Anyone interested in client development?

[Tabasco]

You've got plenty to be proud of, the engine is good work. It's not precisely open source at this point, but that's your call.

We have no way of knowing whether or not SOE will pull a page from Blizzard's playbook, but that's not the point. Eqemu is a server framework that can be devoid of non-free content but it's bound to a non-free, evolving client.
Windcatcher's client was in delphi and never worked without a custom login server as far as I know, so it's a pretty poor example.
I just hate to see a promising project consumed by the hassles of backward compatibility with a client that already does a pretty good job of representing the nostalgia of classic EverQuest.

[PixelEngineer]

Originally Posted by Tabasco

You've got plenty to be proud of, the engine is good work. It's not precisely open source at this point, but that's your call.

We have no way of knowing whether or not SOE will pull a page from Blizzard's playbook, but that's not the point. Eqemu is a server framework that can be devoid of non-free content but it's bound to a non-free, evolving client.
Windcatcher's client was in delphi and never worked without a custom login server as far as I know, so it's a pretty poor example.
I just hate to see a promising project consumed by the hassles of backward compatibility with a client that already does a pretty good job of representing the nostalgia of classic EverQuest.

The client isn't open source because I am ironing out the ugly details in my code. Any programmer of an open source program knows that it is often a daunting process of sending your code out for public scrutiny.

I understand the concerns of backwards compatibility but here's my thoughts:
- I want this project to be compatible with old hardware.
- I want to have this client run as fast as possible.
- I want this client to run on all platforms (including Android and iOS)

and most importantly,

- I want this project to teach me about graphics and game programming.

That's about it. I do appreciate the feedback and criticisms.

Cheers

[PiB]

First poster here, also working on re-creating a EQ client using OpenGL. Seems to be a popular pastime here

PixelEngineer, are you using backface culling? I have tried to turn it on but this removes a lot of faces that should be visible:



When backface culling is disabled:



Looks like the normals and winding order of many faces are wrong in the s3d files. Or maybe there's some flag to invert them that I overlooked? In Blender, the normals of the Pedestal are pointing down instead of up:



I could just leave it disabled but this sometimes causes z-fighting (look at the water in the second image).

[KLS]

If you know the order of the vertices you can just calculate your own normals (hint: you do!) which is what we do in azone for .map files.

[PiB]

I know how to calculate face normals, but I think the order of the vertices in the file is wrong. Half of the faces use clockwise order (first picture) while the other half use anti-clockwise order (second picture).

The reason I mentioned the normals is that, if all the normals were pointing in the right direction I could detect which faces have the wrong order and change it. Unfortunately it seems faces specified clockwise have wrong normals and vice versa.

[PiB]

My bad, I was looking at the faces from the wrong direction. Looks like they are all specified in clockwise order. Asking OpenGL to cull front faces did the trick. D'oh!