| Thursday, February 23, 2006 |
  Frigate and station updates | 
Posted - 2/23/2006 11:43:15 AM | Consolidation of the engine continues. I've been fighting against path and files management for a couple of days. That's just no fun, but it now seems to be working as expected. It's now possible to set some aliases to directories in the path of files. For instance:
- $current is the path of the parent file ( for example, when a file is included from another )
- $base is the path to the base directory of the program
- $data is the path to the data folder, that contains models, shaders, textures, etc..
- $cache is the path to a folder that can contain temporary files ( for caching purposes, ie. can be safely deleted at any time without consequence ).
JoeB has finished to UV-map his frigate. There are no textures yet, so i've just made a 256^2 gray one, to see the shaders work on it. Looks pretty cool.
Shawn has added pods to his station ( see screenshot ). For fun, i placed JoeB's frigate in front of the main hangar door.. as expected, it appears as a black dot from the distance. Yeah, that station is freaking huge! Shawn is now working on the station inside ( docking rooms and tunnels ).
| |
| Wednesday, February 15, 2006 |
| Interview, video, new screens.. | |
Posted - 2/15/2006 5:44:08 AM | Moddb.com has finally released the interview. You can find it here:
Link to moddb.com
The new video is here:
Link
In other news, Shawn has made an update to the station and added two large pods. I'll post some screens in a later update.
| |
| Sunday, February 12, 2006 |
| Consolidation, phase 1 | |
Posted - 2/12/2006 9:19:49 AM | Moddb.com hasn't published the interview yet, so to patient a bit, i'm posting 2 new screenshots.
This week i've been working on the consolidation of the engine. I planned to do it for quite a while, but i thought now would be a good time. I'm re-organizing the whole directory architecture, renaming a few classes, recreating the workspace, integrating a new memory allocation library ( nedmalloc ), fixing implicit linking, fixing the plugin management system, adding some documentation to make the engine "usable", etc.. It doesn't sound like this "reorganization" is a lot of work, but with 2000 files to "fix", it really is..
Next week, i'm going to clean the planetary module. There are a few hard-coded parameters and algorithms that need to be improved and made generic.
I'm also going to start working on a small gameplay prototype soon, to test the fighting and controls, all in network.
| |
| Tuesday, February 7, 2006 |
| Interview + upcoming work | |
Posted - 2/7/2006 5:52:29 AM | I've finally completed an interview (with some new pictures, and a video of the space station) for the site moddb.com (they also list standalone games). It should get posted in a couple of hours or days.
In other news, i've added a sun glowing effect and some "dust" particles in space. It doesn't look very good at the moment, but i'll improve the effect later on. The idea is to be able to see how fast you're moving in space when there is no point of reference around you.
The video motion is a bit jerky and there are some slowdowns. This is due to recording in real-time, which puts a lot of stress on the hard drive and CPU. But i've also discovered a massive memory leak, which makes the whole game crash at 2.1 GB of memory usage. In theory, i was not expecting it to go higher than 1 GB, so i'll have to investigate into that.
I noticed some artefacts in the ZBuffer after i modified the setup of the scene. I moved the gas giant away so that it looks more "realistic", and also added a couple of moons. The algorithm tries to split the scene into 3 frustums, with different ZNear/ZFar values. I guess there's a bug in it, because i can sometimes see the atmosphere/clouds fight with the ground.
In the coming week(s), i'm also going to consolidate, clean up and reorganize a few things in the engine. The base is pretty well designed and robust, but some of the recent tests / changes are pretty ugly. And i'm not 100% happy with the directories structure.
| |
| Thursday, February 2, 2006 |
| Dynamic cube map reflections | |
Posted - 2/2/2006 4:59:28 PM | I know that some people will be happy: i'm working on a new video, this time to show off the shaders and effects on the space station. It should be ready sometimes next week.
I've been fixing a few bugs ( the "dark halo" around the planet, especially visible in the ring background ), and i'm reworking the scene setup so that the gas planet is further, and i'll also add a couple of moons.
Most of the work in the past days has been focused on playing with shadow maps, adding some new pipes to the rendering pipeline, and implementing dynamic cube map reflections.
Cube map reflections can be used to do some "mirror" effects, that reflect the environment surrounding an object ( in my case, the space station ). At the moment, the cube map has a resolution of 6x256x256, which is definately a bit low / blurry, but once mixed with all the other shaders, i think it will be pretty unnoticeable.
It's pretty cool to see the stars and all the planets reflected on the station. Makes up for some interesting / confusing point of views. Here's a screenshot, with the other shaders disabled ( only reflections ):
It's interesting to note that the tesselation of the mesh is affecting the reflections quality ( ie. you can see "lines" in the reflections ). The reflection vector is indeed calculated per vertex. If that is noticeable with all effects / shaders, i will probably try to offset it to the pixel shader.
Also, remember that the cube map is regularly updated ( i tried different values, from 10 times per second, up to 1 time per second ) to reflect the environment. If a ship was to pass near the station, you'd see it reflected on the walls.
| |
|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S | | | | 1 | | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | | 13 | 14 | | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | | | | |
OPTIONS
Track this Journal
ARCHIVES
October, 2009
August, 2009
July, 2009
May, 2009
April, 2009
March, 2009
February, 2009
January, 2009
November, 2008
October, 2008
July, 2008
June, 2008
May, 2008
April, 2008
March, 2008
January, 2008
December, 2007
November, 2007
October, 2007
September, 2007
August, 2007
July, 2007
June, 2007
May, 2007
April, 2007
March, 2007
February, 2007
January, 2007
December, 2006
November, 2006
October, 2006
September, 2006
August, 2006
July, 2006
June, 2006
May, 2006
April, 2006
March, 2006
February, 2006
January, 2006
December, 2005
November, 2005
October, 2005
September, 2005
August, 2005
July, 2005
June, 2005
May, 2005
April, 2005
March, 2005
February, 2005
January, 2005
December, 2004
October, 2004
September, 2004
August, 2004
|
