Objective: To design and write a first person shooter engine for the XNA that utilizes advanced shaders, shadows, and poly-based collision detection and to meet or exceed the capabilities of the engine used in "Halo"
Website: [here]
Time Frame: 4-5 Months (Expected completion in late April to early May, 2007)
Description: The Chaos First Person Shooter Game Engine for the XNA will allow anyone to create high-quality first person shooters that will rival Halo. Chaos will be a library available for both Windows and the XBox 360. The library will include all the basic, and advanced functions of the game, you just need to add in your custom elements and add the content. Chaos will not only be easy-to-use, but will be extremely fast, utilizing portalled geometries for collision and rendering. Chaos will also include some more advanced rendering elements, including bump maps and shadows. By supporting up to 4 players and having built-in screen division and HUD control, you can easily make your game multiplayer. The Class-based scene objects make it even easier to create your game using built-in object types. No FPS is complete without vehicles, and Chaos would be nothing without them. Four different vehicle types will be included in Chaos: Cars, Planes, Hovercraft and Turrets. Chaos' physics engine will make your dynamic scenery, vehicles, and projectiles even more realistic by giving them believable movements and reactions to other scene elements. With scripted campaign maps, mission objects are a breeze, allowing you to create levels where players must collect items, unlock doors, and defeat enemies before continuing on to the next level. With built-in main-menu and pause screen functions, you're game will play like the top-of-the-market shooters.
Expected features:
Poly-Based Collision detection
Multiplayer support (1-4 players)
Scripted campaign scenarios
Artificially intelligent characters
Basic physics
Vehicles (including cars, planes, turrets, etc)
Weapons
Multiplayer gametypes (CTF, etc)
Real-time Shadows
Higher Level Shaders (including bump/normal maps and detail maps)
Model animation
Background music
Sounds
Effects (sparks, contrails, explosions, etc)
Possible Features:
Online/ Network multiplayer (Windows only unless networking is added to the XBox 360)
Cooperative Campaign
Online cooperative play (would require both of the above)
Vehicle damage (which would only involve having multiple models and switching them based on "health")
Help requested:
Many questions have already been answered including multiple screens and poly-based collision detection (in another post). However, we (or more correctly, I, seeing as I'm the only person making the engine, the rest of my team is working on making game content for the "release" game that Chaos is being designed for) still need help with some things. These include:
Shadows
Using HLSL shader files
How to save settings to a file
How to load settings from a file
How to load XML files to import content (like "tags" in Halo)
Mouse / Keyboard control
How to use WinSock or the C# equivalent (on Windows)
Post Script:
Thank you for reading this, and for those who have helped answer my questions or provided me with sample code, I'll like to add you to my credits list so that you will be properly thanked and your help will be made known to all who use the engine and play my upcoming game.
Updates:
1/5/07 - Found a tutorial for implementing parallax mapping, so we'll probably use that instead of normal maps unless I find a normal map shader file that I can look at and the normal maps are faster...
1/5/07 - Fixed a type-o