December 02, 2005
Well, I'm back from Thanksgiving, and starting to get some code written again. I addition to the production & team leader duties, I have been working on Novodex integration.
Some of you expressed interest in the biz side of things, so I'll expand the journal topics a bit & talk about that a…
Some of you expressed interest in the biz side of things, so I'll expand the journal topics a bit & talk about that a…
November 21, 2005
I'm going to see family for Thanksgiving, so no updates until early December, most likely.
I have been doing tons of producer, business and other tasks over the past couple of weeks, but today I wrote a tiny bit of code : I fixed the smoke growing behavior.
As of this morning each puff of smoke was …
I have been doing tons of producer, business and other tasks over the past couple of weeks, but today I wrote a tiny bit of code : I fixed the smoke growing behavior.
As of this morning each puff of smoke was …
November 17, 2005
Things are moving along well, although still mainly on the business/project side.
I have made some fixes and improvements to the level editor lately. One of the options I added recently was the ability to load/save just the triangle & texture portions of the level. This was needed b/c I kept…
I have made some fixes and improvements to the level editor lately. One of the options I added recently was the ability to load/save just the triangle & texture portions of the level. This was needed b/c I kept…
November 11, 2005
Things are moving along, but lately more on the business side of things.
As I posted in the Help Wanted section, we are in the midst of a 3-month demo project, and in need of coding and artwork help.
On the code side, I would like assistance with the GUI and the animation code. Mainly I expect th…
As I posted in the Help Wanted section, we are in the midst of a 3-month demo project, and in need of coding and artwork help.
On the code side, I would like assistance with the GUI and the animation code. Mainly I expect th…
November 06, 2005
I spent some time tonight doing art-related things. I converted a bunch of models, bought some good textures and created a batch
conversion process. The incoming source textures were 1000x1000 jpg files, which I used the nvDXT program to convert to resize them, convert to dds files, create mip-map…
conversion process. The incoming source textures were 1000x1000 jpg files, which I used the nvDXT program to convert to resize them, convert to dds files, create mip-map…
November 04, 2005
Over the last couple of days I ran into a couple of issues related to triangle size. The first issue was with large triangles. To save memory, I used 4-meter tall walls in my Karnathus level. This means that there were 2 4-meter tall triangles making each face of a 1x1 square meter of wall top. …
November 01, 2005
Today I did a bunch of level design work. It's probably the first time I actively made changes to a level based on gameplay, rather than looks, or just random ideas.
First I dropped the wall heights to 4 meters, down from 8. This makes it so the camera rarely has to adjust its height to avoid clip…
First I dropped the wall heights to 4 meters, down from 8. This makes it so the camera rarely has to adjust its height to avoid clip…
October 30, 2005
Dusk at Karnathus
Do the old gods walk these ancient halls?
Or, are they spared disgrace by an age-long slumber?
Do they sense the crumbling of these hallowed walls?
Or the dust-choked fountains encased with umber?
Where twenty virgins once filled the queen's own bath
With steaming mineral waters, and …
Do the old gods walk these ancient halls?
Or, are they spared disgrace by an age-long slumber?
Do they sense the crumbling of these hallowed walls?
Or the dust-choked fountains encased with umber?
Where twenty virgins once filled the queen's own bath
With steaming mineral waters, and …
October 29, 2005
This morning I got death animation working. Took a bit longer than I thought, but now it works. Before, when an entity reached zero health, I would simply take it out of the world, making it disappear.
Effective, but not very satisfying. Now, when a character gets to zero health, I switch to the …
Effective, but not very satisfying. Now, when a character gets to zero health, I switch to the …
October 26, 2005
I fixed a bunch of bugs over the last couple of days. Things are really shaping up. I had to fog the entities again, after
changing their lighting path. I also fixed some issues with the water, including making sure the fog was working properly.
A few more editor fixes as well.
