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I feel so happy! in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Big news today. The big news around here is that Apple release ITumes for the PC. There was a whole frenzy of music buying. We capped it off with a nice couple games of Halo. I did get some stuff done today. My first success was that I figured out why my framerate in my map editor was crap. My driver was setup to do 6x antialiasing ALL THE TIME. I've been kind of half tracking it down but I couldn't figure it out. It was only when I went to setup for Halo that I figured it

I love excersize... in Software Development JoeUser Forums

I love excersize Today was mainly spent doing more stuff to get the 3d engine distilled. I got the UI mockups for the editor from Brad. That's our version of a design doc. Kinda interesting if you come from a background where there were entire design teams that would write up specs. The cool part of today is playing Halo instead of basketball. Too many people had other events going on so we decided on a solid hour of Halo instead. Anyways, gotta go. Halo time is coming... Even B

Stupid is as stupid does and I'm stupid in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Just a quick update.... I've spent the last couple of days lost in my own stupidity again. I was working on distilling the 3d engine to get it so that we can just plug in content. My guinea pig was the map editor. I hooked it up and everything looked right code wise, but nothing was showing up!!! All the HRESULTs were succeeded. It was jut plain weird. The view was clearing properly, but no data. I couldn't figure it out. I finally got it and it was another one of those si

It's alive in Home & Family JoeUser Forums

If you didn't already know, we're expecting. One of the perils of having wired parents is that this babies every movement will be tracked. It'll be just like the Truman Show. Anyways, check the link for our baby's blog. Joe, Steff and baby

Reply to Weekend at Porkies. in Home & Family JoeUser Forums

Yeah, that should be fine. These pictures were taken 09/30 - 10/02. We were just seeing some of the trees really get color.

Reply to Fog of War Made Easy in Software Development JoeUser Forums

That's really cool. All we have left to do is smooth out those edges :)

Reply to Boot Screen Fun in Software Development JoeUser Forums

That's awesome!!! How about giving us a handle to the DC and a proc so that we can write our own custom boot screens :)

Reply to STUFF YOU HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT in Misc JoeUser Forums

My favorites: Jenny Holzer http://mfx.dasburo.com/art/truisms.html

Ooops. I did it again. in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Ok, I did it again. Flew off the handle without first making sure I was right. I guess that's what happens early in the morning when you're tired. If you've read my last article, you should have noticed that I said that top frames were important when exporting objects. I was wrong. What is important is that your objects pivot points and coordinate system are aligned. Make sure they don't have a wonky 90 rotation on them that you think is your fault. Ok. Here's the updated in

I hate when I do that. in Software Development JoeUser Forums

I'm a funny guy. Sometimes, I can beat my head against the wall for hours and not see a solution to a particular problem. Sometimes I get the answer right away. Sometimes, once I turn off my computer, the answer comes to me (I particularly hate this one). Well, it happened to me tonight. At work, I beat my head against my computer for a couple of hours trying to figure out why our animations weren't working. The code looked right as far as I could tell. The MAX demo and Tuesday ba

Weekend at Porkies. in Home & Family JoeUser Forums

Ever wonder what a programmer does on the weekends? Here's our trip to the Porcupine Mountains (Porkies) in Michigan's UP. By the way, the local food is the Pastie. It's pronounced "paasty" not "pasty" and the place we stayed at is called "Ont'noggin" not "

Reply to Cadillac's Description Of Detroit in History JoeUser Forums

It obviously worked! Nice history lesson.

shhhh....Deep under cover... in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Sorry for the lack of updates. I've been off in a deep dark hole recently. Now I'm coming up for air just to let you know what I'm doing. We're done with the demo so I can devote some real time into getting big parts of the engine together. Right now it's the animation system that needs to be overhauled. We want to animate a bunch of things in the game. Ship idle (hover) Weapon hardpoints Weapon firing animations Partic

Reply to Lit like Britney Spears in Software Development JoeUser Forums

That's cool! You can expect to see more of these words popping up. What's literotica? How about dogging?

