Scooter Mechanics

I spent the last few hours working out the mechanics for my electronic moped project - it should turn out to be fairly practical if I've got my estimations right. The range on about £450 worth of batteries is the limiting factor - about 20-35 miles depending on speed and mechanical efficiency. The problem comes in when you factor in hills - even a mere 5% incline is enough to significantly eat into battery life. Combined with a 1 hour charge time, it should be pretty useful as a commuter or student vehicle though. I still need to wait to hear about sponsorship, funding, and the legal status of my "donor" moped, and look into the process and costs of registering the vehicle for on-road use after it's been rebuilt, but it looks like the project is, at least in theory, possible. Even if it isn't entirely road-legal, 6kW (8hp) in something that weighs around 45kg will be pretty fun for off-road use.

The 3D printer project is not entirely forgotten either - expect to see more on that soon...

I'm also just going to leave this here regarding the quadrotor:

Yours textually
Charlie

Personal statement: Complete!

Since the deadline for submitting my UCAS application is tomorrow, so I hope you can excuse a terrible post. Just to say that I haven't yet got shadow mapping done, but it's not too far off now. The quadrotor theoretically now has spinning blades (fun fact: the tip of the blades move at over 80ms-1), which will be tested fully later today.

Charlie

Speculars: Sorted

Specular lighting is now sorted and working perfectly. I'm also now able to re-build shaders virtually instantly, which means no load-up time for minor changes - which should make shadows much easier to create and debug - more on this next time. The next big hurdle is getting some real game logic running. SSAO and anti-aliasing can wait until there's something playable, with good scene management, and at least vaguely optimised.

Charlie

Kind of Proper Lighting

Back to school tomorrow, already up too late. Ah well. Progress has been made on lighting - apart from shadowing and specular reflection, it's now fully usable. There are a number of speed improvements which still need to be done, but those changes will have no real effect on the image. Rendering speed is still acceptable as-is with the single light I've been using to test, but it can easily be pushed up far faster than it is currently - I'm using the simple but time-consuming approaches for now.

Charlie

Lighting

So, if you can read this I'm on holiday without reliable internet access - so this post will have to suffice. It shows the progress I've made up to the time I started to pack. The light is unfortunately quite glitchy, and doesn't feature shadows, bump mapping or specular highlights.

Very basic multiplicative light.

Gen1:3
Charlie

Sponza Atrium

Here's a simple first-look at the engine. Currently it's showing the base texture and tangent-space surface normals of Sponza, a model used for tests (mainly lighting). The next step is to shift the normals into viewing space (using the transpose of the inverse of the transformation matrix, for reasons I neither understand nor need to), and use them to light the scene. This now works on GL2 (DX9-level) hardware, with ideas to extend to GL3.X (DX10) or GL4 (DX11) and add new features (re-building a high polygon count from a set of smaller points and a map - geometry shader).

Base texture

Tangent-space normals - the light blue colour represents (0.5,0.5,1) as a colour, which works out to (0,0,1) as a vector - the
"up" direction with respect to the surface. I have since fixed the out-of-place stone texture - a bug in the model, not in my code for once!

Still a fair way off actually lighting it - I need a way of quickly working out the distances between points amongst other things. At my current rate that might be done in a few days. Skeletal animation, a game engine, net code and sound system are a while off.

Come next Sunday, I'll be camping and so may not have internet access. If that is the case I'll have a scheduled post prepared. With any luck it'll feature working lighting.
Fuck wasps.
Charlie

Fixed glitches, Minecraft

First things first, I fixed the graphical glitches which were occurring in my last screenshot - the depth buffer hadn't been set up correctly. The renderer can now project and transform objects, and essentially also supports textures. Still to add are normals, displacements, scene manager, skeletal animation, blend shader and lighting - but the heart of the deferred pipeline is now fully functional, which is always nice. In a couple of days I might be able to get a copy running in a web-browser, this post will be edited if I manage.

Redness represents X axis, Green Y-ness, and Blue Z-ness. It's also possible to "fly" around the cube.

Secondly, I started playing Minecraft Classic for a bit, then fell a little in love with the game. I purchased the Beta at about midnight, and have been playing it solidly since. It's absurdly addictive, but also brilliantly simple, and the DRM-free, play-wherever, indie quality of the game makes it all the better. It's also written by one man, in Java and using OpenGL (exactly the same as that ^^).

Minecraft? More like mindcrack?
Charlie