The main fix was to …
October 25, 2005
This morning I added other door options, so now you can have doors that go up, down, east, west, north and south. All doors except for the open-down variety only open 95% so that you can see that there is an open door present, even if the door slides into or behind a wall. The open-down doors go…
October 24, 2005
Tonight I got the doors operating in the game. It still needs some cleanup, but they basically work. A door right now can be any shapes or entity, but mainly I expect to use AABBs as the bounding shapes for mostly rectangular doors. But, you could set up a statue or boulder as a 'door' and the e…
October 21, 2005
Well, I've been re-working the entity lighting system to be more consistent with the rest of the engine. The main focus of this effort has been to make doors look good. As I showed last time, doors cast shadows fine, but they didn't receive them at all.
The entity lighting system was designed prim…
The entity lighting system was designed prim…
October 18, 2005
Doors
Today I've been working on getting Doors into the engine. The main gameplay purpose of doors is to restrict the player from going to certain parts of a level. It's also a nice reward to be able to get through a door once that initially blocked your character from proceeding.
Doors will work l…
Today I've been working on getting Doors into the engine. The main gameplay purpose of doors is to restrict the player from going to certain parts of a level. It's also a nice reward to be able to get through a door once that initially blocked your character from proceeding.
Doors will work l…
October 15, 2005
Light Rebuilding
Yesterday I made some more fixes to the editor, and added the sunlight filter option to the level. This is a
monochrome filter that's modulated with the sunlight static shadow term to represent the sun filtered through clouds,
or a high forest canopy, etc. It can scroll, which give…
Yesterday I made some more fixes to the editor, and added the sunlight filter option to the level. This is a
monochrome filter that's modulated with the sunlight static shadow term to represent the sun filtered through clouds,
or a high forest canopy, etc. It can scroll, which give…
October 13, 2005
Adjustments
I spent today moving the level-specific configuration options from the text configuration file into the level editor itself. It involved changing the level editor saving & loading code, the game saving & loading code, the game rendering & culling code, as well as all of the …
I spent today moving the level-specific configuration options from the text configuration file into the level editor itself. It involved changing the level editor saving & loading code, the game saving & loading code, the game rendering & culling code, as well as all of the …
October 13, 2005
Sound And Fury
Today I added the rest of the lighting parameters to the level editor. Now the editor properly reflects the color, falloff factors, shadow casting and flicker settings of the selected light. You can also modify the settings in order to adjust them for all selected lights.
It used to …
Today I added the rest of the lighting parameters to the level editor. Now the editor properly reflects the color, falloff factors, shadow casting and flicker settings of the selected light. You can also modify the settings in order to adjust them for all selected lights.
It used to …
October 12, 2005
I started on a crypt level yesterday. The Crypt will be one of the few levels that will feature mostly randomized combat and a few items. Since Ancient Galaxy is an RPG, there are times when you want to train up your character, or try out a new weapon or ability, so it's nice to have a place you …
October 10, 2005
Final Fog
Hopefully I'm done with the fog for a while. Recently I fixed the last few particles to fog out correctly. The most challenging was the smoke, which used an unusual blend mode :
srccolor * srccolor + invsrccolor * destcolor
Sort of a combination of brightening & darkening. I made it f…
Hopefully I'm done with the fog for a while. Recently I fixed the last few particles to fog out correctly. The most challenging was the smoke, which used an unusual blend mode :
srccolor * srccolor + invsrccolor * destcolor
Sort of a combination of brightening & darkening. I made it f…
October 08, 2005
Foggy
The other day the fog shading started showing some strange artifacts. I realized that they were due to overlapping geometry. Whenever you are doing blending, any geometry that intersects other geometry will get blended twice, often leading to double darkening or double brightening.
This was e…
The other day the fog shading started showing some strange artifacts. I realized that they were due to overlapping geometry. Whenever you are doing blending, any geometry that intersects other geometry will get blended twice, often leading to double darkening or double brightening.
This was e…
October 06, 2005
Fun With Fog
Fogging used to be so easy. A few years ago, games with very simple shaders could get away with very cheap hardware fog support. Today, many outdoor games can also get away with using the hw fog, or a very simple approach.
An engine with any sort of alpha or multiplicative blending, ho…
Fogging used to be so easy. A few years ago, games with very simple shaders could get away with very cheap hardware fog support. Today, many outdoor games can also get away with using the hw fog, or a very simple approach.
