|
The Game and World editor I'm working
on.
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| Sunday, November 15, 2009 |
  Dark Age Version 0.4.869 Released! | 
Posted - 11/15/2009 4:07:03 PM | At last a new release after 6 months.This release contains lots of stuff so I will just post the change log.I have added the first skills to the game.There are 9 skills in total but two of them are not working at the moment.Lock picking is not working as doors can't be locked at the moment.This is will be enabled in the next release.Also detect traps skill is not working as traps are not in the game yet.
Here is the download link
Here is the change log and a few new screenshots from the game :
-Version 0.4.869-
-Added Deheza.
-Added city tower and wall models.
-Added city and dungeon doors that can be opened by left click.
-Added skill training from trainer NPC.
-Added skill interface.
-Added dungeon doors.
-Added shadowmap size to userPrefs.ini file
-Added smooth texture tool to world editor.
-Added shadows too all objects
-Added the reflection of the sun.
-Added a slider control to the world editor that controls cloud density.
-Added sun billboard.
-Added a feature to save user settings made in options to userPrefs.ini file
-Added a progress bar showing enemy attack progress.
-Added an attack delay to NPCs which can be changed from the world editor.
-Added four new terrain textures.
-Added highlighting to targets that are mouse overed.
-Added energy and armor rating to units.
-Removed the interaction panel for animals.
-Fixed a bug in skyplane rendering.
-Fixed armor rating icon and position.
-Fixed enemies attacking through doors in dungeons.
-Fixed GUI items in 16:9 aspect ratio.
-Fixed collision detection in dungeons.Enemies no longer pass through doors when they are not visible.
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| Tuesday, November 3, 2009 |
| Dark Age on new computer and shots of next release | |
Posted - 11/3/2009 12:39:31 AM | After the posts of my new computer it was inevitable to show Dark Age running on the new computer.Before I got my new computer I was working on Dark Age on my crappy laptop(which died 2 the day I bought the new computer) with a geforce 8600m gs graphics card.It had a 128 bit memory interface so it was really fillrate limited.Currently I am drawing the terrain 3 times.First pass is for blending 4 different textures.Then another pass to blend another 4 textures on this.And then a final pass to add the shadows to the terrain.All the models are drawn in one pass with 1 diffuse map and a shadow map texture.So yes I added self shadowing and the entities are also receiving shadows now,not just the terrain.
Currently I have an list written in a private file on my webserver which lists a bunch of tasks that I want to finish for the next release of the game+editor.Once that list is finished I am going to post the game to my site and probably to GameDev and ask for help for character and npc models and animations.Someone named Marius Grafe took the goblin model and animated it and sent it to me without me saying or asking anything.It was a nice surprise and he did a very good job compared to my awful animations.But I couldn't reach Marius again he just disappeared.I emailed him a couple of times but no answer.Anyways maybe I can find someone willing to help.
I am thinking of finishing this post with a couple of screenshots from darkage.One to show the new shadows which has problems of course but not anything terrible.And then some screenshots from the game.Notice the screenshots from the game have very different frames per seconds.This is because in the first one the draw distance is set to maximum and more than 600 models are drawn,even if they are occluded by the terrain(note to self:look into occlusion culling).In the second shot the draw distance is reduced and only 170 models are drawn,also notice the fog closing in.And in the last shot the debug info is closed which adds another 30 or so frames per second.I guess sprite fonts are burning lots of cycles heh :)
Ahh and if you wonder what this place is.It is called Deheza a somewhat larger town located north west of Karatin the starting town.It has a place in the story line and you will have to eventually come here for some of the quests.Thats all from me for now see you in upcoming posts.
Shadows,houses and characters receive shadows to...
shots with different draw distance
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| Building the new computer | |
Posted - 10/26/2009 8:59:07 AM | Here I am sitting infront of an old computer of my brother's refreshing the fedex tracking page waiting for the parts to arrive while everyones going to work or school :) The parts seem to be at the Toronto sort facility right now.They should be here in one hour.I will start assembling and post pictures and update this post as I finish putting it together.I have lots of installing to do and also some games to test.I hope nothing arrives dead so I don't have to deal with returns etc.This will be a fun day.
Edit 1 : Ok I am writing from the new computer after like 10 hours of installing testing and stuff :).Putting everything together took a lot more time than I predicted so I am a bit late.And after installing windows 7 the computer kept crashing and showing corrupted screens.At first I thought it was a fried graphics card but it was working perfect in games.I installed the three case fans on the same powersupply cord maybe that was causing some problems so I moved one of the fans to another cable.And check all connections and tightened everything.After that it didn't crash again and now it running smooth.I will post the pictures I took when I install an ftp client.I played a little WoW and Risen and they both ran perfectly.I also tried the new DX11 benchmark Heaven from Unigine which looks great and kills the GFX card.20 fps in some scenes at 1920x1080 resolution everything crancked up.Pics coming soon.
Edit 2: I made a small overclock to the CPU and its running at 3.0Ghz instead of the 2.66 stock speed.When turboboost kicks in it goes to 3.18 ghz.I ran superpi 32m and it calculated in 12minutes.I also ran 3d mark vantage and got 14k cpu score and 13k gpu score.
Edit 3: Ok here are some of the pictures I took :
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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| Thursday, October 22, 2009 |
| New Computer on the way | |
Posted - 10/22/2009 1:45:09 PM | I bought a new computer today and will probably have it in 1-2 days.
