| Submitted by , posted on 28 January 2003 |

Image Description, by Greetings fellow Flipcoders! It has been a while since my last IOTD was submitted way back in July 2000. Back then I was still playing with 2D gaming. Now I introduce Retribution. It is a Battlezone II style game that I have been creating since the beginning of summer. The features are pretty extensive:

> - A Billboard system for the grass and menu
> - A parameterized particle system for the rain and unit exhaust
> - A mesh manager system for the tree, tall grass, and unit models (All of which I created in 3DS Max - I know they suck!)
> - Geo-mipmap terrain complete with trilinear filtering (geo-morphing) as proposed by the paper by William DeBoar
> - The grass, sky dome, waterfall, particle systems, and bump-mapped pond are all animated
> - Editor allowing positioning and rotation of objects, billboards, particle systems, fogging parameters (color, pixel / vertex, start, end, depth, etc.), FOV, far clipping planes, terrain modifiers including parabolic raise / lower, and individual or group vertex modifications, and full load and save capabilities
> - Plus the usual stuff: pick rays for object selection, view frustum culling, and rudimentary occlusion culling

The terrain uses generated textures by taking into account terrain height, slope, and blending in of what I call a path map. The path map allows for the blending of additional textures that would not normally be generated just by taking height and slope into consideration.
The framerate is pretty pitiful, at only 20fps, but there is not much optimization between switching rendering states and texture stages. It is written using DirectX 8.1 and Visual C++ 6.0 with no MFC!
Please feel free to email me about any comments, suggestions, critiques, etc.
The next phase is to implement enemy AI using autonomous steering behaviors and a parameterized BOID system for flocks of birds and other animals.
Happy coding,
Nick Van Tassell

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