Lit like Britney Spears in Software Development JoeUser Forums

So much for planning... I spent today checking in my stuff and fixing bugs. Alex also tried to talk with me about how we're going to do hardpoints on ships, but it always bogged down into a conversation about how he'd like the UI done. Go figure... Another long talk with the group about implementing bezier curves for ship movement. It'll be cool. Do we have enough time though? We'll have to see. I managed to fix the lighting for the ships. Now they're lit

I'm back... in Software Development JoeUser Forums

After a small vacation, I'm back. I decided to get a head start and look at some of the work I'd have to do tomorrow [later today] and I got sucked in. Here are the results. When I left on Friday, the ship effects were made, but they weren't fully integrated. There were some problems integrating them into the code. They worked fine in EffectEdit, but didn't in our code. I definately thought it was a bug with M$. I wrote a little test app to prove it. Turns out that the test app pr

Reply to Single Pass!!! in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Thanks for the input. We'll definately use this information. DXT1 may be a little constraining for us though. The 1 bit alpha doesn't lend well to glow falloff. But I guess I could always just use black instead of an alpha and do an ADD op instead of a MODULATE. We'll experiment with that.

Reply to Single Pass!!! in Software Development JoeUser Forums

The glow is actually just a light map texture. There isn't anything in the geometry telling me where to put lights. That's not to say that we won't do that anyways. Running lights for instance are best done as point sprites and for those, I'd need reference points on the geometry.

I love .NET 2003 in Software Development JoeUser Forums

New Compiler. Today I started to evaluate the new VC.NET 2003 compiler. I like what I see so far. I decided to try because the Big M is making it nicer for DirectX developers to develop on the new compiler. With the DX9 Summer update, they've integrated the current help into the compiler, added a shader debugger that doesn't work with so well with VC6.0, and an integrated D3D debugging environment. That's ni

Reply to No more 2 bit cursors! in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Cool. I'm glad it was just a simple fix. Also, if you use Paint Shop Pro's screen capture, they have an option for leaving the mouse in. Or you could try CTRL+PrintScreen instead of ALT+PrintScreen. I think Alt+PS just captures the window, but CTRL+PS captures the entire desktop which may include the cursor.

Single Pass!!! in Software Development JoeUser Forums

More ship woes and then...the "Ah Ha!" moment. Have you ever read "Illusions" by Richard Bach? I had one of those moments this morning. That was the break through moment for my day. I was putting away my books from yesterday when I decided to open up "Advanced 3D Game Programming". It opened to Pg.438 and my eyes immediately caught D3DTA_SPECULAR. Booom!!! That's the answers to all my problems. That's how you can map to COLOR1 in a verte

Pretty lights in Software Development JoeUser Forums

The first order of business today was to work with Paul to get some cool glow maps in. Here are some mockup examples. Check out the lights (bright yellow parts). When we change the lighting direction, you notice that the lights are still lit. It gives the cool "There's someone inside" look. <img border="0" src="joe/Daily092403/glow.png" width=

Reply to Texture thrashing and you. in Software Development JoeUser Forums

There's been some talk of baking the specular map directly on the diffuse, or just using a separate specular map. That'll take some load off the GPU. I think that if we're going to use a specular map anyways, we should just bake it into the diffuse. It's one texture that way. Using a specular map also means that the specular highlights won't change so we may as well put them into the diffuse.

Fixed Alabama in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Turns out the Alabama problem from yesterday is really a problem with whichever state is first. I had to go through a whole bunch of hoops to find that out though. I even examined the mesh by hand and it looked perfect. Turned out to be errant texture states. I've got to come up with a better way to manage these. Maybe using StateBlocks. I also tweaked all the meshes so that they don't produce errors during load. Now we should have the final visual look of the map. Scott als

Texture thrashing and you. in Software Development JoeUser Forums

This weekend, just days before the demo, we came across a major problem...Texture thrashing!!! Texture thrashing was our single largest contributor to a recent framerate drop. We added 50% more textures on Friday and this pushed our 64 meg video cards over the edge. Instead of the clean 60+ frames, my laptop went down to 1~2 frames. Ouch. After much discovery I found out that our textures are just way to big. They were cool to play with. Unfortunately, as the number