Project::OSiRiON

If you box-select a number of entities, and you want to move them, you have to drag the active selected entity.
CLicking any other selected (highlighted) entity will deselect the other members in the selection.

Dragging any member of the selection should work.

The camera handling is rather confusing. It would be best to retire the third-person "Turret" view and have a cockpit view and an external, third-person view.

Freelook should still work on both modes, but the camera angle should not be reset when leaving freelook.

TODO

• remove Turret view
• use shift+mousewheel to zoom in/out
• remember freelook angle
• remove 360-degree rotation limitation
• remove control lock (spacebar)
• do not pass ship control events when in a menu

Windows is extremely slow to load compared to other platforms.

$time ./src/osirion +connect +quit

Linux: 3.3 seconds
Windows: 23.7 seconds

This may be related to the binaries being produced via mingw:

http://osdir.com/ml/gnu.mingw.msys/2006-03/msg00024.html

The best solution is to probably use a Visual C++ toolchain for windows binaries.

The following issues appear if you're docked at another player's ship

TODO

- If the host docks a planet or a large base and you launch, you'll spawn inside the planet.
- Space dust isn't rendered if the host moves
- Correct undefinied behaviour if the host gets destroyed, docks should be destroyed as well

- Note: In theory, recursivedocking should work (player A docked at B docked at C),
issues should be resolved accordingly

If multiple patch mesh points are in the same place(like on many windows), certain polygons are lit incorrectly on Intel hardware.

Shot taken from netbook with Intel 945G chipset.

At random, if you use 'give ship' while your ship is moving, you can be trapped in a state where you cannot turn or move in any direction. You are still given the new ship, however, and if you use 'give ship' a few more times, you can recover from the problem.

Leaving this as low-priority since 'give ship' is technically a cheat. Setting this as category 'src' because the cause is unknown.

Symptom: When rotating the ship, cubemap reflections are not rotated in effect, and stay in the default rotation axis.

Since the 'say' chat command is now used to chat in the current zone,
it become useless on dedicated servers because the console does
not have a current system.

There are several ways to solve this:
- Have say behave like shout
- Add an extra parameter to say to indicate the zone to chat in
- Provide a way for the console to set the current zone

If the testmodel window is opened, the current scene is still drawn.

Fixing this would provide quite an optimization.

For an example of this, take a look at the Talon's main guns.

The corrent ui code has default fonts and font size in ui::root().
They have to bo moved to the ui::Palette class and handled like
colors and related settings.

The initial default fonts should be set in the ui::Pallette class.

It might be better to merge ui-style related settings
into a single ui::Stylesheet class and read settings from a .css
file.

The engine needs a way to be able to use a LOD system for performance reasons. I propose a method for this: all brush entities(except worldspawn and misc_model) will have a 'lod' key. The existence of this key in the entity(as in, if it's actually set) tells the engine to enable LOD on the entity. The value for the LOD key would be an integer of 0 through 3. A value of 3 tells the engine to only render the brushes at 75% and above of the detail LOD distance. A value of 2 renders at 50-75%. A value of 1 renders at 25-50%. 0 renders at 0-25% distance. If the key is not set, the brushes will render at all distances(unless set to detail).

This allows two things: Patch meshes get LOD, and LOD gradually degrades with distance.

An alternative would be in patch loading. At model load, bake 4 levels of LOD for the patch meshes into the model, and apply the same rules as above. This may not be desirable because some patch meshes may be required to stay at full LOD for specific reasons.

The only downside to this is that it requires more memory to store the LOD models, but it would cut down on polygon count at render time significantly.

Clean up and homogenize material, light, flare, engine and particle color types and flags.

Those fx can be triggered by engine states (trigger_impulse, trigger_engine, trigger_destroyed, ..)
The color can be set as color_entity, color_entity_second, color_entity_third, color_engine, ...

