Doom3world

Well, we were hoping to scoot this out BEFORE Christmas, but close enough!

(updated 1/26/07)
http://www.groundzeromod.net/files/grou ... type31.zip

QUICK INTRODUCTION, INSTRUCTIONS
Ground Zero takes place 30 years after a global nuclear war. The dust has finally settled, and the seeds of a new civilization are planted. In the southern mid-west of former United States, the player must try to find a place in this new world--taking as big or little a part in its development as he/she wishes.

In this prototype, you can explore a procedurally generated city, populated by hostile "raiders" (represented by Doom 3 zombies). You have several weapons at your disposal to engage the enemy in a form of turn-based combat called "step-based," which is broken into individual actions.

Press "Q" to toggle step-based mode on at any time. When not visible to hostile characters, or when you are far enough away, you may press it again to return to real-time. In step-based, characters may only move and shoot on their turn. Each action is assigned an action point cost, so characters must wait longer to act again after more "expensive" actions. When every character's action points have been depleted, a new turn begins and AP are replenished.

Right click on the ground to move your character to that point. You can adjust the free-floating cursor area (inside which the camera does not rotate) in your options. Use W,A,S,D to adjust camera zoom and height. Left click to shoot (which enters step-based automatically), and select weapons with 1-9/mousewheel.

During combat, characters may only fire withing a 135 degree arc, beyond which it takes 1 AP to rotate.

Press "f" to focus on a target in combat, increasing your chance to hit at a greater AP cost.

You may not perform actions which require more AP than you have available. If you want to "pass" on an action, press "H" (hold)

Change stance between standing and crouching by pressing "control." This takes one action point and reduces your max movement distance per AP, but reduces your profile (harder to hit) and increases your chance to hit with ranged weapons.

WHAT THIS PROTOTYPE IS

To paraphrase the included Readme:

The main purpose of this release is to demonstrate our ability to generate a game environment with no pre-compile, based on variable inputs.

As a basic example in this release, you can set the average height and number of buildings to spawn, how much damage has been inflicted on the city, and the strength of hostile forces (which is expressed through the number of enemies and their personal skill level). A dynamic pathnode system is used by the computer controlled characters for long-range navigation, which can be generated and altered on the fly.

In the future, this system will be used to represent the growth and development of settlements over time, and to randomly generate levels for the wasteland that separates them. Towns will rise in population and technology level, rebuild the ruins of pre-war civilization, and evolve in cultural style as each of the three gameworld's factions gain influence.

Our first step toward this goal is to allow the player to navigate on a world map between several cities like the one in this prototype, which develop and interact with each other in a simple Civilization-style game.

WHAT THIS IS NOT, KNOWN MAJOR ISSUES

Performance is greatly improved over our last release, but we are continuing to research methods for increasing framerate and reducing the number of hiccups. Load times are currently VERY long, so be patient!

This does not graphically represent our artistic vision for the gameworld in any way. All models and textures are placeholders and have a great number of glitches. The squarish, grid-like appearance of damaged buildings will go away with proper art assets. Characters, weapons, and environmental props will all recieve a complete facelift at some point.

The pathfinding system is a first draft and obviously needs a lot of work. For now, we "simply" needed to make sure that the AI could navigate across a randomly generated city and make its way up a 10 story building to the player. There are numerous glitches in small-scale navigation, and characters will appear to be floating in the air at times.

The finished game will be violent and combat heavy, but it will not be the main focus of gameplay necessarily. In future releases we will be working intensely on actual role-playing aspects. All of the skills listed on the character sheet will be more or less equally useful, or cut.


-Jonathan Lamb
Ground Zero project lead

p.s. weapons slot 9 I believe is the constructor cannon. Press "R" to cycle between different constructor types to spawn where you aim. Use at your own risk!

One quick performance note: If you set the number of buildings (population) and the height of the buildings (tech level) to high values, things are going to be VERY slow. In general those two sliders should be the inverse of one another (if one is very high the other should be very low).

To use the constructor cannon you have to mouse scroll to it. It should be the last weapon after the rocket launcher. Have fun using it, and if you wish to adjust the average height and damage of the buildings you spawn simple move the sliders found on the main menu.

Hope you all enjoy playing the prototype!

EQUIPMENT AND ENEMIES

NOTES
1. Every wound reduces one or more attributes to some degree, which in turn affect the character's ability to apply skills. A heavily wounded character will have fewer action points and lower chance to hit, for example. Use "E" (examine) on an enemy to see approximately how wounded he is.

2. The damage inflicted by a weapon is modified by the margin of success in the attack, and the victim's armor.

3. All weapons have an optimal range, with a minimum and maximum distance. Long-barreled firearms for example have a long minimum range, inside which it becomes increasingly difficult to acquire a target. This gives melee fighters a significant advantage when the manage to close on a gun-wielding opponent.

