Filler posts? Who, me?

I've been out all weekend filming (more over the next month - and no spoilers I'm afraid) so I haven't had much time to work on the engine or any other projects - though I have ordered the motor, charger and batteries for the quadrotor. The work I have done towards the game is mostly non-visual (i.e. importing 3D models, materials, user input, and animating colour transitions). I'll be finishing the model and material importer, and designing the renderer properly over the next couple of weeks.

CryTek know how to do lighting.

Once model importing is sorted (not too far off) the next big problem will be lighting. Lighting is easy in certain situations but next to impossible in others. Take the above image as an example (a model of Sponza Atrium, rendered in CryEngine 3). If you consider light as moving only in a straight line, then any covered areas would be completely dark. We know from experience that this is not the case, however - light is bounced off all surfaces, providing light to the covered areas. This is known as radiosity. Games like Half Life 2 pre-compute the radiosity but this method has limitations (most notably, the lighting is only valid when the sun is in one position) so increasingly games have started to handle more advanced lighting in real-time. There's still no "standard model" to speak of as yet - though there are some techniques in common between virtually all games. Advanced illumination like this won't be relevant in an RTS game, but I prefer to plan ahead and think about how features could be incorporated. 

Project size to date: 384mb

Charlie

Progress. Kind of.

I do Linux. It's a thing now.

This is going to be another short post, I'm afraid. Current progress towards the game is shown above - I've set it up to do real-time colour toning of scenes. It's currently just set to turn Red and Green down a lot, and Blue down slightly, and then switch the Red and Blue channels around (fixing the odd colouring issue I was having at the time of last week's post).  It's also rendering to an off-screen buffer at the same time - which means that the in-game content could all be treated in the same way, not just a raw image as shown here.

For anyone interested, the fragment shader code itself is shown. It really isn't that bad, actually. The code that goes with it (feeding it the data points, textures, etc) is horrific at first sight though. Finer-grain control over colours will be possible, when I write some code to handle one-dimensional textures (multiplying by 0.9, 0,7 and 0.6 were really just to test the concept).

The switch to Linux is an interesting one - I had previously done so on my laptop whilst "revising" - but now it's on my desktop, and it's permanent. On the whole I love the OS - everything is free, without any hassle - installing programs is as easy as typing its name, and pressing "Install". Programming is far easier than under Windows - the entire O/S feels more geared towards it. Even advanced changes only require a couple of lines of text. I'll only cave in and install Windows 7 when my craving to play Portal 2 gets too great, or when I discover that there's no fix for a bug I have with it. (The choice to use a Portal-related texture as my test image suggests I'm not going to last too long...) The only real barriers against wide adoption is the lack of apps like Photoshop, After Effects, and a large library of decent games, the perceived increase in complexity (no steeper than Windows - just not what people are used to), and maybe the self-imposed "free software" barriers (again, not a problem to me - technically formats like MP3 and DVD are licensed, and drivers without source code available throw up a "non-free" warning). That's how my experience of it as my "Main O/S" has been, anyway.

Linux is the one responsible for destroying the performance - it's not actually that slow.
Charlie

Shaders Aren't Easy

What I've done there is failed. 

I'm afraid there isn't going to be a substantial post today - I'm just going to show what little progress I've actually made on an "engine" (term used loosely) - my code can import a texture and show it on a slightly-mutated ex-square. Colours are a work in progress, and it's also using a complete hack to set the texture coordinates, but I think it shows that I'm not far off doing "useful" things in OpenGL. It's not going to win any awards for pretty code (once I have model importing, basic illumination and muti-texturing sorted, I can start writing pretty, fast and flexible stuff), but it's all practice and experience in the graphics language.

The texture on the right is the original, the two on the left are various attempts (guesses) at the right colour profile.

I've managed to keep the performance, at least...


"Failure is just delayed success". Is what failures say.
Charlie

5000 FPS. Like a boss.

(Yes, the Physics exam is in 10 hours.)

I didn't manage to hit 9001 FPS, and admittedly it's only 2 polygons, but pretty cool anyway...

I'm just going to leave that here as a little teaser of what's to come. That's actually a very basic shader program - which means it's running on my graphics card and not CPU. In non-technical terms, that means that you get much more speed on modern hardware, and a huge amount of flexibility, at the cost of a bit of complexity. Shaders in modern games control pretty much everything you see, in some way or another - from lighting to the position of objects.

This is only the start, but in the relatively near future, this will become a more full-featured game engine - is anyone interested in helping create a "complete" game, beyond who I've already spoken to? You don't have to be technically minded - there's a huge amount of non-technical work involved in actually creating a decent game - the more hands, the merrier. There may well be a Facebook group in the near future. I have some ideas, as do several other people. RTS/FPS/3PP are all possibilities - it depends on what people would like to do. In fact, some might be useful as miniature test projects, as the code/collaboration improves.

I'm clearly not Chuck Norris
Charlie