Space strategy multiplayer online game.
Link to the client:
Link 1
| Wednesday, October 28, 2009 |
  Theora Video Plugin, refactored | 
Posted - 10/28/2009 3:27:50 AM | I was ill last week so there is nothing to tell something new about the game (the only thing - I've fixed the issue with the strobing lazer effect, it was just a bug  ). So, I'm laying out something that I made a couple of months ago but never mentioned it before.
This is a refactored Theora Video Plugin for Ogre (available for download), which is initially was created and currently supported by Kreso (from Ogre forums) but I completely refactored the library and fixed a number of threading issues with the library. Yet the theora and ogg header parsing code was done well, the stability and rendering smoothness left much to be desired. This job took for me a week of work.
So, to conclude the job, to test high resolution video performance I've quickly made the temporary video.
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| Final visual improvement of the battle screen | 
Posted - 10/19/2009 12:19:46 AM | Final battle screen improvement, all kinds of weapon added, + explosions. Long way of Ogre related bug-fixes is behind (all the job was made for an 4 hours, remained week was spent on Ogre), not all bugs are yet fixed though.
The final update in a mean of visualization of automatic battle. Sounds are yet needed, right meshes for different ships and different lazer/cannon animations. Later, I need to bind all that animations with correspondent ship modules, using Scenario Editor, which, in turn, I have to modify to support these changes. But that's not complicated at all, just building a folder structure and a couple of lines of C++ code.
But what really needs an improvement, to prepare game for an online games/tests by anyone who wishes - a GUI, as I promised earlier. I'll start this week to apply that cute screenshot graphics to the actual game screens. I hope it'll not take long.
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| Thursday, October 8, 2009 |
| Yet another battle screen improvement! | 
Posted - 10/8/2009 8:58:17 PM | Well.. Here it is.
New battle screen view
I've just completed this implementations & video yesterday night and quite happy with a result. In 3D space with such a small efforts you may do beautiful sceneries very fast  .
There are a number of improvements: smooth ships animation, meshes refactored (however, no bump normal mapping yet  ), twitchings in orientation removed (some still exists, though), reflectance, object flyby mode (with 'shift') and a skybox, of course , which gives 60% of visual impact of all the scene.
Of course there is a lot to do - scene utterly misses lazer & cannon rays & explosions. I'm not even mention about right meshes for the ships (actually, there is a different kinds of ships are taking part - carriers, tankers, fighters with battle cruisers). Next - icons (friend/foe) & statistics information about ships.
After that, I may consider battle screen as being done. Gui redesign is upcoming.
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| Tuesday, September 29, 2009 |
| Normals, smooth animation & music | 
Posted - 9/29/2009 1:16:49 AM | Hello everyone!
I'm still fighting with proper lighting in Ogre shaders. I've redone Berserk mesh, by manual silhouette outlining, as a result I've got cleaner normal map, however during render there is a still a bunch of unsightly bugs on it. In spite that World Space Normals gave benefits to avoid any addition calculation in shader related to tangent space & stuff, I've concluded that idea with these normals don't worth it, because:
World space normals need higher texture resolution to get same smooth result - but that not the worsest, I guess data amount is comparable with providing "normals & tangent vectors information with mesh data + tangent normal map"
On UVW Unwrap borders of the mesh there are visible darken areas, because normal blends with background. It is solvable by disable antialiasing during normal map rendering, however light fracture is visible anyway in place where UVW was unwrapped. As an example, let's consider ring as a mesh. When you're unwrapping continuous, looped 3d ring surface to non-wrapped 2d surface, there must be a cut somewhere, so along this cut you'll see fracture during rendering, because normals, which was naturally blended on 3d mesh, can't be blended anymore because they're located on the opposite borders of the texture. This issue can be solved in some particular situations by using 2d texture wrapping (for example, I still believe that for continuous mappings, like Spherical mapping, it'll work flawlessly), but generally for complicated unwrapped mesh this is not possible. Tangent space normal maps almost lacks this problem (or the effect is neglible), because they're representing just a deviation from regular 'normal map'.
On World Space Normal map you simply can't draw additional noise, make corrections in Photoshop.
I'm tired to cope with a number of issues & bugs in export software, relating World Space Normal maps. I guess it happens due to infrequent usage of this kind of maps.
Anyway, normal maps issue is solvable. I started to make smooth track approximation by having only 3d points & orientation in point. I was trying to use OgreQuaternion::Intermediate, OgreQuaternion::Squad API, however it seems nobody really knows how these 2 functions are working coupled. So, after observing some twitching weird rotations with my Berserk's, I've read some documents and found SimpleSpline, RotationalSpline classes, which seems hiding from me quaterion spherical interpolation particulars.
I'll try them today.
And the last, I've had to do this long time ago, but better later then even more later  . Two new wonderful music tracks for Tachyon Wars, generously provided by Jake=]:
Ambient piano track for starmap screen
Ship design screen track
Enjoy
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| Friday, September 18, 2009 |
| Battle screen improved 2 | |
Posted - 9/18/2009 12:56:09 PM | Here, <Link> I've released video with new battle video screen.
Added camera flyby, and corrected lighting effect for the mesh. Next step - lazer/gun tracks & rockets  .
It took me almost a week to work out all the issues with Ogre of wrong light calculation by sampling the normal map  . At final stage, after solving a bunch of very annoying (for example, I was struck that my Boost::Asio network library just broke up) but non interesting stuff, I finally came to the understanding that mesh too, exported to the Ogre, has different axes than it has in 3d editor. Additionally, world space normal map, generated in editor, has editor's axes. And normal map itself was greatly corrupted by my wrong, inexperienced low-poly generation & export  .
Currently I've regenerated low-poly mesh - it's still ugly but at least almost no buggy lighting with normals - I'm hoping for my artist to generate a bunch of low polys of our ship designs with textures - unfortunately, it's a low priority task. And for now, I quite glad with the result. Let's wait for more improvements.
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| Thursday, September 10, 2009 |
| Untitled | 
Posted - 9/10/2009 11:42:44 PM | This is a carrier, which was rendered for the game around a couple of months ago, just I haven't released any results until the client become assembled back again :)
So, now I changed my mind, because release is just delaying due to intensive UI refashion. Client is still downloadable & even playable, however you'll meet some clumsy things in UI at couple of places.
& by the way, this is the Berserk, how it was turned out finally.
We understood, people like red colours.
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| Tuesday, September 8, 2009 |
| GUI | 
Posted - 9/8/2009 12:24:33 AM | In parallel, our artist is doing game UI look, here is the draft
Only bottom buttons is worked out in details for now.
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| Monday, September 7, 2009 |
| Battles in 3D | |
Posted - 9/7/2009 1:35:59 AM | Started to redo the battle screen to the 3D, because battle itself happens in 3D space, so visualization must reflect it.
This is old style battle
And this - new, started just 2 days ago - exported mesh and applied normal&diffuse map texturing with simple pixel shader. Study the Ogre engine possibilities~~
Ships doesn't really fit to the screen - camera setup e t.c. is still TODO (i'm going to do camera flyby) and the light is rotating around some axis - to show that models are in fact 3d & to ensure that render works.
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