4. Armor has Resistance and Absorption ratings. Resistance is a chance to outright deflect an attack and negate all damage. Absorption is how much energy the armor diffuses on impact, reducing the damage inflicted on a successful hit. Some weapons do a high amount of damage have little penetrating ability, and visa versa. It is important to keep track of what weapons you use on whom.

5. Projectiles lose power (and thus penetrating ability) over distance, based on how much power they have to begin with. Rifle cartridges will drop off much more slowly than shotgun BBs.

WEAPONS

(of course, Doom 3 assets are used as placeholders for the following test weapons):

Fists: An attack of last resort, although a skilled unarmed fighter can dispatch opponents very quickly if he manages to close on them from the right angle!

.22 Pistol: Low power with moderate base damage. It will generally take several hits at minimum to kill a person, especially if they have any armor... but it only takes 1AP to fire, and a well placed shot can occasionally cause severe wounds. Ammunition is plentiful.

12ga Shotgun: This pump action weapon is tremendously deadly against poorly armored targets up to moderate ranges, but the BBs lose energy quickly. Ammunition is limited at first, although the player can salvage shells from some raiders.

9mm SMG: This ammunition cuts through the most common body armor with relative ease at close range, and is effective out to several hundred feet. There is very little ammunition available for it however. *Move the cursor to guide the 5-round burst.

5.56mm Man-Portable Minigun: Goes through ammunition at a ridiculous rate, but handy when you absolutely need to kill everything in the street. The 5.56 rounds have excellent range and shreds most civilian-grade body armor. Guide the 30-round burst with the cursor.

7.62mm Battle Rifle: Reach out and touch someone. You only have 10 rounds, but even with open sights this beastie will bring down targets in ceramic-plated vests from 400 yards away.

Rocket Launcher: A non-guided RPG, ejected from the firing tube with an initial charge followed by the hiss of internal propellent. In the history of warfare up through the 21st century, it remained nigh on impossible to construct man-portable armor to withstand even antiquated explosive compounds, and this is no exception. You have an unusually large and precious horde of 5 rockets, which are most useful for creating your own doorways.

ENEMIES:

There are five different troop types, two of which use shotguns, while the rest use pistols. The troop types are:

Raider Commander: Armed with a shotgun and (generally) very good at using it, extremely dangerous.

Raider Lieutenant: Armed with a pistol and next in skill to the commander. Deadly, but his lack of a heavy weapon and armor make him less of a threat than the commander.

Raider Body Guard: Armed with pistols and fairly skillful, they should not be underestimated.

Raider Guard: Armed with a shotgun and heavy armor, what they lack in skill they make up for in numbers.

Raider Soldier: Lowest of the low, pistols, weak armor and (generally) little skill means a single soldier isn't much of a threat, but he can still kill you if you aren't careful.

custom weapons is, always, very welcome
Im curious though why noone has brought in a conventional
machinegun such as a M249 SAW or a M60 ?

Guys, its awesome what you did with the LOD system and destroyabel buildings BUT i'm begging you, just change that movement and controll system! It hurts my heart to see that kind of freedom in a doom 3 map and then i'm not abel to move around in it as i want to. Its to cry out loud because i feel like in a wheelchair whitout whells trying to move around in this town that i'd like to look at.

Why arent' you just making a fixed camera in the back like in GoW and controll the guy by keyboard keys. if you've planed features for the mous-controlling system then why don't you just make a key where you can swith between the two modes.

The system you have right now is just poisoning the awesome stuff you have there and a mod should also be about fun gameplay and there could be many that will be disapointed if they play the prototype with that movement. people remember negative things better than positive ones.

jlamb: check your pm's

Definitely going to be checking this out tonight to take a look at the LOD system, while the mod as a whole is interesting that part intrigues me the most.

Thanks peter_86, we appreciate even the harshest criticism as long as it has some reasoning/explanation

I think the movement system will be difficult to get used to if you are approaching it in terms of shooters like GoW, or even shooter/RPG hybrids like Deus Ex and System Shock. Try to think of it more like Neverwinter Nights or Baldurs Gate--which may simply not be your cup of tea.

One thing that will hopefully help smooth things out is to disable camera collision, causing it jump in and out. The plan is to create a portal that always draws your character, even if he is concealed by a wall or prop.

(FYI Deavile and I have been talking about making a realtime action spinoff using the same tech, at some point in the future)

The main principles behind the movement system are:

1. Minimize the number of buttons to press and/or hold down.

Ground Zero will be very exploration heavy with the player frequently walking over large distances. In most 3D RPGs (take Oblivion for example) you almost CONSTANTLY have a "walk" button pressed for looooong periods of time. The idea here is that you click once to tell your character where to go, and then are free to look around the environment as you wish with just mouse movement.

