So here is how far I got. Nothing special I know, but it scales dynamically with the resolution. That makes for less needed background pictures and I don’t even use multiple panels.

Now the windows for Save, Load and Options… yes that is going to be a bitch to do. But who knows, maybe I come up with some brilliant idea.

So yeah… When the menu is done, the next step will be more levels.

[YoutubeDirectAlive]

Well, not a hell lot of informative information there, but still better than nothing and saying every day “nothing new”.

Nothing really exciting new, but I integrated the “Countdown clock” to the “wake-up” chamber. Needs some shadow work still, as it yet appears quite flat on the wall, but that will be changed soon. For now, just giving my life sign that I keep my promise this time to continue to update the blog.

By the way: New code snippet coming up soon.

I am having quite some trouble with media_play, which is the function I use to play sounds in the “dialog” system. Well, not quite a dialog system, but used to display the captions and play the sound files whenever the AI is talking.

My trouble is that the media_play function doesn’t play sounds correctly if you have more than 1 speaker. If you have a Quad Speaker system like me, the sound only comes from the front speakers, yet the two rear speakers keep quiet (or in my case, only play the jingle from the little table radio – Goddamn! ent_playsound works fine with a surround system) which kind of destroys the illusion that you have a voice in your head.

I should also mention, that the “Dialog” System and the “Caption” system are independent from each other, thus I can also use the captions to display what the Turrets may play, or even for some other uses.

Right now, the “Dialog” system reads out “pcap” files which look like this:

:fx:ai_on.ogg

:wait:1

:file:ai_story02b.ogg

Hello, and again welcome to the

:wait:3.4

Tuscture Science Practical Application Testing Facility

:wait:4.7

:pause:

...

:event:evStory01()

:resume:

:wait:1

- voluntary test subject.

There are ultimately 7 “commands” you can use in these PCAP (Portico Captions) files:

• ":file:” – To play the voices, like the one from the AI
• “:pause:” – to pause the sound played by :file:
• “:resume":” – to resume a previously paused sound
• “:wait:” – Wait the indicated number of seconds
• “:fx:” – Play another sound, e.g. for playing a reboot sound.
• “:event:” – Execute a function, to enhance the “adventure”.

Now that were only 6, what about the 7th commandment? That’s the part where the dialog system and the caption system interact: Normal text adds the text to the caption system by the “vGUI_PushCaption” function, much like this:

vGUI_PushCaption(sDialogCurIn, iiDialogDefTexttime);

or

vGUI_PushCaption("This text will display for 500 ticks", 500);

Right now I am working on making the Captions more “smooth”. They already fade out and to white as the time elapses, though the "background box” is still static, and I’d like it to adapt to the text content and smoothly expand or retract depending on the situation.

Right now it looks like this:

I hope you like these small sneak peeks into the portal development. Please leave a comment if you have any questions burning on your fingers or just to chat!

Let’s start with the voice for the yet-unnamed-AI. I have now a definitive WIP voice.
The voice actually should have been female, but my voice actor vanished, so I have to do all the speaking for now. Here’s a little excerpt:

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

As I said in the forums, I had to revamp the entire first level. It turns out to be a bit of a kick into the right direction as the level right now looks better and runs and compiles faster than the first version. Also I learned how to make models in A6 better merge into the environment (at least static models):

Invisible blocks that generate a shadow. It’s an old trick which I never actually ever used, because I never thought that some simple shadows can make models look so much better than the dynamic “cutout” shadows. But it indeed is effective!

Also there are lot’s of different textures (even though you can’t see much of them in the current screenshots) and then even of the same texture different variations and variations in size (from 32×32 up to 512×512) so it is possible to always apply the right texture for the right level of detail in order to get max. FPS.

Here’s a little excerpt from the textures folder for “Chamber 00”:

Last but not least, there is also a lot of code involved and also a lot of shaders. Even though I don’t like shaders like most people know, but sometimes you can avoid it. Nevertheless, knowing that I am not the best friend of shaders and only have a crappy video card, people with older PC’s can be sure that I am doing a lot to make it possible to play Portico even without a top-notch-high-end PC Gaming Rig.

Over the time I will make more posts about Portico, eventually even dedicating posts to the separate systems themselves so you get to know more what is going on behind the curtains of my mysteries.

Oh, and yes. The portals work.