Our latest version in A8 runs smoothly with 250+ FPS.
in Unity with 460+
in Ogre3D with 120+

system specifications? Because it could be much faster (and I urge you to make it faster, so that it runs on my crappy notebook)

looks really good though

My Test PC:
Intel 2,5 GHz Quadcore
6GB DD2 Ram
NVidia GeForce 560GTx 1024MB

It runs faster - each engine with an FPS increase of 200, when not using Normalmapping (except A8, cause we don't use it there right now)

The main Problem of combining entities here is the mapping system. From a 256x256 Block Map, we only show 40x30 Entities max, scroll them with the screen and morph them to another one if needed. There will be 32 different tiles for each room, rockway and hero-room. I calculate with a total of 640 different tiles
i think it's not really possible to morph all them into often used block combinations

we will use a replacer system - like my library example.
Build a 5x5 lib, and 25 Blocks will be replaced by 1 Lib model that covers that space, build it up to 8x5, and all blocks+the lib model will be replaced with the bigger one.

Render looks really good, though you should really think of combining the meshes.
(If you want I can sell you my library, or you just ask HeelX)

All those DK clones (saw some in the Unity Forums) make me want to make one, too D:

I think the game mechanic is very appealing to most programmers because the underyling mechanics are pretty easy, because the game world is very constrained and tile-based. Making it pretty is also not so difficult, given a good and talented artist.

Making it fast is a completely different story and requires lots of indian rope tricks. You can't blame Gamestudio or any other engine for not being fast enough for this, because they weren't written for it. Plus, the graphical detail used in the original game (in 1997) was very poor:



My guess is that they dynamically created, changed and skinned the 1) upper, the 2) lower and one or many 3) wall meshes. All other static 3d objects might be baked into one mesh, too and all other entities are animated sprites (sic!).

[EDIT] It also seems that they precalculated the lighting and put it into the vertex data.

I would not blame Gamestudio either.

Oh my, I wish I could do graphics

It's too bad I'm not working with gamestudio anymore since this is really a game that I'd be interested in to develop.

It seems to me that almost all projects either lack artists or programmers.

Not true from what I can tell. I was fixed by this idea some months ago and did some prototypes. I did the straight approach and rendered a map of 256 x 256 tiles without any problems. For some of the tiles I even used 2 entities, namely for the lava and water tiles. The engine was running fine even when showing all 65.000 entities. With fogging enabed and a smaller clip range it ran perfectly fine, i.e. always > 100 fps.

i'm not creating a DK1 clone
i'm working on a remake of the DK2 System, wich is Block/Tile based, uses single models for each Block and single textures instead of a texture map
Problem is the high number of models to be created.
My goal is the DK2 Gameplay + a Overworld Gameplay (wich was planned for DK3) + Graphics near the one in Dungeons (a game by Calypso).

EvilSOB is a great help here, and i'm proud of his help and the Progress of Development we made (he in the mapping system, me in the AI, builder, Modeling and Environment System).

But it's really hard to create it. I think we will think of a combining system and a precalculation method for the mapgrids and lighting.

@Uhrwerk: Since A8 uses an ABT-tree (and since you can turn some knobs to customize it's behaviour), your argument is valid as long as they run no function and especially when you turn off their dynamic flag and such tricks. Have you tried using shaders on the tiles and have you tried to throw in dynamic entities, that move and are animated?

@Espér: It doesn't matter if you create a DK1 or DK2000 clone, the underlying challenges are all the same and it gets even more complex if you want to throw tons of other stuff into it. But, I wish you the best