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Blurb
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Airlock is a 3D multiplayer space trade, exploration, combat, and business simulation. It will be an immersive
experience that will allow you to own and pilot any class of space craft, including space stations,
trading cogs, fighters, capital ships and luxury liners. A supply/demand system will be
implemented to drive the persistent universe in persuit of profit. Cooperation between players will be
encouraged through trade, business, cooperative craft operation, and community spirit.
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Introduction - Tech. Demo v1.0
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Welcome to the little universe I am building. Airlock is a space based 3D combat, trade, exploration, and business game.
This release is a technology demo of the work done so far. While the final game will be based on multiplayer, the tech. demo
is single player only. There is little in the way of gameplay. You can trigger various objects controlled by artificial
intelligence to fight you by shooting at them. You can conrol a fighter or a capital ship (Destroyer).
Nominal docking support exists, but leads to nothing as yet. Note that most models don't have textures only because making
them is time consuming, and I'd rather be writing code (I am a programmer, after all). The physics needs a lot of work - I
want to eventually have a Newtonian model. The explosions are no-where near what I want, and the planet is pretty sub-standard.
I gave it a 256*256 texture so it would show up on 3DFx cards (will make options for it in future).
Please feel free to provide feedback to me at astro@tne.net.au
Get the latest news and downloads at the Airlock webpage
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Credits
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My name is Tim Auld. I'm responsible for the existence of this game (design, programming, most of the art), but there are some who have helped me.
Apologies to anyone I have missed.
- Nick Young - Logo and Icon
- Photon - Collision Detection Library
- Valve - Skybox Textures and Sound Effects (Sorry!)
- Redstorm - Explosion textures (Sorry!)
- Tim Beckingham - Testing
- Robyn Whibley - Testing
- Nigel Whibley - Testing
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Key Bindings
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Eventually, you will of course be able to assign your own keys, but for now, the key bindings are as follows.
Note that the spin views and free camera require the use of the mouse for direction, and left and right buttons
to move forward and backward respectively. You can also use right mouse button/drag to rotate objects in the
model gallery.
Flight Control Keys
| Left Arrow/Right Arrow | Roll |
| Up Arrow/Down Arrow | Pitch |
| Plus/Minus | Thrust Control |
| Backspace | Zero Thrust |
| A | Docking Authorisation |
| E | Docking Escape |
| H | Enter/Leave Hyperspace |
Weapon Control Keys
| 1 | Particle Laser |
| 2 | Plasma Laser |
| 3 | Beam Laser |
| Right Control | Fire Current Weapon |
| T | Next Target |
| M | Launch Homing Missiles at Target |
| B | Ion Beam (Destroyer Only) |
Ship View Control Keys
| F1 | Fixed Cockpit |
| F2 | Rear |
| F3 | Left |
| F4 | Right |
| F5 | Virtual Cockpit (Mouse) |
| F6 | Chase Camera |
| F7 | Relative Spin (Mouse) |
| F8 | Fixed Spin (Mouse) |
| F9 | Look-At Camera |
Dock and Turret View Control Keys
| F1 | Fixed Cockpit |
| F2 | Front View |
| F3 | Relative Spin (Mouse) |
| F4 | Fixed Spin (Mouse) |
| V | Focus On Next Turret (Dock Only) |
Game Control Keys
| F12 | Take Screenshot (In-Game and Menu) |
| Left/Right Angle Bracket | Control Focus Previous/Next Object |
| Left/Right Curly Brace | View Focus Previous/Next Object |
| P | Pause/Unpause |
| Keypad Plus/Minus | Increase/Decrease Time Speed |
| Escape | Exit Game (Press Again to Confirm) or Navigate Back in Menu |
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Planned Features
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The goals of the final game are summarised as follows:
- Support for large numbers of players in a persistent world via TCP/IP
- Ownership and operation of any game object including fighters, cargo vessels, space buses, luxury liners, space stations and capital ships
- Cooperation, diplomacy, and conflict between players
- Communities and Corporations simulated to create a dynamic and living universe with real demands
- Simulation of real life - the need to eat and sleep, and mundane living expenses
- Law inforcement and government - break the law and become a fugitive, get a permit to fly a class of ship
- Exploration of and interaction with the interiors of space stations using a portal engine
- Exploration of and interaction with planet surfaces and cities using a terrain engine
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Progress
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The work done so far is summarised in the following list:
- 3D Studio Max model export, and import into game engine
- Rendering of vertex colour blended, flat colour, translucent colour, textured, and alpha textured 3D Studio models
- Directional lighting
- 3D camera movement (cockpit, rear, left, right, external, rotating, free floating)
- Six degrees of freedom using quaternions (no Euler angles!)
- Input via DirectInput (keyboard, mouse and joystick)
- 3D Sound Effects and MP3 music using the fmod sound library
- Particles, Sprites, and Stretched Sprites
- Particle Sources
- Text display
- Skybox and sun (with occlusion bloom)
- Projectiles
- Event passing architecture
- GUI control heirarchy and page stacks
- Space station docking
- Planets and asteroids
- Level of detail (LOD) for objects
- Virtual cockpit
- Specular Lighting
- Environment Mapping
- Hyperspace Tunnel Effect
- Starfield
- Target brackets, target direction indicator, inertial target tracking system
- Steering AI/Guided missiles
- Simple finite state machine AI
- Capital ship mounted laser and missile turrets that lead their target (mounted at any orientation)
- Fast triangle perfect collision detection using Photon's excellent library
- Laser reflection (for a bit of fun, but will make them reflect off particular surfaces)
- Engine trails, flames, and directional glow
- Beam lasers
- Animated lights that are obscured by ray collision tests (photon again)
- Permanent or fading decals caused by projectile or beam impacts
- Debris sparks from explosions
- Setup utility supporting multiple screen resolutions, window/fullscreen, audio settings
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Compatibility
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This is a Windows OpenGL game, currently tested on win98, winME, win2000 and the following video cards:
- Diamond TNT Viper V550
- Diamond TNT2 Viper V770
- Diamond Savage2000 Viper II
- ASUS GeForce2 MX
- MSI GeForce2 MX
- Unknown 3DFx Card
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Valuable Resources
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The following pages have helped me to make this game:
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