Citadel - System Shock Fan Remake

[673fcdb6682f8JDoran]

Dogs are brilliant, and puppies are extra cute too. The comedian John Finnemore (who wrote and starred in my favourite radio program Cabin Fever), did a survey a couple of years back to find what was the voters' favourite thing ever, and the winner was 'dogs'.

[673fcdb6684deJosiahJack]

I've been working on a dynamic tile-based culling system.  Has the benefit of better performance, better RAM usage, and will support Citadel's ultimate and as yet uncreated feature.  It's a long planned thing, involved, but necessary for the things to come.

Also poked at adding support for custom music mods that people could drop in and use to override one or all tracks, but it's not quite ready yet.

Not much progress these days with my current setup and playing with my 3 kids, but still going when I can here and there.

[673fcdb66862bicemann]

The benefits to making your own game engines. Get to add the features you want.

[673fcdb668770JosiahJack]

Dynamic culling seems to be working quite well now.  Already a decent performance improvement.

Ability to load custom music is finally in.  Just need to do the tedious part and link the override system to each dynamic music snippet.  I also plan to have two types of overrides, snippets and looped where the dynamic music system does not do anything if looped is picked and instead it just continuously loops a provided mp3 override that way any custom mix ever made could be dropped in and used as is.  Or any mp3 music really.  Or .wav.  Haven't added support for midi + soundfont yet though but that's planned for later.

[673fcdb668852JDoran]

Brilliant, mate! Any idea of when we might see a release, please?

[673fcdb66893dJustVisiting]

As a bonus performance improvement, perhaps you could use normal mapping for further geometric detail so not as many tris need rendered?

[673fcdb668a4aShokker]

Few questions:

When I turn on the full map, the side buttons disappear?

Do most of the things get "sent" to the left side, ala Audio logs?

How can I make System status permanent on the left side in the 4th button?

Are shadows supposed to tank performance so much, RTX 2060?

[673fcdb669010ModdedInstall2]

As a bonus performance improvement, perhaps you could use normal mapping for further geometric detail so not as many tris need rendered?

So, I posted this ages ago, except I wasn't signed in. I had, at that point in time, read approximately 5 pages of this thread - the first four, and this one. I spent 4 hours over the past day and a half reading this entire thread. I now see that the issue had been raised several times throughout the project's development, but that the goal was always to keep it in real 3D. Disregard it, please.

Also, in my time reading this thread, I have found something astonishing. A few months ago, I beat the NDS remake, which was my first full playthrough of any version of the game. I loved it a lot, but didn't really have a great point of comparison, as I'd played up to Research in pretty much every other official version of the game before I lost all motivation. This is still the case. Anyway, time for my astonishing thing:

In eight and a half years of development, a team of about 40 people with over a million dollars in financial backing restarted their commercial remake project three separate times (switching engines at one point), scrapped countless features that would have added to the immersiveness/been more faithful to the original, and ran out of money before striking a deal with a proper publishing company to keep them going - and failed miserably at updating people who gave them the million dollars they needed in order to start in the first place, releasing an update about every two years AT BEST. The final product, despite being something I found a lot of fun and really enjoyed, is still incredibly unpolished, with glitches such as entity models loading in without any AI on a level where that entity shouldn't even exist (screenshot by me). Over the past decade, one man on these forums has recreated essentially the entire freakin' game almost from scratch, without the source code for a good chunk (and by the time he had the source code, he had done such awesome work that basically the only thing he gained development-wise was an arbitrary and completely optional feature - literally a random game-within-a-game - that NDS scrapped in their remake), and surviving major setbacks such as an engine switch of his own (which only happened because of an issue with the engine he had been using that completely halted development), a rapidly evolving personal life, a time-consuming job involving countless international trips, and the entire world shutting down for a year. Oh, and did I mention he's still going strong? 

I have a personal project of my own I'm trying to see through to completion, but after that, I plan to spend an indeterminate amount of time (probably about two or so months) beating Citadel and trying to see everything it has to offer, after which I'm going to share my full thoughts on the state of the game and how it can improve.

Best of luck on finishing the project!