Simplified, triangulated terrain

I've continued to work on the terrain for my lunar-lander-on-a-disc game. The polygons are now simplified, which cuts out a lot of little bits that result from evaluating on a grid. It also lets me dial up the grid resolution so things are smoother where they need to be. After that I dropped in my polygon triangulation code. Right now the terrain clocks in at around 4000 triangles. This is how it looks with edges shown (click to enlarge):



Now I am working on offsetting the polygons by the radius of the rocket, in order to produce new polygons representing the accessible surface (and thus possible landing sites).



The next step is to intersect the new polygons (both with each other and with themselves), which should produce new interior polygons that can be stripped by examining their signed area.

Reading Outcast SFX files

I've been replaying Outcast for the umpteenth time, courtesy of Good Old Games' rerelease and still enjoy it tremendously. (Here are some of my notes about why Outcast is cool.)

In a previous post I outlined how to read the contents of the game's archive files. Here I'll describe how the audio files are stored.

Audio files have .sfx extensions and there are vast numbers of them. They are compressed using the GSM 06.10 cell phone audio compression standard. All the audio files have a 20-byte header followed by a sequence of 33-byte frames of GSM data. Since this is a cell-phone audio standard, each frame can be decoded independently.

All the headers start with the same 12 bytes: 32 54 76 98 01 00 00 00 00 00 80 3F. After this comes two 4-byte little-endian numbers: the number of bytes of data following the header, which should be divisible by 33; and the sample rate (22050 samples per second in the file I'm looking at).

Each 33-byte frame decodes to 160 16-bit samples, so the compressed data rate is around 4.5 KB per second. I used code by Jutta Degener and Carsten Bormann to decode the frames.

Here's a random snip of dialogue from the game (ilott_found_naarn_g_7-9). Ilott has just learned of his brother's death at the hands of Kroax:

I have not had a chance to play with it, but I suspect that they get some of their “alien voice” sound by monkeying with the parameters of the linear predictive coding used to compress the audio, since it is essentially modeling a vocal tract.

Note: Another person requested the command-line tool for converting the SFX files to WAV format. I dusted it off, updated the project files to the latest version of Visual Studio, and put it up on Github: https://github.com/mcneja/sfx2wav. It's just a thin wrapper around the library mentioned above and converts all of the files in a given directory, writing the output files to a specified output directory.

Hole extraction

I've returned to work on my lunar lander program by spending some time on the planet generation code. It now collects closed polygons and then throws out any that have negative area, so there are no longer any inaccessible interior regions:



I lost a fair amount of code in doing this. There is no longer a BSP representation; I'll need to do that in a different way if I end up needing it. There's also not a triangulation yet either, but I have code lying around that I should be able to plug in for that.

The current top priority is coming up with landing targets. I've been trying to think of a good way to identify accessible landing targets on a random terrain like this. Ideally it would be able to find "interesting" places to land.