So, I haven't been that lazy at all, I have recently, well not recently but a few months ago I joined a 3D developing community, among tons of people I have met already I found a couple that played starcraft/diablo and blizzard games in general, along with a few MMORPGs I like.
They are all awesome programmers and have coded several tons of plugins for MAX and one of them is even developing a small rendering software that is supposed to cause minimal usage of CPU speed.
The Starcraft 3D or SC3D was born after they found out I was "Corbo" we imagined a world in which, with my knowledge on SC and theirs we could develop an "enhancement" of the current SC engine and since we are all in a 3D creative community the only option was, duh, obviously make the SC engine be 3D. We took several weeks and maybe months in thinking and finding out everything we could on the current engine, at the beggining I actually didn't know what was I doing there since I knew nothing about programming compared to them but then I started learning my way through ASM and several other stuff and participated in more than feedback and ideas.
The SC3D team is formed by me, Carlos Cuchilla as project lead since I have the most knowledge on starcraft, history and such, David Bryans as the lead programmer, Luis Quiros as concept and subsystem developer, Sarah Kunze (yeah a girl!), Chris Gent. Our goal is simple, not simple to do but simple to understand, it is to make starcraft engine with support of 3D graphics.
The point of me saying all of this right now is because our last months of work have come to a bit of success just a few days ago, I was just not able to tell you guys since I am so busy with university. We have succesfully managed to make starcraft "raise" tiny bits of terrain and we're just too excited right now about it.
The re-written exe is able right now to create 3D enviroments via "uni-linear displacement mapping", these are very graphical tehcnical data but basically works like this, we apply a map or "bitmap" if you wish to starcraft terrain and the map tells starcraft to "displace" or "elevate" the terrain. Of course it is far more complex than just that but I had to tell you something you guys understood. As a consequence we had to basically (not me, though
) re write the stacraft engine to make it read all the data we were inputting, such as the map itself and we had to code sub systems to read specific external data for 3D environment specs, this is handled the way stacraft does right now, files in a .mpq. Other features like environment mapping, anti-aliasing and RGB inputs have been added, the last one means that you can get your units without palleting them in a 256 color index. You can just throw in full RGB color based objects.One of the challenges we have right now is to make stacraft read data as "polys" and not just planes, by doing this we would no longer need to use displacement mapping but we could use tri-linear based graphics. Next in the line, however, is bump mapping.
Now let me show you some top secret stuff (yes, it's screenshots time!)
The SC engine is so OBVIOUSLY not built to handle this kind of data, but as I said, basically all it does is apply height to a two dimensional plane making it to produce deformations that seem to be raised terrain and that's exactly what they are.
Some of the things you'll obviously note is that the resources count is missing, we are aware of that and we have no idea what produces it, the graphics actually somewhat mess up in the "game" screen. Sprites, mineral counts (and all), doodad sprites, overlays and everything that is to be shown on the game screen except for the terrain just has a tendency to not appear sometimes.
Another thing you'll note is that the marine is still 2D. That's because we haven't developed the "stacraft has to read polys" system so we can't really have models right now. The units, buildings are still 2D sprites, the terrain however is 3D.
We have also managed to "orbit" in the screen. We can move around in the Z axis as we wish, even to negative values that often just crash and overflow. however we cannot "rotate" around the XY plane. That means you can move up and down to change the perspective view but you cannot rotate. We're hoping to develop the full 3D navigating system next.
You can note how the textures are "stretched out" and this is because of the uni-linear displacement mapping. Everything is raised but not mapped correctly. Think of it as a rubber band or something you can stretch out, if you pull it whatever it has will expand and deform depending on how much you pull it. We're hoping to develop at least a bi-linear stable platform and that'll let us use texture coordinates in 2 planes and not just one.
Since stacraft cannot write this kind of 3D data the perspectives are often messed up. You can also note that since there's basically no environment in stacraft engine the pictues lack a sky or higher boundary that adds that 3D feel of an unlimited explorable world.
the fog of war remains to be 2D, in fact the unit movement is still 2D. Go back to the badlands picture and watch the unit sprite on top of the cliff, you have no idea how hard it was to find the way for the unit to go up there since we were trying to move the units in 2D in a 3D terrain.
That's basically all the material they let me leak right now. We just want to motivate you all with the changes we're making. I myself am proud to be part of yet another revolution that might change the starcraft modding and this time even more radical than the last revolution I did
Any further questions you should have and feed back please tell them so I can answer and take notes. We currently aren't letting anyone try our re-built engine since it's very unstable but I'm hoping that we can move really fast withing a month so you guys can get a nice playable build. Once we get all the systems required the hardest part will be actually making tools for you guys to use this modifications at will.
fuck you all