Here are the specs :
Asus P7P55D Socket 1156 Intel P55 Chipset CrossfireX Dual-Channel DDR3 2133*/1600/1333/1066Mhz GigaLAN 8-Ch HD Audio 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 Slots 6x SATA + 1x eSATA 3Gb/s 12x USB 2.0 ATX
Intel Core i5 750 Quad-Core Socket LGA1156, 2.66Ghz, 8MB L3 Cache, 45nm
OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz Platinum Edition Low Voltage 4GB (2x2048MB) Dual
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 SATA 3.0Gb/s 1000GB (1TB) 32MB Cache (I have another 1TB too)
Asus Radeon 5850 1GB 256bit
Cooler Master RC690 MidTower Case
Corsair HX Series CMPSU-750HX 750W ATX EPS12V Power Supply(Has 4x pcie power connectors for crosfire)
Samsung SH-S223L/BEBS SATA Black 22X Lightscribe DVD-Writer OEM
Can't wait to get my hands on it and start playing games :) I also plan to start learning DX11 and slowly make the move from dx9 to dx11.Dark Age will stay in DX9 though.
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| Wednesday, October 14, 2009 |
| Extending Dark Age World Editor with C# | |
Posted - 10/14/2009 8:49:58 PM | I am pretty tired of doing all the GUI work in pure win32 so I wanted to use c# for the world editor.Converting all of it to C# isn't really an option because there is just too much code in it.So I decided to implement new dialogs with C# and run them from the C++ code with shell execute.
For example for an item editor or dialog editor I create a new c# application with one form then I modify this forms properties so that it looks like a popup window.Then I run it from the world editor.The changes I made to the form are as follows :
1-MinimizeBox = false
2-ShowIcon = false
3-ShowInTaskBar = false
4-Topmost = true
These settings make it look like a normal popup inside the editor.The only problem is it can be run multiple times and when the main application closes these popups stay open.I think I can find an elegant way to restrict only one app per world editor and send a close message to the c# apps when the world editor closes.
This will enable me to make much more advanced GUI elements in the world editor and hopefully speed up the progress of it.
Here is a screenshot showing the new c# dialog.The dialog on the top right is the regular win32 one the new one has a listview and a datagrid.
I will use c# apps for things that don't need data from the main application so that I won't have to deal with passing data around.For example the item editor can be done this way.It will read the item data from the disk and modify everything.The world editor is using IDs to add items so it just needs to reload the item list which holds ids and it should be all good 
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| More work on skyplane. | |
Posted - 10/11/2009 8:50:43 PM | I have done more work on my sky plane in Dark Age.Previously I was drawing a sky plane in one pass and combining two textures for clouds and adding a color based on the height of the vertex.This was working nice until I decided to add a sun billboard in.Because the actual sky and clouds are drawn in one pass I couldn't find a way to draw the sun behind the clouds and in front of the sky so I split the sky rendering into two passes.This really simplified the shaders too.
First the sky plane is drawn without any textures just to give the gradient color based on the time of day.After that the sun billboard is drawn and the clouds are drawn over that so that they can occlude the sun.
In order to make the sky gradient brighter around the sun I calculated two rays one of them is the ray that comes from the light position to the camera and the other one is the ray that comes from a vertex of the sky plane to the camera.By comparing these two rays I changed the color of the sky plane.I used the same technique to make a fake lighting for clouds,so clouds that are facing the sun are brighter and clouds that are in front of the sun are darker.
Finally I made the clouds darker based on the density of clouds the clouds don't look as good as they do in a less dense situation.I haven't found a solution for it so I left it as it is.
Here are a couple of screen shots from the world editor and the game showing the new sky and sun:
Cloud density = 0.0f
Cloud density = 1.0f
Cloud density = 2.0f (dont ask why density is between 0.0f- 2.0f :))
Sunset
Moved sun to the other side of the map see how clouds became white.
One more showing clouds changing color based on position.
Well that's it.It's time to work on gameplay again :).There is no end to graphics, they can be always improved so I really have to stop working on it and focus on the game itself.
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| Saturday, September 26, 2009 |
| glBase | |
Posted - 9/26/2009 12:23:07 AM | I made some more work on my little opengl framework.
I was using sourceforge but for some reason its interface is making me want to rip my eyes out so I changed to assembla,but assembla doesn't have any kind of stats and searching other projects is totally fail.I might try out codeplex as it has a better interface then sourceforge and some kind of stat system.It wasn't supporting SVN a few years ago but I guess it is now.
Here is the link to the assembla page it will probably change soon : glBase
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| Monday, September 21, 2009 |
| New Monitor | |
Posted - 9/21/2009 9:19:30 AM | Yay! I got a new monitor.No computer yet so I plugged it to the laptop and doing my coding work on it.It is pretty nice here is a picture :
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| Thursday, September 17, 2009 |
| What's going on? | |
Posted - 9/17/2009 9:53:06 AM | So here is a short summary of what's going on.
We are still staying with my brother but we will soon move to a small apartment in downtown Toronto which is very close to Art Gallery of Ontario.My wife is working very close to the Art Gallery so we won't spend time and tons of money(greedy TTC) on transportation.
As for me I have started as an intern game programmer in a game studio,again in downtown Toronto it is a 15 min walk from the apartment.So far it is a great experience,we are working on a MMO using a third party engine and most of the work is done in python but I get to play around with the shaders and stuff too.The work environment and people are great and I'm enjoying every second of it.Hopefully after finishing my internship I will find a game programming job which pays so I don't have to ask my wife for money :P
I added a couple of pictures I took in and around Toronto(Island,Highpark etc) to my facebook page,here is the link.
Photos
I will also be building a new computer once we get to our own place.I'm considering getting a Core i5 and a ~150$ gfx card until DX11 cards become widely available then I can upgrade to another card.Probably a geforce 300 or a ati 5000 depending on which is better on price/performance.
That's it for now.
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