Specs and Legalities

The great thing about the Ogre Rendering engine is that it's configurable to use both OpenGL & Direct3D... I believe those screenshots were taken when I was loaded up in OpenGL mode tho.. I'm not a big fan of microsoft (but let's not get into that here...)

That terrain was a temporary one that I just threw together to have _SOMETHING_, and the end project will NOT have that particular one in it. As far as the textures go, it was using a splatting shader to put the different terrain textures on based on height in the heightmap. There's about a billion (plus or minus) other splatting modes available, but that's the one that I used for taking the screenshots. I'll decide at a later point just what it is that I'll settle on later. Maybe make it user configurable (especially if I want to use the shader).

I'm kinda shooting for a middle range/high end computer setup to play the game tho. I really detest having to limit myself because some guy on a 386 wants to play HalfLife2 on it. I'll be putting some fallback rendering techniques in for the textures and whatnot, if, for example, your video card doesn't support certain features, tho.. But those aren't implemented yet.

I'll likely be putting in a skydome, although a skyplane might happen.. We'll see. No need for a skybox tho, as the player'll never see that far down, even in the airship. I haven't even TOUCHED the sky yet tho. All I did was set the background colour to a pretty blue^^

Music: I'm thinking about using either FMOD or OpenAL, but really, that's not high on my todo list yet.. I want to make some other important things work first. If I can start using the orchestra music on various CDs, it'll likely have to be MP3 format. I haven't even thought about the legalities of releasing it to the general public yet-- odds are Squenix would have my head heh heh. I'll concern myself about distributing it (if at all) when it's somewhere even remotely close to being complete-ish. As far as total project size so far: Currently it's sitting at almost 100MB, but 50MB are temporary files, so in reality, it's currently 50MB. This is with no texture compression yet, which'll be end-project once they're concrete. The majority of my other data files are 1 or 2 digit kb sizes. Although a couple of the dlls are a little heavy at 1.5MB and such... but once I've decided for sure on what I need/don't, I'll be removing some of them.

Usually, my music composing has been in fruityloops, which I've quite enjoyed. But I'll worry about my music and whatnot later, when I get even within SIGHT of that bridge. :)

Well, the big thing about this project being a remake in 3D is that I want it to be all in 3D. I'm toying with the idea of allowing the player to swap out models for sprites in the majority of situations, but we'll see if I actually decide to go thru with it.

I already mentioned earlier that I'm using the Ogre engine, hehe. Ogre is released under the LGPL license (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lgpl.html), which basically means (and I quote) "You can get the full source for nothing, nada, zip. There IS such a thing as a free lunch."

LOD was something I'm capable of doing myself (and have in previous projects), but conveniently, it's already fully integrated in Ogre. So, no point in reinventing the wheel.

Soon, I'm hoping to implement an in-game screenshot system, possibly with timestamps (in the name), so you won't have to deal with my ship-shod image cropping skills of doom in too many more future screenshots ( ^-^)