Mod dead?

[FIGURE-]

Is this mod still being made? From what I've seen it looks awesome! If it's not dead I'm assuming it's taking long with coding and stuff. Anyway, was just wondering about it as it caught my attention.

TIA.

[HarvestWombs]

viewtopic.php?f=82&t=59560

[Adhin]

Yup as black linked not dead just slow, really, really slow. Sadly im a gamer and play lots and lots of games. So besides waiting on stuff, I also have to you know, not get distracted with games.

[prodigypm]

I'm Playing this mod again right now. My opinion is (like it was) that if this mod is dead it will be a big SHAME . Its a masterpeace . (Lil' noobish in terms of difficulty ) But still a thing u gotta try . Love it . Keep Working .
Why u work on to the mod , I'm working my way to baal with my 25 level Templar - Titan , The Tank

[Doub]

So guys any news?

[Necrolis]

So guys any news?

In between being sick and finishing my second degree, I've managed to almost fully rewrite the GFX driver (so better support for higher res'es, better perf, more effects and better UI quality), busy rewriting the parts of UI we don't currently handle (the inv and waypoints) and creating an entirely script driven quest system; apart from fixing bugs like crazy... This was pretty much my past week

I have no clue what Adhin is up to

[Doub]

well guys im willing to help with ideas. just tell me in which part you would like help. if you do

[weapon-x]

So guys any news?

In between being sick and finishing my second degree, I've managed to almost fully rewrite the GFX driver (so better support for higher res'es, better perf, more effects and better UI quality), busy rewriting the parts of UI we don't currently handle (the inv and waypoints) and creating an entirely script driven quest system; apart from fixing bugs like crazy... This was pretty much my past week

I have no clue what Adhin is up to

ummmm... will the more effects and better ui quality be exclusively for Blackened, sir?

or can the community get a slice of this system too?

[Necrolis]

ummmm... will the more effects and better ui quality be exclusively for Blackened, sir?

or can the community get a slice of this system too?

the quality requires better images, which requires some black magic or new code.

So for instance DXT5 provides good compression as an image format with decent quality and is widely support in hardware and by drivers; to be able to use it, you either need a new image drawing function that works with plain textures (what a lib like SDL does when it draws textures in software), or you need to customize the DC6 format so that it becomes a container (which also would be limited by sizes any more, but also wouldn't have frames, directions or offsets any more);

I'm pretty much doing both and then some; but it has a downside; every assert that is used needs to be transcoded:
- all the DCC animations get mapped to special indexed textures, so I can keep memory down and still support palette shifiting, it takes roughly ~2 hours to transcode the entire of D2's assets (DCC, DC6, DT1) to this indexed format on one thread, so either your patch takes a few hours to install or you add ~1GB of size to it (to be fair, I have not optimized the transcoder, nor are the atlases packed correctly, especially DT1's which are wasting a tone of space atm ).
- certain additional things need reworking, mainly palettes, all palettes are now fully global and always loaded (they are basically arrays of 1D textures, at current I support 1024 globally unique palettes, which is easy to expand, just uses more texture memory), each image can have its own palette if you so desire, however, these palettes are only really meant to be used for animations; anything static should be a proper compressed DXTn texture (so UI, Tiles, pretty much every DC6 bar the 3 monster anims, which can be made as the atlas format...), but items are a slight exception to this as they get palshifted (missiles and objects too, as I added support for this in Blackened). this isn't really a big deal for the standard palettes (in fact 99% of things could all be mapped to the units palette without any quality loss, do to using DXTn for the static images, specifically the tilesets), which would pretty much fall away; what it does create an issue for are the special palettes used for PL2 shifts (aka the global palette shifts), these need to become pre-indexed along with monster and item palettes. the other problem is the hardcodes to certain palettes need to be removed (something I didn't for Blackened). It does add some cool new things though, for instance, vanilla can't blend a monster palette and the poison effect, its either one palette or the other (most PL2 palettes are actually global color transitions), but I can actually blend a color with a palette, so you get correct tinting and the like; this is also great for things like text, which can be blended with ANY color, rather than the predefined 22 global palettes (half of which are broken for fonts, as they are made for items).
- why this gets difficult for other mods is not really the new tools or the transcoding, but the fact that my D2gfx replacement needs to hook MANY of the loading functions used by D2, it also changes the internal structures used to draw images; this breaks a lot of plugins especially the res ones which everyone seems to use these days.
- The more effects part also is only accessible via new code, as its basically GLSL shaders, and the ability to specify true colors, not palette indices for things

Basically, if I get this working for Blackened, I might see about making it a plugin, but that makes it a lot more work (ofc, the performance gains alone are cool, I get ~1300 fps in windowed mode with full colored lighting and proper gamma correction, something glide wrapper has never even come close to doing on my system, plus I can actually play in fullscreen mode, something I can't do in vanilla cause I have too much VRAM).

[weapon-x]

Basically, if I get this working for Blackened, I might see about making it a plugin, but that makes it a lot more work (ofc, the performance gains alone are cool, I get ~1300 fps in windowed mode with full colored lighting and proper gamma correction, something glide wrapper has never even come close to doing on my system, plus I can actually play in fullscreen mode, something I can't do in vanilla cause I have too much VRAM).

i thought glide mode is the best...

being a gfx-based fanatic,
it would be ultimately cool to see your super-buffed-gfx system, in-action sir

perhaps in the future we too can experience your masterpiece...

Good Luck and Godspeed !