Book Of Souls



It finally happened...they found a way to raise Hell on Earth.

Large corporations had been in control for many years and secretly working together to create a New World Order. What they didn't know was that there was one behind them all which had it's own agenda,With the promise of wealth and power it was easy to convince everyone...too easy.



The primary goal was time..with control of time would come the control of everything and these people were the tool in finding a way. They worked relentlessly to find the key and eventually they did...time portals...which would open the door to the past and the future.They discovered too late that opening the past would open the way for those who ruled then to return and reclaim their power. They had been banished and forgotten..but they hadn't forgotten us.



Now they are back and the planet is in ruins.



You were with a team who planned to close the portals, this time for good. Separated in a firefight and alone you aren't even sure the rest of them are still alive..you have to find the Book Of Souls. A key which will close all doors and stop them coming through.

No one truly knows if it even exists...but it seems the only option.



Find the portal door and enter the past, destroy the demons and enter the flame to be cleansed of all Evil.



Demons have a gas bag in their stomachs which compresses what they eat into a ball of lava, they fart these out and will throw them at you for an instant kill.

If you hit them in the bag they will explode, try not being too close when this happens or they will take you out along with them.











Build V1.0085. Please be aware that the level will appear to hang on loading, just give it time and it should load up ok



Download removed* Looks like Reloaded encryption isn't very effective.



Lower end machines will probably fail to load the level due to insufficient memory. If it closes out with an image load error this is likely the cause. If this happens change dividetexturesize from 1 to 2 in setup ini, it might not look as good and take even longer to load up but it should let you play it.



After finding the first time I built this level that standalone simply didn't work the same way as test game I have had to build it from scratch again.

Some enemy characters are placeholders and will be replaced as and when I have others to put in.

This would be better built as several different larger levels but for now had to settle for smaller areas built into one single level. I want to add a lot more detail to each area.



It is not intended to be complete in any way, any more than Reloaded is complete and still in Beta.

I haven't paid much attention to music/sounds and such for this as it is more a Graphic example of what I can do with it so far, but I may look to adding more features in future updates. It is what it is for now as I am fed up struggling with it. There are whole host things broken and not working as they should in V1.0085 most of which only came to my attention when put on another comp to play after building standalone.



It will appear to hang at ninety percent loading but give it time and it will eventually happen.



Known Bugs:

I would have wanted more enemies in this but found with this level that if I place any more than already in there the game crashes.

The player after losing lives simply wont die so you will finish this whatever...I have no idea why but maybe I am missing something.

For now the player can take and will find Modern weapons in the past. Not so much a bug as a media limitation at this point.

awesome can't wait to play it. I been wanted to play since the comp. yeah I understand wait you mean about you can't die in the standalone. you would think a reasonable game over would have found it's way to this version by now.



try it twice it get suck at the end of loading.

Hi Michael, I take it it is hanging at end of loading the game, it will do this for some time.

In test game the culprit appears to be 'creating AI Obstacles', I suspect this is down to all the floors and walls in the level.

If you leave it long enough (go make a coffee) it should eventually load. It takes around 8 minutes on my comp and same with a different comp I test on.



I will send it to Lee and see if he can provide any insight into what causes the bottleneck.

It wont load at all for me,...gives me this error every time....

Runtime Error 506 - Could not load image at line 25834
LOAD IMAGE entitybank\\cave\lavacave_D.dds,2117.0.1

@Shadow man, either missing textures, possibly _n or _s maps. or even a memory limit. What's your specs?



If I can narrow it all down I might even get a working demo here



Reloaded is strange it will load and play fine on the comp you build sta

I had a look and your textures are all in there.
My specs,.......Win 7 Ultimate SP1 32 bit, CPU Intel G530 @2.40 GHz dual core, 4GB Ram, NVIDIA GT 610 1GB.

Some were missing normal and spec, it is for sure that build doesn't copy over illumination maps so have to manually copy over for now. The main culprit appears to have been referencing an old shader effect, some of the cave models were made some time ago.

The shader folder appears to have been created with no shader fx file, it would probably run fine with the older shader all the same but I will change it to basic entity fx for now to fix this.



Still, since mostly all the media is same as comp entry you would have thought all this would have been noticed during judging but nothing was pointed out to me.

I think you might want to ask why you didn't notice it yourself. Even if you played the stand-alone level on the same machine you built it on, you would have had the same missing files and hence the same problem.

I wouldn't have posted it up if it had issues I could see Tom

It plays on both my dev comp and another comp which doesn't have Reloaded installed with no errors and both work just fine.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be rude or anything. I thought it might be possible that you built the final version and sent it off without getting a chance to check it. Like maybe it was the final hour and you were rushed. I just can't figure how it would work with the missing files. Very odd.

There was no rush with this one as I completely rebuilt it, maybe I am the one being presumptious as I assume that surely TGC judging would have noticed these things as others seem to now. The media is the same as the comp entry and showed no errors then and still doesn't even though I am now finding there are some which should have shown up a long time ago.



