Hey all, this is my first demo of what I have been up to over the last 2 months or so!! My project is the Astral 3D Engine, and is based around Q3Radiant which is my level editing tool. The whole demo is about 1MB zip and you can get it at: http://astral3d.webjump.com/a3d.zip See a screenshot of the engine at: http://astral3d.webjump.com/a3d1.jpg The compiler which is not in the download is where most of the interesting stuff takes place, loading .map files, creating lightmaps, vertex arrays etc... The engine currently has a very generic console class, uses multitexuring, loads my files, and does some other useful stuff. Once I have gotten some feedback from you guys and fixed all the bugs, I''ll release the source code and the format specs of my .a3d files. Let me know what you think !!! FatalXC

@sephiroth03: It doesn''t get stuck, it just seems like that because I''m not clearing the Z-Buffer, if you look round you will see the outside of the level.

@Punika: This is more of a tech demo than a game. You will notice the CSG on the brushes, and other things like that which don''t look special but take a lot of time to implement. No there is no form of HSR in the demo at the moment, coming VERY soon... (ie not quite complete).

Can you let me know what you think of the console as I''m probably going to write some form of short tutorial for the OpenGL Game Programming series on it, since Trent is going to be unavailable for the next month or so.

The thing I''m proud of about this is that I can design any level in Q3Radiant and ''play'' it in my engine, it is completely generic. Its fast as well, that map takes ~5 seconds to compile with ~20 lights on my 800MHz Athlon.

I have updated the zip file with a few bug fixes in the console (very obscure) and added support for mouse inversion and zbuffer clearing.

I''m still very interested in feedback on improvements you think I can make to this, bugs you''ve found etc...

Cheers,

FatalXC

ATronic: Yeah I just haven''t got round to putting a scroll down effect on the console, I''ll probably do that tonight. I don''t use OpenGL lighting at all. The whole lot is done with done with blended lightmaps. The lightmap calculations took a while to get looking right, but I think it looks good. The console is just scrolling blended textures, really easy, but quite effective.

It should be quite fast as everything is done with vertex arrays and multitexturing, and is sorted by texture etc... It should be even sweeter when I get round to doing either a PVS set or portal rendering

I will upload the updated exe with a nice console effect in a few hours. How''s that for service !!

Thanks,

FatalXC

Not nice screenshot.

Well, i have to say i'm very impressed, not by your demo , but for what you have acomplished.., you mean you read a text file (.map) made with qradiant, and besides building the lightmaps you also make the csg operations between the planes ?
How do you do that ? You had to build a BSP tree for that, right?
If you already have a BSP tree, shouldn't be very hard for you to get pvs culling working.
You did all of that in 2 months ?
The lightmaps can be tricky, but not has complicated as CSG...,
congratulations man...

Bruno

Edited by - Bruno on July 22, 2001 5:42:59 AM

@Anonymous: Whats wrong with the screenshot ???

@Bruno: Thanks man!!! I started ~two months ago, but I was not new to OpenGL or 3D gfx, I''ve never done anything this big before, though. There are heaps of good tuts on the net about how to do everything my engine demonstrates eg lightmaps, csg, .map file loading, although many features I have been able to do without a tut. And if all else fails, there is always the q3 source code !!

No I do not use BSP trees, because I don''t need to. The brushes are defined by planes, so they must be convex. This means that a BSP tree wouldn''t do anything, it only helps when dealing with concave objects or brushes, like a 3D world for example. Any point that is behind all the brush planes is inside the brush, it is that simple.


Although I''ll grant that nothing in my engine is original , I am hoping the source code can be a real help to people trying to get a grasp on this whole 3D thing. There are many thousands of lines but there are *tons* of comments, and function descriptions, and the code is laid out nicely. Everything you would need to understand what the code is doing. This is what makes it different from all the other stuff on the net, it combines a lot of techniques but isn''t hard to understand. The whole thing is completely OO so adding new stuff is very simple. This is me trying to give something back to the community

The source will be out when I get around to it ...... hopefully within a few days ...

I have just uploaded a new .zip file to the server, and it has the requested scrolling console

Cheers,

FatalXC

Nice egine man, but I have a small problem... I can''t open your console :p (Azerty keyboard, u know :/)
Anyways, I changed my keyboard layout to US and it worked, nice work man.