TODO
- review/refactor: lights, flares, materials, and particles should have the some options for
triggers and colortypes.
The parameter names in .map file classes and .material files should be the same

Having light flares occlude behind objects would allow more detailed flares to be used. The following is a screenshot from Mass Effect, and is the back of the Normandy:
http://www.bioware.com/_commonext/images/me/screenshots/dlc/masseffect_01_1280x760.jpg

If this were tried in Osirion with a regular light entity and a similar flare texture, it would be partially visible from behind surfaces, which is not the desired effect as the light shouldn't be making a flare if it's seen from behind a wall. This is also the reason why most of the flares in Osirion are circular, because a horizontal flare(also known as the 'film-style' flare) is too difficult to get right when it can move in all angles.

In the end, this might actually lower performance a tiny bit because each flare has to be checked if it's behind a surface, but if a flare is completely blocked, it shouldn't render at all which would make up for the loss.

Q3 has several methods of doing this, including a timed fade, real fade, and instant.

Timed fade: when a flare becomes visible, begin rendering the quad and slowly increase its size and alpha from 0 until it reaches the size indicated by the entity. The rate of size increase is based on a simple timer.
Real fade: like timed fade, begin rendering the quad once visible but instead of using a fixed timer, only increase the size and alpha depending on how much of the flare is in view. I believe this is done via the size indicated in the entity, and is based on how much of it at its full size is visible(I'm guessing an invisible quad at max size is used to test this). This method is best because it can be tweaked to allow the flare to overlap the surfaces in front of it by a small amount, making it look very realistic.
Instant: the flare is instantly visible at max size and alpha as soon as the light entity's origin is visible by the camera.

Right now the client keyboard input code is hardwired
to a US-QWERTY layout. It should use the native keyboard
layout of the user.

At the same time, the code should be tested for UTF8.

Fuel System.

Pseudo-dynamic economy support.

Ideas:
- Stations and planets are supplied by NPC convoys
- Prices fluctuate according to availability

http://thoronir.net/osirion/flac_patch.patch

Adds flac support to osirion.

For finer control of the ship, thrust points should be defined. Instead of the ship being pushed from its origin point, thrust entities would define where the force against the ship is coming from. This would allow for more realistic control.

If more than one entity is used, the thrust power is split between them, or defined by percentage specifically with entity keys.

port osi to raspberry pi

I propose a key bind(toggle) to allow the ship to be steered via the mouse in the same method as the joystick: directly steering based on relative mouse position(locking the cursor in the center of the screen).

Fade-out of strobe lights should occur by default, with an optional float fade time and boolean fade spawnflag.

We need this in order to clean up the material drawing(specifically the environment mapping section). This could also possibly enable us to use the skybox cubemap for nice reflection effects.

Allow a player to control (some) weapons on another player's ship,
making him a gunman

The details of this idea still need to be worked out.

Weapons, shields, armour...

TODO

- Shields & armor
- Mining equipment ?
- Misc equipment

DONE

- Weapons

Master server and multiplayer server list.

Add an improved options menu with video, audio, controls and game settings.

TODO
- video settings
- menu to configure game settings
- merge settings menus into a single, tabbed window

DONE
- menu to configure controls
- menu to configure player settings (name, colors, ..)
- menu to configure graphics settings
- menu to configure audio settings

Implement a system where players can send arbitrary signals to each other
(arbitrary, from the point of view of the network protocol). This would be used
to send trade and docking requests, and to replace the silly 'hail' command
with a 'request for private chat'.

In the future this could also be used for other signals, like players declaring
their hostile intent.

It might also be possible to use the signals mechanism
to exchange targetting info.

Support for computer-controlled allies and opponents.

- Better AI control
- Dynamic patrols

To ease the transition to a multitexturing rendering environment, I propose that we fully adopt Quake 3 shader scripting. Currently, we support a simpler version with a single texture stage in mind.

DONE

- Support for material with multiple layers

TODO

- OpenGL multitexture support
- Improve syntax

Exmaple of current implementation:

shader/path/name
{
qer_editorimage path/to/texture
{
map path/to/texture
entity
}
{
map path/to/glow_texture
fullbright
blendfunc blend
}
}

---------------------------------
Quake 3:

shader/path/name
{
qer_editorimage path/to/texture
other_keywords
{
map path/to/texture
}
{
map path/to/texture2
blendfunc ...
}