cyclone3d wrote on 2021-04-11, 22:47:Have you taken a look at all the other downloads available at:
https://planetmic.com/fstdp/fstdp01.htm […]
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Have you taken a look at all the other downloads available at:
https://planetmic.com/fstdp/fstdp01.htm
There are a ton of other files besides the ones on page linked to earlier.
Edit: Nevermind. I missed that that you noted that a bit later.
I saw on one page that the source code had apparently been released but the download links didn't work.
Found that somebody uploaded it to github:
https://github.com/SaruwatariKaito/Flight-Sim-Toolkit
Huh - I uploaded one of the earlier fly.exe sourcecode zipfiles (check a few entries back) from my archives. That was from a very old archive dating back to 2001 or so - I remembered compiling it on DJGPP or OpenWatcom "way back then".
Anyways, looks like Saruwatari Kaito has access to a later code release, since it came with the source code for the various GUI tools (except shape.exe, which is the most important one there). If you look at that version of shape.exe, it's a much later version than the retail releases, as it came with the facilities to work with bitmapping textures onto shapes. I played with that version back then but it didn’t really do the trick for me.
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The fly.exe binary inside the P1 folder (it contains the ingredients for a sim but is missing a world.fst to make it a sim) is quite the groundbreaker back then - it’s too bad that it came too late and without much support from Simis to make any inroads into the FST community. That version is V2.00 (Use Alt+T in any fly.exe to access the hidden diagnostics screen that tells you which version you have, followed by the FPS count, objects rendered, polygons/vertexes in scene, and etc), which is the first publicly available fly executable to contain support for palette texture mapping in 800x600x256 - I don’t think it came to us until at least ‘97 or 98, and by that time, both Redfly and Openfly was a thing, and significantly better (but incomplete) things. I did remember playing with something like this back then, but figuring out the rhyme, reason and logic behind the bitmapping was...challenging. Texture mapping requires you to map polygons to a 2D surface, and the vertex order matters - the tool doesn’t do a great job explaining how it works (in fact the help file was not updated), and there’s not a good demo that we can draw experience from.
The Fly engine can also only handle 256 colors in the palette, but if you subtract out some of the “special colors” that are reserved for lighting, explosions, gauges, etc, it’s more like 194 or so, and whatever tools you use will need to dither artwork (PCX v5) within those colors, which doesn’t work well on most art styles (muddy murky Quake colors or something like that). I guess that’s why no one really took up the mantle. It doesn’t look like Simis will give us a 16 bit fly binary, and no one explained how the texturing scheme worked so no one really cared.
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If you want to see what bitmapped FST in 256 colors can potentially look like in a game, pull apart the Absolute Zero demo Simis made - it's actually an FST based demo.
Unzip, go to AZD/GAME and run AZGAME.EXE - it's a rail shooter demo using a forked version of FLY (v1.6FS) on the Ice moon of Europa. Note that for some reason the FST shapes (fsd), FST Texture Interposer (FTI) and the PCX files seem to be at least one version above what shape 2.13 supports, so I don’t think anyone was able to pull apart the art assets in the demo and learn how texture mapping worked with the FST Toolset. It was a bit of a lost opportunity, really.
https://archive.org/download/AbsoluteZero_1020/AZD.ZIP
Since it came out around the dawn of 3D hardware accelerators supporting 16 bit color, it looked a bit passé even back around its early-1996 release...but the simple barren ice planet look did let Simis get away with the palette limits.
Fun fact: you can modify the files in the Absolute Zero demo and turn it into a flight sim using its existing assets and fly v2.0. See world12.txt included on this post - copy the original world.fst to world.bak, download world12.txt from this posting, use it to overwrite the original world.fst, and then grab fly v2.00 from:
https://github.com/SaruwatariKaito/Flight-Sim … gine/P1/FLY.EXE
And just launch it via fly.exe -v
Fly around, see the colonies and mines of Europa, and see if you can figure out how to edit world.fst so it'll drop you onto the colony bug-hunt at the end of the demo...
(clue: look at the player paths)
Note: if you run it inside DOSBox you might want to throttle the ship down immediately to 30% and engage the speedbrakes, then raise it to 50 and fly around. The web.FMD flight model used in the demo might be a bit buggy on fast machines - my guess is probably some fixed point math issue from modern hardware coupled with game loop timing.
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