2. Freedom of perspective

We want to allow the most "immersive" camera perspectives (directly over-the-shoulder and first person), tactical views (akin to classic isometric games like Fallout and Jagged Alliance), "cinematic angles," and anything in between. Remember you can hold W,A,S,D to adjust camera height/distance, and backpedal/sidestep/move+turn during combat with short moves.

3. Uniform ruleset between player and non-player characters

The movement used to be keyboard driven, which meant we needed different movement/action-point rules for the player and NPCs. This creates a number of potential exploits, and is basically much more complicated in certain respects than a universal movement system.

4. Seperation of player and character

As a "pure" RPG, the player makes decisions, the character attempts to act them out. Everything is resolved through character skill and not the player's mechanical/twitch ability. Part of the mouse driven interface is to make this seperation clear: you are issuing commands to a character, not directly acting through him/her.

The new controls are great. It seems to emphasise the more strategic elements of the game, rather than pretending to be an action game. It will be tough for the action gamer crowd to come to grips with not using ASDW to move around though I suspect. (as shown by peter_86 there) Once path-finding works well, it should be a blast though. (at the moment, our hero gets stuck on walls if you click the wrong spot)

Hope to see how well this goes with RPG elements as well. Keep up the good work!

PS: That realtime action spinoff does sound very nice - I hope it eventuates! (me imagines controlling a small squad of soldiers with a modified version of this interface...drool...)

Thanks, Vcat!

It's been interesting in our playtesting to see how one aspect of a game can influence the percieved success of seemingly unrelated features. We have sat people down to test this release, and some of them seemed to think we had significantly changed our combat system when only the control interface was different.



If there is a team interested in using this tech for another project... It could be something to discuss anyway. I'll see how Deavile feels about that as a possibility.

Downloaded it.
Couldn't play it for getting <4fps constantly, even under Low, 640x480, all options minimum.
I play Doom³ on Ultra, 1280x1024 and get 60fps.

Just thought I'd let you know.

Hmm, that sounds odd.

What are your system specs?

How did you set up the city before launching the map (enemy strength, average building height, average number of buildings, and average damage level?)

Where is the LOD distance set to?

For comparison, most of the video for the YouTube demo was capture on my machine with FRAPs which slows things down considerably. I have an Nvidia 6800GT, Athlon 64 3200+, and 1GB Ram. On 1280x960 (widescreen) and "High" texture detail, I typically get anwhere from 15 to 40 fps using the default map and LOD settings.

I was even able to get a very acceptable framerate on a 2600+ 5900fx 128 and 512 ram (3+ year old machine). I left everything default except the two building sliders.

Hey everyone, just thought I would let you know that we will be releasing a linux version pretty soon. In addition I made a few changes to the way structural support is determined that considerably improves frame rate during building collapse. Note that this won't change overall performance, but for those of you who were getting nasty hiccups when you smashed buildings it should help quite a bit.

Just an FYI, we've re-uploaded the archive with a new .dll that almost completely eliminates the pause before a destruction event:

http://groundzeromod.net/files/groundze ... type31.zip

If you've already downloaded the full mod, the .dll is here (just replace "groundzero_gamex86.pk4" with this file, and delete gamex86.dll from the "groundzero" folder).

http://groundzeromod.net/files/groundzero_gamex86.pk4

Really impressive work, from concept to realization.....

Runs absolutely smooth on my system at Ultra High + 4xAA

Sorry for the slow response.

P4 HT 2.6GHz
1GB DDR Ram
GF 6600GT
300GB SATA


And I chucked all the settings, like LODs to minimum, draw distance to minimum etc.
If the new updated version doesn't lag, I'll edit this post however.

Hmm, I'm not sure what to say. If you get a chance, it would be a help if you open up your console when the framerate is bad and enter "com_speeds 1" and let me know what its spitting out. The same for "r_showprimitives 1"

Just a point of curiosity. Not sure what to say, since you and I have pretty similar systems (unless the 6600GT - 6800GT simply makes that much of a difference in this case for some reason). I'd be tempted to point my finger at background processes or something.

And what city size/average building height/average damage do you have it set to? When the first two are set high and the damage is low, things can still hit a wall pretty fast.

Ok, I tried the latest beta, and performance is *slightly* improved.

Now I can actually chuck buildings into the map. Bizzarely, when I'm inside a building - 60fps, but as soon as I exit the building - 20fps

Still on low and all that.

- Oh and about background proccesses, EndItAll made sure of that.


City size = lowest
Building Height = mid
Damage = lowest

Strange, being inside or outside a building should have no effect on performance, as the Doom3 engine does not do culling for objects behind other objects. Try this, create a map with 0 buildings and see what your frame rate is. Since you will basically be creating an empty level with a few props strewn about your frame rate ought to be around 60.