It is as baffling to me as it is to you that it is working my end with this level, if some normal and spec maps are missing you can get the 'black' model issue, I know others haven't been getting anywhere fixing this but for myself copying over the missing textures does work.



Reloaded doesn't copy over illumination maps at all and this also will create the black model, but as I say it all works fine on my end.



I also noticed if I test build with water present in the level characters with transparency have normals flipped in standalone. It is a quirk of Reloaded that if you test level with water and terrain present, you can then move the start marker to a trigger zone, which will start the game with the trigger settings for atmosphere, then save before standalone. If you dont do this when you trigger on terrain and water the water will reflect the wrong atmosphere, but at least all transparent textures look right....go figure.



Perhaps all this jiggery pokery is messing it up for others but as I say it still works fine on a clean machine, only a few months old which doesn't have Reloaded installed.

All very odd and mysterious for sure. I'm hoping we can get 1.009 soon and that it fixes more problems than it introduces.

it work as you said. the game slowdown here and there but it was awesome. I like how the the level and the skybox. this was a very cool game.

Good to hear it worked for you eventually Michael, trigger zones seem to cause a sudden glitch in fps, the back door of the tavern is the main culprit when water and terrain are turned on. This would be expected but not sure why a simple trigger or player checkpoint would do this.



@Shadow man, I believe your system is too low spec to load all the textures involved in this, there are a LOT of custom textures, some fairly large due to the need for those animated shadow maps.. I tried loading it myself on a similar spec machine and had the same problems with image load errors where the texture is obviously present but failing to load up.. so pretty sure it is a memory issue



I have looked closely at the standalone and replaced any shaders with the Reloaded default where appropriate, and made sure all textures are copied over to the build. I will try making a standalone using texture reduction so users with lower specs can play it too. Meantime I would suggest only those with at least a mid range comp try this level out.

I will try it on my machine when I get back from work.



My specs are,



AMD 9370 4.7Ghz (8 core)

GTX 770 2GB

16GB Corsair RAM



I will try it out and report back.



Cheers



Jay.

I finally got this to load on my machine after making some highly technical and sophisticated changes to your
setup ini file,.....................I changed dividetexturesize from 1 to 2,... LOL .

Sadly I could not finish the game as it kept crashing back to desktop all the time, but I did get as far as the
cave tunnels on one play through, and got the uzi, but that was the furthest I got, all other plays crashed
before then,....pity because I was enjoying the atmosphere a lot, but apart from the problems it was pretty
impressive given the state reloaded is in at the moment, and it demonstrates the potential of the engine
well, so keep working on it, I want to play it all the way to the end next time and see what I missed.

Thanks Shadow man, I reckoned the game would have to actually be built using dividetexture to work properly so that's something I learned

Do you have an updated stable version of this yet? I am interested in trying it out, but with all the reported issues I wanted to wait til you had them resolved.

The link in first post is a more recent update Tom, with fixes to all I can see myself or have been informed of, the only issue that remains I can see for now is low spec m/cs still having memory issues, If your comp is mid range or above you should be able to play it now with no problems.

First of all, my computer was state-of-the-art 10 years ago. That said, setting the dividetexturesize from 1 to 2 as Shadow man suggested above did the trick. After a loading time of 1.5 cups of coffee (about 10 minutes) the level was quite playable, and apart from the telltale slowdown when nearing enemies and sluggish game-play while battling them, it actually played fairly smooth - better than I expected. Still, the need for continued performance work is apparent.

I love the story, the level design - reminiscent of Painkiller - worked and looked great. I expected no less from you.

Brian.

I downloaded and gave it a try. Unfortunately, I didn't get very far before it crashed. I walked forward a little ways and noticed there was a strange audio issue so I kind of went forward and back a few times to see what it was and it turned out to be the thunder sound trying to play, but not playing completely unless I moved further forward. Anyway, I decided to walk further forward and it just bombed. I only went about 30-50 feet in game. Bummer because I really wanted to try it. I'll give it one more go and see if it'll work.

No go. As soon as I get to the first corner, it crashes. Something wrong. I'm assuming getting to that point is triggering something to happen that is causing the crash because this time I had it sitting at the beginning for a very long time while I was talking to someone and it didn't crash, but as soon as I walked forward and got to the corner then it bombed.

You could try going into audiobank/atmosphere and deleting thunder.ogg, might give you quick fix. I am traveling to the UK for a few so won't be able to look at this right now.

Well, I've heard the thunder sound play fine after I get past the initial glitch I was talking about in my first report. It's that corner that causes the crash. IS something supposed to trigger when you get past the corner?

There is a trigger zone near to the door for atmosphere where the player appears in the level then as you walk forward a trigger for thunder sound. There are no other triggers around that area. It may even be that the memory issue is affecting even some higher spec computers.

