Back to the past...

I started with some useless but technically very interesting project about a month ago.
The alst week I wasn't able to update much, as for one thing I had next to no free time available, and the other thing being some engine troubles which however seem to be resolved with the latest beta.


What you will now see are A3 levels read from the original games/demos. the scripts are parsed, the level data is read, and then the level is recreated.

It is far from being perfect.
- Walls for below regions don't work yet
- Texture y shift is not always correct.
- several texture and wall flags are not interpreted
- texture resizing to power of 2 was disabled due to some other problems. this is why the sky has black stripes
- sky textures are not converted to sky domes
- currently thousands of entities are created. The latest beta however allows me to merge everything into a lot less entities. I hope this will speed up things a lot.


Kandoria, with comparison shot


Kandoria, with comparison shot


Kandoria, with comparison shot


Skaphander, debugger ahead


Skaphander, wrong walls of below region


VR Demo

The Lord of Lightning, slightly wrong color palette


The Lord of Lightning, seen from above

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhh! how awesome is that!

Wow, Really impressive work, Firoball Now I know why you were asking for A3 projects.

What's your eventual aim with this project -- what's the point?

Jibb

There is no point - I just was excited to try it and it kept me well motivated until I ran into problems. Now with this beta I'm stable again and can continue working on it

LAter maybe I try to export all this to MDL7 or some more generic model format, so maybe someone wants to reuse all those levels and do sth cool with it

hi,

sorry I dont get it.

You're happy because the A 8.06 is finally able to run old A3 projects ?

,
gri

Awesome work! I like this a "lott"

Yes!
You, Mr. Firoball, are completely insane.

What's so difficult to understand?

Minimistic update.

I have added some quick and simple ambient / albedo lighting.
The scene from Skaphander which was already shown above looks remarkably better this way.



For better comparison, here the shot from above:


Unfortunately all the ambient stuff makes it much more difficult to optimize the render chain later on.

Currently I'm spamming the engine with entities, which is not really good...

Can't you translate the geometry into a static mesh? With a converter, like a3toWmp.exe or with a WED plugin?

This is quite some extra work which I'll maybe do later - if the whole thing turns out to be usable one day.

Could you try to implement the ssao shader from Heelx?

All the fancy stuff will be done once I have all the import stuff correct. And there's still some way to go.

Palettes are auto generated now, but A8 needs them before the scripts are compiled, so I have no chance doing the whole thing with one engine call.

Later I'll have to divide the project into a converter and a level loader.
The level loader ideally can be included into any project and it does all the stuff like loading the map, placing all the entities, taking care of ambient values, transparency effects etc...

I have no idea how long it takes until I get there, though...

I'd really love to have a new entity type: mesh
So I'm able to have static geometry with skins and collision, but without all the entity overhead...

Some new pics.

The first one shows there's still some work to do.
A shot from the probably most complex and challenging level ever made with Acknex3. Abiventure 2 by Crew99



Simpler levels are next to no problem anymore. The sky shader provided by HeelX is working fine - scaling and offset of sky texture needs more work, but that's part of the converter tool. Shot from World of Kandoria (my work).


One more shot. Deathman's Island by Lutz Hüls. This one renders just about perfect in A8 (except the sky).

Adeptus A3 (by Harald Schmidt)

This all screens looks really great, but the worst thing for me here is, that A8 still uses textures from A3...
Otherwise, I have to say that levels are great, and someone had done a great job.

Haha I've thought exactly the same!
Nice work, Firoball!

NICE!
I still remember adeptus, it came with the a6 commercial 6.10...
liked it back then.

Replacing the textures afterwards is no problem.
However that's not the point of the project. I try to bring over the A3 levels to A8 with as much accuracy as possible.
All further improvements like shader party or better textures are then up to the user.
If you want to replace textures, you just need to replace the image files.

I think that was not 3run's point but that the current default textures, A8's standard.wad, are from A3.

Do you translate the old scripts to Lite-C as well?

Nope.

At least not for the first really real release.

I only filter the region/wall/thing/bmap/model/palette information and discard the remaining script parts.

ok, this I misunderstood.
I never use the standard WAD, so I didn't know

i miss adeptus. one should make a full fledged game out of that. too bad the codes dont work anymore

http://firoball.de/stuff/a3test.zip

Press 0, then right key until you see something.

This is an A3 level, exported to WM3 and then loaded again in A8.

The contest release is available now:

http://www.opserver.de/coni_users/web_users/pirvu/au/demo/zips/a3tools.zip

Sample applications and configurations included.
Comes with full source and developer's manual.

It includes original A3 game demos of Skaphander, Conitec VR Demo, The Lord of Lightning and Kandoria.

Make sure to read the included readme.txt to get things running.


If you checked it out and like it, I say thanks a lot.
Feel free to vote for it in the Acknex Users Magazine forum.

Screenshots from original A3 levels rendered in A8: