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Easy FPS Editor v1.6

Simple way to create an old-school First Person Shooter! · By JessicoChan

Ideas and suggestions!

A topic by avpred202 created Feb 12, 2022 Views: 1,283 Replies: 59
Viewing posts 1 to 19

Could you please put a function in the program that makes an object ( Car) drive itself along a given track/route (e.g. avoiding buildings, etc.) as enemies patrol, but with no offensive intent?

When starting a game the menu is on the left side of the screen!Is it possible to place it in the middle of the screen or on the right side?

I could imagine a simple mini 3D model editor inside the program :) With which you could make simpler shapes, like rocks, etc, etc. 

How can the pak3 files of the games be password protected, so that no one can tamper with the game source? Will there be such a feature at some point?

Will there be a 64bit version of this program?

One more question: if I rewrite the game menu in its own language, for example "New game" = " Új játék" or " Settings" = "Beállítások", how can I use accented letters?

Developer (2 edits)

Provide it with a font that supports them. Although I never intended it to be used in languages different than russian and english (historical reasons) and never got to check if it would support any other. However it _should_ be possible since engine uses utf-8 encoding. All you need is a font.

(1 edit)

i tested it with a font that supports accented characters and it somehow turns them into cyrillic characters. as you said, that shouldn't be happening if your text is in utf-8. i think it may be a bug.

i would recommend at some point down the road allowing menu.script to reference an image for buttons instead of only text.

Developer

1) No, it's not a bug. It shows that it works exactly as it supposed to be working prior to english release. I'm not even sure if I'll be able to fix it propery as the code base is very old at this point.

2) Images generally look way worse than TTF font on higher resolutions.

Make a discord so that collaboration is possible? 

Developer

I don't have a discord server because OFPSC in VK is basically my base of operations. There is a chat (though not a very active one). It's not my group but it's an official group of the engine since I first posted it there and been releasing it there ever since.

Check Scripts/Menu.script file, you can change the position of menu letters.

(2 edits)

my feature requests in no particular order:

change the way the new "custom modifiers only on certain floors" feature is implemented. right now i have to make a custom modifier for each floor, and choose which floor it applies to. if instead i could make one modifier, and then choose which floor it applies to in the map editor instead of modifier editor. a similar feature to declare in the map what floor an entity, key, hp, etc is for would be cool too. i realize it's an inherently a "one-floor wolf3d with other floors added later" engine but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way forever.

add support for 2 skies, one cylinder and one plane and/or ability to choose between spherical projection or cylindrical projection for skies. and/or doublesky like in hexen

four or eight directions for enemies and decorations.

option to include more animation frames for weapons, enemies, etc. for smoother animation possibilities

support lightwave-format .obj files in addition to quake md3.

i know some of these are probably big asks, and many would be impossible to do as engine is now cuz they seem to be hardcoded. in general i would like to see more doom, less wolfenstein.

Developer

1) Entities will be placed on the first free floor when you put them on top of multi-layered cell

2) This is really unnecesary. There will be different skybox types later

3) This will overburden current GUI which will be opposite of "keep it as simple as possible" ideology

4) Use FSM

5) No. Just no. OBJ is a horrible format to use.

ok, fair enough. it is your software. 

another feature that i think would be really helpful would be the ability to export custom modifiers to re-use in other games and to share with each other in this community.

Developer

You can just copy your Tiles.dat file 

(3 edits)

oh shit i was looking for where it was stored. i thought it was hardcoded cuz i couldnt find it. that will make it easy to duplicate modifiers for specific floors too. i don't know how i missed that.

while i am here, is there a way to trigger statusbar messages when picking up health, key, etc items? i can do it with active decorations and scripts, but i am wondering if there is another way. if active decorations and scripts is the way to do it, can we see a sound playing script that works in maps instead of just in cutscenes?

Developer

No. Sounds can't be played in maps. Currently. Also, no, you can't set a script for pickups. I was thinking about making custom pickups that will trigger a script though.

Hopefully it will change in the next update (I already refactored cutscenes part, it should be more flexible now to add something like this)

What is FSM?

I'd like to know about that too!

I asked once here, but I didn't get any answer.

Developer (1 edit)

A Finite State Machine is a set of frames and apropriate actions each entity can have. It's basically a way to control enemy, decoration or weapon frames and behaviour to some extend.

In math terms it's a connected graph.

I would like to see an option to turn off the directional shading. I understand that it was made to differentiate textures when lighting is constant, but its not always working for the final image, especially when skybox lighting does not match the level.

