rennison and I’m a programmer for Axel Project. I’ve been very busy over the past few weeks and months polishing the UI and other front-end things as the engine is now solid and I’ve implemented everything I wanted (server plugins being one of them). When I can, I post images of my progress in the images folder.

I hope to make a habit of posting behind-the-scenes progress of what the team is working on, I believe as it stands, it looks like the project may even be dead to outsiders. I don’t believe that “no news is good news”. Anyway, here’s a quick overview of what I’ve been working on:

UI transparency

This actually went through two phases. Initially everything was transparent, but this seemed a little “over-the-top”:

As you can see in the “Advanced video options” dialog, the text is relatively hard to read when placed above a panel with text on it. So to fix this, I only made the window panel transparent, as shown here:

Transparency only took a few lines changes to implement, although it looks very nice.

Loading dialog

If you’re familiar with the leak, you’ll see that there is absolutely no loading dialog at all. There is code for the loading dialog in the GameUI interface, albeit old and somewhat dead (unused parameters), although it is relatively easy to fixup. There is no code for it in the engine, however this was easy to implement, too. Like the above, this also went through several stages. The final product is personally more intuitive than the retail loading dialog and uses less screen space:

The singleplayer loading dialog is even simpler, with only ever one progress bar and only has the literal percentage in the middle of it:

Batch compiling

Yesterday I was trying to expand our old BAT file compiling system and failed miserably. I don’t dislike BAT files, I just dislike it’s extensibility and I don’t think it’s suited for Axel’s compiling needs. I knew Pat had a SCONS system in the pipeline, which also employs Python, but I thought I’d try tackling the issue myself (Pat is a very busy man after all). I tried to design the front-end with non-savvy users in mind. By this I mean suit it for members of the team who don’t know that to compile in Debug mode they’d have to use build axelproject -Tgame,HL2 -B Debug, without sacrificing power. After several hours coding, primarily trying to get myself back into Python again (looking over the code I realised I had used ; at the end of some lines), I finished it. Here is a screenshot of the compiler as it stands (with pretty colours!):

This is simpler than the leak compile system for a number of reasons:

• Saves echoing the entire compile log to console, even when there are no compile errors;
• Compile errors print in the console and halt the compile process (can be disabled);
• Has 1 BAT file proxy instead of 20, where the user can input which game, build mode and settings they wish to use;

Anti-aliasing

This is proving to be a bit of a bummer. In the leak engine, anti-aliasing is enabled via -mat_antialias # on the command-line. However this method is impractical (and impossible) to use in something like an Options dialog. I’m currently working on this (have been for a couple of days now), but I’m trying to find a solid way of enabling super sampling. At the moment it is working on Pat’s machine, but not mine. The difference is negligible in the screenshots below, so click on them for a better look, and flick between windows/tabs to really spot the difference:

Chapter dialog

If any of you have played singleplayer Half-Life 2, Episode: 1, etc, then you will have noticed the beautiful New Game dialog they all use. Pat had previously committed a semi-working replica to the SVN several months ago, although never finished it (typical ). This is a pretty vital feature for the release so I decided to implement it fully. For those of you interested, here is a full overview on its internal workings:

• GameUI parses a KeyValues file named chapters/chapters.txt, which holds which map each chapter corresponds to;
• It then loads the images for each chapter, located in materials/vgui/chapters/chapter#.vtf;
• Checks to see if the chapter has been unlocked, if so it enables the button to play it;

As in retail, there is a ConVar which controls how many chapters have been unlocked, called sv_unlocked_chapters. Luckily for me the code for it is in the Source SDK, so it wasn’t hard to replicate. Enough talking, here it is:

Other

There’s stuff that I’ve missed off, but don’t really have enough time to write up every single one:

• Server plugins: replicating the current Source engine’s server-side extensibility;
• Many exploit fixes: all public Source Engine exploits have been fixed;
• Shader updates: wrapped lighting on models;
• Advanced Video dialog;
• Fixed up majority of localization;
• Multiplayer is in a semi-playable state;
• Background maps;
• Much more I can’t remember;

Conclusion

Please take into account that this is only the work of the previous month and much more work and effort has been put into fixing bugs and adding new features, not to mention many members have been inactive over the holiday season.

Peace out.