Citadel - System Shock Fan Remake

[67cfe8c1e40fcJDoran]

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'.

[67cfe8c1e42f0JosiahJack]

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.

[67cfe8c1e4449icemann]

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

[67cfe8c1e458fJosiahJack]

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.

[67cfe8c1e4671JDoran]

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

[67cfe8c1e4771JustVisiting]

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

[67cfe8c1e4878Shokker]

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?

[67cfe8c1e4eecModdedInstall2]

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! 

[67cfe8c1e5154JosiahJack]

Thanks!  Still going strong too.

Finally seeing the light at the end of the performance tunnel though quite a few systems have been broken along the way so I'm no turning my attention towards those. I'm getting basically double fps of what I had about a year ago so this journey has definitely been worth it I'd say.  I've probably spent as much time optimizing this as making it, heh.  Anyways there's a jank test build if you want to toy with the performance as it stands currently (need free github account to see the download): https://github.com/JosiahJack/Citadel/actions/runs/13147840269

Again, this is in a broken state.  The gloves came off.  Stuff got messy.  But I'm hoping to rapidly get it back to and better than the more working state it was in about 6mo ago (fixed a number of bugs completely unrelated to my rearchitecture upheavals).

[67cfe8c1e5463JosiahJack]

In other news, I've added some more options to improve the overall look to be more in line with my desired vision.  Using compute shaders and voxelization to bounce light around more realistically using cone tracing.  I'm making use of something called SEGI.  It's a bit ancient these days but it works and when used subtly it can be quite effective.  I modified the compute shaders to better handle the gamma color space since it was written originally for linear which imho is way too washed out and not in keeping with the art style I'm going for.  Anyways, it's looking fairly decent I think.  You'll notice the settings option "VXGI Lighting" for turning it on and off.  Feel like it's finally to a point where it looks "correct" at max settings.

I don't recall if last builds had it, but the options has separate tabs now and the graphics tab shows you your current view so you can see immediately the effect your settings changes will have.

I keep telling myself I should share screenshots of my failed performance experiments in a write up.  Not sure if that would be interesting or not?

I've rewritten the Citadel renderer multiple times over the past few months and ended up back basically near where it started, scrapping all my own which all had lackluster or similar performance to Unity's but complexity drawbacks or severe limitations such as needing large amounts of ram.

I think I may have invented a new type of rendering technique using many subrasters, fun side quest but wasn't feasible for my hardware.  It also might just be a technique that is now useless being at the end of the era of "offline" or "interactive" renderers and taking some 300ms per frame or needing 17gb of ram to put it into ~30ms which is still pretty bad (should be noted my gpu is an old GTX970 with one fan not working so maybe on newer gpus my light inhalation renderer would actually work well on).

Maybe at some point my custom whitted raytracing renderer with zero noise will sneak in as an alternative renderer option.  But I don't have the hardware to actually make it viable as an alternative, for me to play it at least, heh.  And I'm at a point where the impetus to try anything, anything at all to improve it, is now gone because I'm really quite happy with the performance level I've reached so any further side quests are a way later thing in the rendering and visuals department.

[67cfe8c1e5570JosiahJack]

Ooh, yikes, the auto build system failed to import the models properly.  Welp.  The build linked above is more broken than what I have working locally. I suppose I'll make some test builds locally for yall later.  Sorry about that.

[67cfe8c1e56d5JosiahJack]

Here we go, these test builds should work.  Also fixed a lot of issues compared to yesterday but still some known bugs with saving and some areas dissappearing due to culling bugs but it's much reduced and more stable.

 

Citadel_v0.99.70_Windows_x64.zip - Google Drive - 396.3MB

Citadel_v0.99.70_Linux_x64.zip - Google Drive - 409.5MB

Citadel_v0.99.70_Mac_x64.zip - Google Drive - 402.6MB

[67cfe8c1e5901JosiahJack]

Some screenshots since it's been a while.

[67cfe8c1e5c83sarge945]

Looks good.

I'll be looking for more projects to work on once I finish my GMDX fork. So maybe I could pop in, see how it's going, and contribute some code.

We need a good playable version of SS1 that isn't scuffed to all hell.

[67cfe8c1e5e3bvoodoo47]

aye, that we do.

[67cfe8c1e60a5sarge945]

aye, that we do.

Just play the remaster bro 

[67cfe8c1e638ela0s]

JosiahJack
On a Macbook Air M2, with 15.2 it says the app is damaged and it can't open it.

[67cfe8c1e65b9ModdedInstall2]

Finally got a chance to start Citadel, and so far it's great! Looks nice and feels pretty good to control, plus the UI feels like it makes all the right changes w/out doing a complete overhaul like SSR did. I seriously applaud all the work you've done here!

I don't have the hardware to actually make it viable as an alternative

If you need help testing anything resource-intensive, I'm fully willing to assist in that department.

[67cfe8c1e66edJosiahJack]

Latest beta version here with numerous fixes but still some known issues: https://github.com/JosiahJack/Citadel/releases/tag/v0.99.8

[67cfe8c1e691eJosiahJack]

la0s
Ahh sadly it seems there is an issue with how Mac handles the StreamingAssets folder.  It needs to be handled in much the same way as my experimental Android build (yes tis a thing) where it uses the persistent data path to the user's library folder instead.  As such none of the mac builds have likely ever worked (or haven't in a long long time).  I think I know how to fix it (I should borrow my Mom's aging macbook at some point though).

[67cfe8c1e6baeJosiahJack]

If you need help testing anything resource-intensive, I'm fully willing to assist in that department.

I'd be curious to see what frame rates you get at max settings (Soft Shadows ON, SSGI on, reflections on, fov cranked to 90 or above, SSAO on) on Alpha Grove (tilde, then type load10 to cheat yourself there if you don't want to play all the way through, loadarsenal6 is recommended too, or loadarsenal9 if you feel empowered).

[67cfe8c1e6ea4ModdedInstall2]

JosiahJackI ran through as much of Alpha Grove as I could, and I think I managed to explore the whole map there. Performance was... how do I put this gently... not ideal. In most sections, I think I got an average of 4-10 FPS, which correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt those are great numbers. My PC also crashed when I tried to quit the game, so fun times.

On the bright side, though, I actually like this interpretation of the Grove art style a lot more than the NDS one! Granted, the remake still looks nice, but this... wow. It's just so lush and colorful. Citadel also just feels satisfying to control - seems like you managed to strike the right balance between the controlled precision of the remake and the fluidity of the original, which is an awesome thing to achieve.

Full test run here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1XD-gGRpsY

[67cfe8c1e703bJosiahJack]

Next release here: https://github.com/JosiahJack/Citadel/releases/tag/v0.99.9

Of course I hadn't looked yet to see your post and recalled I still have one more trick up my sleeve to make the groves more performant so I'll have to squeeze that in when I can after my trip this next week.

[67cfe8c1e7151ModdedInstall2]

Hang on... how am I just now seeing there's a full skybox now?!?