Wartbed:Bright Portents

From Dark Omen Wiki

Bright Prospects is the code name for the Dark Omen 3D editor (and possible game engine) project. It is currently principally developed by Mikademus, but will be integrated with Rob's BTB editor and a future ARM parser for complete level parsing and editing.

It was originally written using the Irrlicht 3D framework but due to limitations of Irrlicht has been ported to OGRE 3D.

Contents 1 Status 2 Roadmap 2.1 Viewer 2.2 Editor 2.3 Engine

Status

Well underway and currently capable of loading and rendering an entire Dark Omen level. Not yet publicly available. Current features include:

• Loading and preparing the level as specified in the .PRJ battle description file: terrain, water, and furniture.
• Graphical effects underway: currently supporting texture animation (f.i. water animation).
• Render states supported: transparent and colour-keyed texturing, which Dark Omen's software engine does not render
• Loading and rendering the terrain shadow map specified in the .SHD file underway.

Roadmap

All items here are preliminary and subject to frequent change. Roadmap and future direction is speculative. No dates or promises are given.

Viewer

• 0.1: Rendering terrain and water
• 0.2: Rendering map furniture
• 0.3: Rendering texture blends correctly
• 0.4: Additional map effects: shadow map, vertex lighting
• 0.7: Rendering model graphical effects
• 0.8: Rendering particle effects
• 0.9: Rendering units
• 1.0: Complete rendering of all specified aspects of a battle, including units

• Bonus: Sound effects

Editor

Since Dark Omen uses its own format where terrain and water meshes are independent on the underlying height maps, it is difficult to change the terrain and save to new maps. Given the difficulties involved, it is still undecided whether we will implement the creation of new maps for the original Dark Omen game, or if we that will be only implemented for the Dark Omen engine remake (save format codename ".DO2").

• 0.1: Moving and removing furniture on the map.
• 0.2: New furniture (INSTances) addable to the map.
• 0.4: All INST aspects editable
• 0.5: All relevant DO aspects editable.
• 1.0: .DO2 fully implemented. Edits can be saved as new battles.

Engine

Dark Omen was written in 1997--8, employs an unfortunate mixture of APIs creating great compatibility issues today, and is largely hardcoded. Therefore, since the game data structure is relatively well known, and the existing DO internte MP is problematic, is is reasonable to remake the engine.This remake will likely not directly use the existing DO data, but re-cooked imported (.DO2) data.

• 0.1: Battle map loading and basic camera interface.
• 0.3: Sprites and sprite-based units on-screen
• 0.4?: Non-sprite based units (enhancement) on-screen.
• 0.5 -- 0.7: Battle playable; 1P and MP battles working
• 1.0: Dark Omen basic battle feature set implemented.
• 1.5: Campaign support, Dark Omen campaign transposed.