sioux is not comanche

sioux is a drop-in replacement engine for the 1997 game comanche 3, similar to how gzdoom is an engine for the 1993 game doom (only that gzdoom is complete and working).

back then i loved the game and was blown away by the voxel engine and the cohesive mood introduced into the graphics by the use of palettes.

playing it today i still think it's a great game. but.

• a flight simulator with a camera projection that does not allow to pitch and bank without weird distortions?

• faking similar colour mood by multiplying a consistent palette is nice. today this job is usually done by global illumination.

compile

the build system is a simple makefile with some pkg-config and hardcoded paths:

$ make

run

you'll need the original game cd, in particular the resource.res file (i know, the gold edition has a pff instead but my old cdrom didn't yet).

TODO: describe how to extract the res with the tools in tools/ as well as the external tool pup/ by vladimir stupin.

$ ./sx

you can also pass --fullscreen and play with --lod 1 (1 is highest, 4 is default, higher will be lower detail). if you want to start another mission, try ./sx c1m3.mis or similar. in fact c1m3 is probably the only mission yet which you can play about as intended and actually win :)

For SDL2_mixer to work with fluidsynth you need to set SDL_SOUNDFONTS:

$ export SDL_SOUNDFONTS=<path to soundfonts directory>/<soundfont filename>

controls

keyboard bindings are

or, if you have a dual shock 4 controller:

and you may want to read the helicopter flying handbook.

there's also 'p' for pause, 'f' for opening bay door, 'g' for raise/lower gear.

currently the keymap is hardcoded in src/vid/gl/vid.c and prepared for an english dvorak layout.

known issues

this is just release-early-release-often code for your perusal. it's totally not playable. in particular:

• i implemented some of the trigger-based scripting system but it's by no means complete

• enemy ai makes them not crash immediately (hey, flying helicopters is hard!) but they're really dumb

• loaded the scene and all objects and their textures, but only very few are animated

• did not implement weapons (just infinite amounts of dummy rockets)

TODO items

• shading (currently it's just pretty much displaying the texture colour and normal)

• global illumination, or some close fake

• horizon maps or ray tracing for terrain shadows and radar/stealth

• simulate weather and winds in the terrain (maybe i'll settle for incompressible fluids here)

• more sophisticated flight dynamics (got aerofoil from flight gear, but rotor needs improvement)

• take local winds/turbulence into account when simulating flight dynamics

• port rendering to vulkan so we can use RTX