Developer

You can disable it through shader editing. 

There also _was_ a checkbox for disabling lighting on textures but it's not working right now

Deleted 1 year ago

as a workaround for pickups, have you tried scaling down with mitchell filter (bicubic) so you get a softer downscale with less pixelization?

Deleted 1 year ago

yeah it will definately go blurry. problem is that if the engine was cutting the size of your key or hp1 in half, it is still downsampled. you can't make something smaller without losing some detail.

one thing i have been playing with is using esrgan AI upscaling, then downscaling the upscaled image. depending on the ai training model that may or may not look good with your handrawn pencil aesthetic. check out n00mkrad's cupscale and his models

Developer

1) You can scale down weapons in the editor. As for keys and HPs, I will add this feature later.

2) You can use cutscenes for that.

3) This was planned but I never got to it

4) It probably gets cut because there are many sounds playing at the same time. There is no such thing as sound length limit.

Ladder or elevator would be good for the floors! :)

Developer

There was no reason to add those. And I really don't see it being necessary right now, as games are still somewhat flat.

games are flat because the engine is flat

I understand that!

However, it would add some extra to get up to the floors. :D

Hello!

I need a script that can make a sprite (enemy or other moving person sprite) perform a specific action instead of attacking.

Like say in Half-life, when the scientist runs to the exploded computer...

I hope you understand what I want! :)

maybe with finite state machine logic, but i doubt it. this engine ain't really made for anything but "shoot stuff, collect keys, open doors, shoot more stuff." that's all you really need, but of course more would be better. as it stands, it's really about creative use of modifiers and simple 3d models to make maps look interesting, less flat, but everything is pretty static. this isn't the answer you were looking for but.... you could try learning another program? i'm still using EFPSE myself, but i am part-time working on getting a similar 2.5d doom-like setup in Coppercube. If I can ever get that into a working state, I will release the coppercube project ccb file for others to use.

and of course you can pray to whatever gods or devils you believe in that JessicoChan stays safe, and that one day they will be able to resume dev on this promising tool. even if it never progresses further, let's still hope that they and their family is safe.

I have all the versions of the same type of editor that I can find on the internet. (rgm, rgm+, etc.) 

In short, I'm a fan of EFPS, otherwise I wouldn't have bought the program in support of its creator! :) 

Of course I understand what you're saying, but I think this editor has outgrown making classic Doom type games. A few extra things wouldn't spoil the editor, like what I wrote, or if it had the possibility to climb ladders or to lift!

I will be curious to see where EFPS develops in the near future, if all goes well. For some reason I'm sticking with the program, although it's a fact that there are much better ones, but it's as simple as 1*1 :D

As for religion, I have my own opinion, just so you understand me : ( I am not an atheist, I believe in God! I'm a Catholic, but I don't practice religion fanatically because I have my doubts, but I have to believe in something.

There are so many horrible things in the world, and to watch God suffer innocent people, that's why I have doubts, because I don't understand why he is not doing anything!)

Coming back, I hope all is well with the developer and his family, I wish them all the best.

We have controversial news in Hungary, lots of fake news, but some of it is real news.

At the moment it is said that Russia is not recruiting soldiers, especially young ones, but we can see from the videos on the internet that it is ... Anyway, all the truth will come out one day.

Hang in there every one! 

EFPSE is certainly the easiest tool to use to make retro fps games. and i agree with the desire to expand on the possibilities of the engine. but it's a one-person operation, and JessicoChan has their own view on what to include and not to include. we will just see how it develops, and work with whatever features are made available. as of now it is about halfway between wolfenstein3d and doom.

i agree that i am a fan of EFPSE, and will continue to use it. i just will also continue to dabble in other engines as well.

Of course, it will be up to JessicoChan to decide how he wants to develop EFPS in the future.

But, first now is the security and the hope that everything will be fine with him!

And that he will soon be able to improve the program, somewhat tailored to our needs. :)

P.S. Sorry if my English is sometimes misunderstood and not precise enough, I use a translator.

Hi!

In a completed game, how can I walk with the player? Because when I press W, it looks like he is running.

Or when I press Shift+W, it runs? I somehow didn't figure that out!

Another thing: are you planning to put water effects in the editor? For example, if I make a "pool" and the player jumps into it, he holds his breath, sinks slowly by gravity, and has to swim a bit.. Etc

Hi!

 Do you see any possibility to use hills or mountains in the editor in the future? 

Developer

Sorry for the late reply.

Probably, but through custom tiles only. I've been thinking on adding slopes as a feature for a long time now.