OK. I was able to hear thunder sounds, but only when I was by the corner did it crash so that's a bit odd. Yeah, I have pretty decent PC specs as you can see from my signature so I don't know what it could be. One thing you can do is re-sample all your sounds to a much lower rate and bit depth. I ran into memory issues as well and ended up really cutting down the sampling rate on sounds and it freed up a lot of memory. And it didn't even affect the quality as far as I can tell. I'm sure a sound expert would notice, but I didn't. I also ended up resampling a lot of textures much lower resolution to conserve memory.

Does the download seem a little big? I don't download many games, but 650 mb compressed (2 gb expanded) for a single level seems a bit much. Is that normal?

It is most likely down to texture sizes with the animated sprite shadows etc. All the same most of these are 2048x2048 as I could overlay the shadows onto a diffuse texture and not lose resolution. This is also offset by the fact that only diffuse and normal maps are required, spec map isn't used or included so file sizes for most objects which are animated would be on average 1024x1024 diffuse and 2048x2048 normal with each sprite frame only being 256x256. Some are even smaller.



Older Classic levels would be much the same size using custom media, it is something I have thought about is the increased texture resolutions being advised for Reloaded, which are almost necessary for acceptance of store media.



It also has to be taken into account that most of the ruins part of the level is similar models which share the same texture so no reason there would be a massive amount of textures in use for any scene in the level (not all textures are loaded at any one time in memory). Most games nowadays are coming in at an average of 23-24 GB with some over 60GB. So I guess with spec expectations for many gaming systems this may not seem so excessive.



Take into account this level should be 3-4 separate levels which would re-use many of the textures in any one scene and you get the idea of why it may perhaps seem a large file size for one level, in reality it is not a single level



All the same it will raise it's head in the future when all that store media mounts up in a Reloaded level with all those individual assets and all those increased texture sizes, I am at least able to optimise my own media, but it won't be the same for those who drag and drop without thought for what they putting in.

I did see Lee make mention of looking into why a 5GB level was crashing so he does seem to think large file sizes are acceptable for Reloaded levels.



It would be difficult to estimate an individual level size in a full game as many assets and textures are re-used throughout, which would at least keep final build sizes down.

As always, I'm a bit behind the times.
Just for info, I started a thread in General Chat about file requirements because your demo would not play on my new system until I installed TGC's demo. It would be nice to know what needs to be distributed/installed in order to make these games/demos work on other systems.

Brian.

I was able to play this on a completely new comp without a single TGC product or any other game installed.

This is ridicoulusly cool! Can I upload a video of this to the youtubes and comment on it?
I believe TGC should use this to market reloaded. The sense of artistry and adventure is great



-Wolf

You can do what you wish with it Wolf

Any chance of a little critique on the game,any issues? It will help me to improve it, a commented video would be perfect.



I suppose it could help market the engine which is capable enough as is for those who want to use unique media and know how to go about it, maybe not so much for the ease of use aspect of the software for building games as it is, but I agree it does show what can be done with it even now. At least from a graphic perspective.

Well it keeps crashing back to desktop for me at the same place all the time,.......I get the uzi, then turn back to go the other way through the cave tunnel in the opposite direction and it crashes every time at that point ?.
I can't see anything wrong in game, and up to that point I,m flying along at 40 to 50 fps,.... not bad for my budget comp. Thanks to you for tuning terrain off of course .

As Wolf said,..." This is ridiculously cool! ",....and I agree,......I just wish I could play it to the end,.....but I know you will sort that out,......eventually.

Unfortunately I can't make that video because the game randomly closes whenever I record it.

There is no error-message, it just goes back to desktop. But still: great game!



-Wolf

I enjoyed the game but played at a very low framerate for me and crashed a few times as well for no reason.

I was surprised this was not packed up in vishnu packer or something else as the media is very easy to get hold of and you was the one saying about protecting your media.


best s4real

I thought Reloaded currently had media encryption, how easy was it for you to 'rip' it from the game?



Till I get some sort of confirmation from TGC that encryption is actually present and not easily bypassed, download removed, thanks for pointing this out.



I already know conversion to .dbo is no form of protection for models, but reckoned the encryption of textures at least seemed sound enough.

I'd really like to play this myself. I can't wait until the file is back up again.

What can we expect from rolfy? Of course a very good game design. Keep it up bro.

Just wondering if you're still working on this, and whether later builds of Reloaded/GameGuru are encrypting things sufficiently now..?

I would imagine that TGC would have this all sorted before the Early Access Steam launch..?

I am completely rebuilding Book of Souls, will show some screenshots in a couple of days as I am taking my time with it now

some of the media used previously will make it into this but redoing all the exterior stuff with all new models.

City Docks area, still a lot of detail to add, trying to get a night scene without area's that are too dark.
Needs a lot of lights and illumination maps for lit windows etc but it is coming together, just playing with the scene for now and see what I get.

Wow! That looks fantastic!

I bow to the master. Great stuff as always.

phenomenal work, i take my hat off and say fantastic, still as always inspire me to do better, the best mr motivator this side of the galaxy.

Really nice looking screenshot! It almost has a dream-like look to it.

Very impressive work!

Cheers

Jay.