Iris Update (Just future progress discussion)

April 13th, 2006, 16:28 Posted By: PSmonkey

*Just a note, This is more discussion, Less news post. No need to post this as news on other sites*

Ok anyways last night I was having trouble sleeping so I got to start thinking about the next iris (specialy after sniper showed me shots of his new map).

I realise I really need to get a new build out because alot of moders are waiting on me before they can post their mods. So I think I will probably get cracking soon as i get back from break and put lesser time into money64 (like maybe 4 days iris, 2 days monkey, 1 day for me).

While up thinking, I was going over what I feel are big problems to iris that need to be upgraded. The two major ones are Controlls & AI. There are a few more things but thies two need to be solved the most.

So on the controll front. I realised last night that iris needs to evolve into more then doom like it is now. It needs to allow people to see all over so they can shoot people above & below with ease. Yet I am not sure what is the best setup. So I've desided to try getting some help from a few designer friends to hammer out 1-2 of the best controll setups that not only work well on the psp but also can make iris great. Sadly I've also desided to go against allowing custom controlls (if there is, its minimul and not full custom controlls). I know this sucks but the psp is limited on buttons and this would mean the difference between iris becoming coded arms (ok with alot of bad controlls) or Syphon filter (great controlls that fit the game). Once we figure something out we will post it up so people can see & maybe I will make a small modified demo of iris 0.1 so we can see them in action.

The second biggest problem with iris atm is AI. It's discussingly stupid. I know but it was the best i could do in like 3 hours i had. I have been thinking of new methods that would work but there are drawbacks to all. The first is to use quake3 bot setup files but the problem is they are a little over bearing and complex which will probably hurt the performace. The next idea was to install waypoints in every map and a few guide nodes to let the bot navigate the amp. This is very posibly what i might do but it means that map editors must plop thies in but if not there, the ai wont work on the map. So this as well kind of sucks. The best method is to somehow parse out waypoints or some map info from quake 3 bot files but this is hard to do because I dont think there is any solid documentation other then checking though the quake 3 source (which is a bit complicated to read).

So pretty much thoes are the two main things i need to fix. I also have though about doing a few more things to help improve iris as a whole that I will probably do. First being a real menu system (in external tga images so mods can customise the look) with fonts so the game will look better. I'm heavly leaning on the idea of going with the doom/quake style menu (not complex with simple buttons to get though everything). It sure as hell wont be anything complex like unreal2k4. Another thing on the list is fixing clipping & posibly throwing lightmaps back in and droping the use of vertex colors. Lightmaps look 200 million times better even tho they are a little costly. Yet to do lightmaps, map editors will have to run the maps though a tool i will write to make them compatible. I also am thinking to rewrite the weapons setup. So the game uses a 3d weapon, a 3d projectile and a 3d animated explosion. Thies will be specific for each weapon so a moder can make different ones for each. I probably wont add much in the way of extern weapon custumization tho (like to change how it fires and etc). I am also thinking to do some wifi but not sure since I still have problems getting my psp & router to work together.

So that is about it at the moment. The only last thing is I am posibly going to rename the version and consider this 0.2 since there will be alot of changes made & just make the ps2dev compo entry 0.3 (still planning to do this).

So thats about it for my late night thoughts. Any comments or sudgestions people wish to add?

As for a release date. I have no idea. Depends how things go starting next week.

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