GameDev selfstudy

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2009-06-28T20:12:00.002+02:00

I had to stop working on it for a while because of several house movings and renovations in my family where I had to help, but now I got some time to work on the engine again... I guess.

Clouds, Skydome and Per-Pixel-Fog

2009-05-21T18:14:00.006+02:00

Static shadow maps

2009-05-12T15:49:00.004+02:00

I've implemented shadow maps for the terrain, which are generated at start-up. I'm going to create an external tool for creating those, which reduces the engines initialization time a lot.

It's useless for day/night cycles, it's just too slow, but it's a nice feature for games where the sun position won't change. What's cool too: You can merge the normals into the shadowmap which allows some kind of per-pixel lighting on old GPUs.

Mountain throwing shadow on the terrain (shadowmap + PPL):

Just polished some details

2009-05-03T19:47:00.003+02:00

(Notice: Those models aren't my own work. I found them somewhere in the web, they were declared as FREE. I don't wanna infringe any copyrights. Contact me if it's your intellectual property.)

Frustating frustum. Finally working!

2009-04-28T21:02:00.002+02:00

Phew... frustum culling took a while to get it working properly, even though it's actually not that hard to implement. But now it's finally working!

Frustum culling is a technique that allows culling away objects which lay outside of the the cameras perspective (frustum). For example: I'm now able to put like 200 trees and houses or some other stuff into the scene without any great loss of performance!

High five!

Video

2009-04-08T01:03:00.002+02:00

I said last screenshot, not video ;P

What do you think?

2009-04-07T19:47:00.006+02:00

Last Screenshot for today, but in my opinion it's looking pretty nice so far, though there is soo much left to do and so much bugs to fix.

I guess I have to rewrite the entire scene graph due to its bugs and (bad) architecture.

Polygons have to be sorted in real-time too, I'm not sure how to find a FAST solution. I tried using GL_SAMPLE_ALPHA_TO_COVERAGE_ARB to save coding time, but the result is way too ugly.

Triangle collision detection has to be implemented too. The terrain needs to be patched and there's no LOD algorithm yet...

...I wonder if I ever get finished.

Lighting Problem

2009-04-07T11:50:00.008+02:00

I really don't know why all Objects/Meshes that doesn't use a shader appear to have some lighting problems. As you can see on the picture above, those objects are too dark and have a green undertone, which is definitely not supposed to be! Graaaar!

So I decided to use shaders to light and texture all objects, until I solved the problem:

Another screenie with improved lighting:

Is it me or..

2009-04-06T14:57:00.003+02:00

.. is my coding style not one of the nicest?

2009-04-02T23:50:00.006+02:00

Didn't work on it for a while, but now there's news! I rewrote parts of code to use vertex buffers and index arrays for almost any geometry.
Rendering is super smooth and fast now :)

PLUS: Thanks to some awesome little library I've found, I wrote a model converter for my engine, which is able to convert 3DS, Obj, Collada, Quake, Doom3, HL2 files etc. to the engines own model format.

2009-03-03T16:50:00.002+01:00

JatGoodWin recored a video of my engine, which I want to show you. Though it's a bit older than the current engine's state.

Game Engine - Terrain: Latest pictures

2009-02-24T23:39:00.016+01:00

Almost the same as above with some UGLY tree models using some rudimentary model loader/format. Looking at the bottom right you'll notice the typical alpha sort problem, which once worked but needs to be fixed again... :)

This one shows the smooth sculpting and painting feature.