An engine with any sort of alpha or multiplicative blending, ho…
October 05, 2005
Fade Away
Just got back from seeing my folks, and I installed the game on their PC. It ran at 58 fps on a 2.6 ghz, 1gb ram and a gf 6200 128 ( non-turbocache ). It was interesting watching my dad fight with the controls. He's not into games much anymore, so it was instructive to see how someone n…
Just got back from seeing my folks, and I installed the game on their PC. It ran at 58 fps on a 2.6 ghz, 1gb ram and a gf 6200 128 ( non-turbocache ). It was interesting watching my dad fight with the controls. He's not into games much anymore, so it was instructive to see how someone n…
September 28, 2005
Camera Obscura
Spent the last couple of days on the camera & controls. Tonight I added several more text-tweakable camera options, such as the camera's distance behind the player, the min & max camera height, etc. I also made the camera position averaging time-proportional so it would feel…
Spent the last couple of days on the camera & controls. Tonight I added several more text-tweakable camera options, such as the camera's distance behind the player, the min & max camera height, etc. I also made the camera position averaging time-proportional so it would feel…
September 27, 2005
Camera Motion
First of all, thanks to those of you who responded to my Poll in the last update. If you haven't yet, please respond if you get a chance.
Man, changing the camera has such a huge impact on so many things. One thing that I'd been meaning to fix for a long time was the camera sometimes …
First of all, thanks to those of you who responded to my Poll in the last update. If you haven't yet, please respond if you get a chance.
Man, changing the camera has such a huge impact on so many things. One thing that I'd been meaning to fix for a long time was the camera sometimes …
September 26, 2005
Afterglow
I have had a post-processing filter in my engine for a long time, but it wasn't very blurry, even though I was using a 5x5 gaussian kernel. Instead, it acted like more of a saturation boost than a glow or blur.
On Sunday I decided to track down the issue once and for all. Turns out I was …
I have had a post-processing filter in my engine for a long time, but it wasn't very blurry, even though I was using a 5x5 gaussian kernel. Instead, it acted like more of a saturation boost than a glow or blur.
On Sunday I decided to track down the issue once and for all. Turns out I was …
September 25, 2005
Lighting & Culling
I ran NVPerfhud on the engine tonight, because I suspected some frame-rate dips I was seeing were due to poor frustum culling during shadow passes. Turns out I was right.
This showed up in the indoor dungeon level that I created this morning. It has no directional light, but …
I ran NVPerfhud on the engine tonight, because I suspected some frame-rate dips I was seeing were due to poor frustum culling during shadow passes. Turns out I was right.
This showed up in the indoor dungeon level that I created this morning. It has no directional light, but …
September 24, 2005
Indoor / Outdoor
Yesterday I added skybox support to the game engine. It was a little trick to get right, with the semi-deferred shading system I have in place.
The fact that I had a black background around the level was hiding some problems with anti-aliasing, but after I added the skybox they were…
Yesterday I added skybox support to the game engine. It was a little trick to get right, with the semi-deferred shading system I have in place.
The fact that I had a black background around the level was hiding some problems with anti-aliasing, but after I added the skybox they were…
September 23, 2005
Closer And Closer
For the past couple of days we have been experimenting with various camera, cursor and control schemes. The scheme we have been working with for a long time has been a pretty fixed camera that didn't rotate, but followed above your character. A couple of weeks ago I added the abi…
For the past couple of days we have been experimenting with various camera, cursor and control schemes. The scheme we have been working with for a long time has been a pretty fixed camera that didn't rotate, but followed above your character. A couple of weeks ago I added the abi…
September 21, 2005
Needles
The engine is definitely shaping up - now it's to the point where you can make a level, run around & kill enemies, who do a reasonable job of fighting back.
I have been hankering to add some other weapons to the game, so I decided to add a gun that shoots Needles. Basically, it's similar…
The engine is definitely shaping up - now it's to the point where you can make a level, run around & kill enemies, who do a reasonable job of fighting back.
I have been hankering to add some other weapons to the game, so I decided to add a gun that shoots Needles. Basically, it's similar…
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