Would it be possible to make an option for the Decorations to not rotate?

+1 i would like static decoration option as well. perhaps a checkbox on the entity editor with option for along the x axis or along y axis.

obviously this would be a down the road suggestion.

there is so much the dev is working on right now and planning/hoping to implement, so we ought not hold our breath for suggestions :)

Is there any way to make it rain on one map level? I'm thinking of a game set in a thunderstorm, but only on the first map.

no rain

You could make an animated texture that is transparent and import it as a wall tile. Then place the wall on floor 2, floor3, etc. Here is a gif as an example:

The only problem is the wall tile will show the animation on the bottom of the tile. I have tried making a custom modifier and disabling the 'Always cap top and bottom' but this results in a bug where the animation is not played.

i have had issues with using tiles that have transparencies, causing the view on the other side to be weird. this may have been fixed in the newer build, as that was several months ago.

Thank you for your answers!

I hope they will release an update soon, with lots of new features and additional options :)

Engine has particle system, so, in theory, by meddling with game objects, you can create an entity which spawns rain particles in the area around it.

I'll try to find a way to make it rain in my game.

I have one more question:

How could zooming a telescope or scope rifle while aiming be implemented?

Do you know any solution?

where is the particles system? only particles i know of are blood and sparks.

although now that i think of it, it might be possible with finite state machine to create an invisible enemy with a custom blood sprite as rain but it would be super jank.

other thing i was thinking might work is create a shader and activate it by script.

You need to read the old manual. It is written there how to make objects spawn particles.

ok i see what you mean with finite state machine ("automata" in old manual) and particles action on state. i had never noticed that, but i haven't really played much with fsm either. interesting.

Hello!

In the game, if I place a health box or a key on the map and start the game, how can I make the key or ammo sprite not move when I move my camera view? 

Huhh, hope you know what I mean!

:D

With move you mean rotate with the Camera?

Unfortunately my English is a bit bad, so sorry :D

Yes! Don't move, don't let the sprites follow the camera, don't let the sprites rotate, etc. 

Just stand still and don't move. 

I guess this is not possible, but maybe someone knows a solution... 

There's another thing that I think would be cool, if you could make levels with grassy areas, which would fill up say the whole level. Don't just have bushes/sprites of small grasses appear! 

Also, I'd support an "underwater" implementation, where even if you can't swim, you could at least shoot underwater monsters. 

Plus there would be one more thing! 

Doom also has an elevator or lift... 

Please include it in the editor as a feature... I would like to add an elevator to my game! Using a ladder wouldn't be bad either. 

Thank you! :) 

Not possible at the moment. I too hope it will be in a future update.

Developer

You miss the point that EFPSE is an old school shooter creation app, not "have it all in one" editor.

Historically EFPSE has too many limitations and workarounds for some things being impossible or too difficult to be useful to implement.

Wanting more is not a bad thing. But unfortunately what's impossible is impossible.

In the game, when I press the TAB key, the map appears in a small window.

There is no problem with it, but the level display could be improved to show the levels in a bit more detail!

Developer

The map shows the first floor. There was no work done on the map as it was not needed for a while.

I have a question and an idea that I think is not unfeasible!

The question:

What is the actual size of the map? I mean, what is the maximum that can be created in the editor? I guess it can't be as big as the map in Gta San Andreas! :D

The idea:

It will be possible to use a car in the game! For example, if the player picks up a car/motorbike as an object, or as if he picks up a weapon, and as if I choose a weapon, the inside of a car appears, etc. However, then the speed should change, so double the speed for example.

P.S.: I hope to get answers from the developer, and to my previous questions :) 

well.... this ain't gonna happen.

the size of the map is 64 x 64 tiles and 9 floors.

this is not an engine that will likely ever do anything other than retro style first person shooters. somewhere between wolfenstein 3d and doom in terms of gameplay.

if you want to try and make the style of game you are talking about, i suggest you try coppercube. it is probably the easiest 3d engine that's not "specialized" to a specific genre of game. efpse it much easier to use than coppercube, but it is intended to make a very specific type of game.

i am not a developer or involved with the creation of efpse, but the things you are talking about are outside the scope of the engine.

Developer

There is no driving mechanics and there never will be. There is literally no reason to implement that.
And the map size is limited to 64 by 64 by 9. That is a hard limit.

Does anyone know how many 3D obketums can be used in the editor? Are there any limits? For example, a maximum of 10 and then the program freezes when it reaches 11? Has anyone tested this? 

Developer

There is no limit

it would be cool if there is a chronometer for speedrun