When will LoS development resume?

When will LoS development resume?

Postby Julius » 23 Jan 2013, 10:26

I am currently tinkering with the idea of using the LoS engine for some modding (mainly because I suck at coding and many features are already there and it has LUA scripting).

Sadly development is currently stalled it seems, however I read somewhere that it should continue sometimes this year when the real-life commitments of the main developer are sorted out?

Oh and what kind of animation features for characters does the engine support? Fully blendable skeletal animations with physics constraints? Physics based cloth props like capes etc. would be great too.

Also, are there plans to allow for paged geometry to render vegetation on large outdoor areas?

Anyways, looking forward to see this cool game/engine progressing soon!
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Re: When will LoS development resume?

Postby amuzen » 23 Jan 2013, 13:21

Julius {l Wrote}:I am currently tinkering with the idea of using the LoS engine for some modding (mainly because I suck at coding and many features are already there and it has LUA scripting).

Sadly development is currently stalled it seems, however I read somewhere that it should continue sometimes this year when the real-life commitments of the main developer are sorted out?


Most of the more work intensive university courses should end in March, so that should be when I'll start to have enough time to be able to develop properly again. However, I have started to work on some design stuff already, so the project isn't technically fully stalled anymore; it's just moving at a snail's pace.

As a word of warning, you shouldn't expect a stable modding experience yet. We will likely drop several planned and existing features soon in order to limit the scope of the game to something feasible to develop. The most likely scenario seems to be that we'll drop all the plot and dialogue elements, as well as various other things, and limit our focus on combat, crafting and procedural maps.

Julius {l Wrote}:Oh and what kind of animation features for characters does the engine support? Fully blendable skeletal animations with physics constraints? Physics based cloth props like capes etc. would be great too.


Currently, there are just relatively simple blendable skeletal animations that can be either created in Blender or scripted using Lua. Physics-based bone control might be added in the distant future, but it's not a priority. There are currently no plans to implement softbody, cloth simulation or other complex animation features.

Julius {l Wrote}:Also, are there plans to allow for paged geometry to render vegetation on large outdoor areas?


There has been a new terrain engine in the works that will work a bit better for outdoor scenes, but it won't really be comparable to a traditional static terrain engine. Things like animated grass might be implemented in the distant future, but for now I'll be happy enough if the view distance will increase enough to make outdoor scenes mostly playable.

Julius {l Wrote}:Anyways, looking forward to see this cool game/engine progressing soon!


Thanks. Slowly but steadily, hopefully with clearer goals and more focus on the essential.
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Re: When will LoS development resume?

Postby Julius » 23 Jan 2013, 14:27

Ok sounds not too bad, the features to be dropped seem to be those not really necessary for what I have in mind. Would be nice if you could document your planned changes on the road map however.

For the skeletal animation... wouldn't it make sense to switch to a ready made system to also avoid all that hassle with custom exporters etc.? The simplest would be probably to use the FOSS FPS standard IQM. However if scripted bone animations are permitted one could probably script a simple cape or hair etc. system that would react to movements (are the bullet physics exposed to the script)?
Edit: This: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... fce7e26397 would be awesome though ;) (But most likely horrible for performance).

For terrain... well personally I don't even like traditional height-map based terrains all that much, however there is a nice OGRE3D plugin for paged geometry to make seamless transitions between models and billbords etc possible. Maybe that would be something nice to implement for outdoor areas? What about ocean and water support?
But well... yes keep it simple for now ;)
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Re: When will LoS development resume?

Postby amuzen » 24 Jan 2013, 21:17

Yeah, I just wrote a new roadmap. At least I can now imagine the game reaching some form of completion after several more years of work. :p

Frankly, I don't think I'm going to poke the graphics engine or its file formats much in the near future. The file formats in particular are quite a good match for our use cases and weird requirements. Unless one of the advanced animation systems is really easy to integrate, I'll probably leave the animation system as is. Working much more on terrain rendering doesn't sound particularly tempting either, so I doubt there'll be whole lot of changes there either.
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Re: When will LoS development resume?

Postby Julius » 24 Jan 2013, 21:29

Ahh the new road map sounds great, except maybe for the drop of the mapeditor (ingame editing should be somehow supported to enable some predefined, non procedural areas).

However for my mod idea I am starting to think a FPS engine like Cube2 is probaly more suitable.

However keep up the great work... LoS is really an awesome game.
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