Posted by Dr. Willard on July 02, 2000 at 00:21:58:
In reply to: Re: Open Raider Project? posted by TB on July 01, 2000 at 17:05:19:
: I messed around with the thought of Open Raider based on Crystal Space some months (a year, maybe?) ago. By that time it wasnīt so far to go with the idea (e.g. D3D port was not very stable and Linux hardware acceleration was too beta). Well, the pictures on that page say "try me again". Crystal Space has some features I always wanted to have in TR, some features that already to be found in TR3 or TR4 look better. Could just take a short look but a third person option seems not to be built in. Iīm a beginner in programming but maybe Iīll try this out.
Actually, a third-person option is fairly easy to implement. All one has to do is to move the camera behind the player-character location and render a model at that location. Aleph One has a third-person option, and that was fairly straightforward to implement in a first-person shooter that supports netgames.
: Another point is: Eidos/Core want us not to mess around w/ the engine, the levels or even the character. As you mentioned already on your hp, TR and its fans are extremely fixed on Lara, so it wonīt be easy to convince "Them" that Crystal Spaceīs programmer isnīt involved with that port. The last thing I want is that anyone else gets in trouble.
However, Crystal Space's programmers need not be involved directly -- one can get what one wants from one of the engine releases.
Also, if one wants to make an open-source TR clone, it might be better to use a different sort of filesystem -- not to pack everything into one file, but to have several files with a directory hierarchy, the way that the Quake series does. That's what's inside those pak files. Thus, a level can get its map from one place, its wall textures from another place, its models from yet another place, etc.