project: demo3 version 1.0 ============================================================ credits ============================================================ developed by: elliot pace http://dxelliot.tripod.com libraries: Microsoft DirectX 9.0 - February 2005 Release FMOD (sound and music) with the following resources... models: each of the following models were downloaded from http://www.polycount.com/ Lee David Ash Double Barrel Shotgun www.planetquake.com/violationE James "HarlenquiN" Taylor Ray Gun & Grenade Launcher models http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/qbranch/ Edmund "Buster Charlie" Dupont Machine Gun model edmundd@riotsoftware.com Darren Pattenden Recruit model daz@darren-pattenden.cix.co.uk Spider Models Maxx3D spiders@eightleggedfreaks.com textures and sound effects: ATI Remedy Entertainment Strategy First Xatrix Entertainment (now Gray Matter Studios) several other files were downloaded off of freebie sites. ============================================================ description ============================================================ You are a commander and you must hire recruits and purchase weapons in order to hold back a swarm of spiders with a delay of 60 seconds between each. There is no turning back. Be sure to drink coke to heal yourself AND YOUR RECRUITS by holding the 'e' key down. This key is also used to dial Blanco Industries (google it) for more supplies and recruits. You can force the next spawn by hitting the 'return' key. There is a limit of 4 recruits, but don't feel troubled, there is no way to "beat" the game anyways. Instead, you must survive for as many swarms as possible - the final swarm is displayed upon your death. If you make it to swarm 10, then you are quite good. 14? Pushing it a bit. 17? Then you're better than me... and I MADE the game while play-testing it for an insane number of hours. ============================================================ system requirements ============================================================ - a graphics card with vertex and pixel shading support >= 2.0 - at least 256mb RAM, although 128mb might barely be enough ============================================================ known issues / bugs ============================================================ IF YOU WISH TO RESET THE GAME TO ITS ORIGINAL SETTINGS THEN DELETE THE SETTINGS.CFG FILE IN THE MAIN DIRECTORY. - the 3D sound effects are a bit "clicky" at times. I believe this occurs when the player's angle changes too rapidly. - changing from fullscreen to windowed mode (or vice versa) can sometimes freeze the game. - Toggling music can sometimes cause the sounds to permanently warp during gameplay. Be sure to toggle the music before beginning a game. - Shooting at a particular wall with a flaming grenade causes its explosion to be inside of it, rather than in front with respect to the wall's normal. ============================================================ technical stuff ============================================================ Lights: There are three dynamic lights. Two are used by the level and the last one is used by the player, triggered by the weapons. The siren is sort of a light... see below. the shaders: I stressed the instruction limit on the two primary rendering shaders (level and models) on the pixel shader side, so the game is most likely going to be fillrate limited. I didn't use multiple passes, but I will now. There used to be a bloom filter, but it simply wasn't worth it. The game seems to run the most stable on a low resolution (640x480) in windowed mode. I did my best to prevent the laggy mouse in full screen mode, but it's still noticeable. I have only tested this game out on a Radeon 9700. the shadows: the shadows are rendered with the shadow mapping technique, but does not use interpolation to smoothen the edges out. I found the extra texture fetches to be very wasteful in my situation. A separate technique is used when rendering the level's alpha textures (fence, etc) that call the clip(-1) function if necessary. This allows certain pixels to be skipped, whereas its depth and color are simply ignored, giving the illusion of light shining through. The depth is NOT extracted with the z/w term after the WVP matrix multiply, but instead is linearly interpolated with a max distance constant using only the z element. I found that this allows balanced accuracy for all geometry in the scene. the normal mapping: This gives the illusion of triangles being bumpy with the use of a normal map texture. I won't use this effect anymore as I find it to be too expensive and no longer worth it. The parallax effect was removed due to the instruction limit. the armor and weapon reflections: these are fake "reflections". It is a mere cube map lookup using the popular "grace" DDS cube map texture. The amount of "reflectance" is controlled by each base texture's alpha channel. ============================================================ permissions ============================================================ Please inform me if you wish to use the game for anything but entertainment purposes. It cannot be used for any profit whatsoever. You may redistribute the textures, sound effects (main directory/sound), models, as you wish, but you are then required to fulfill the requirements set forth by the creators. The readme files for the models are within each folder.