Today is a recovery day. I just integrated my last changes to the source code from the weekend. I also made a custom build for Alex so that he can do some texture munging. I decided to put some of the knowledge we learned from the demo into PoliticalMachine. Slow process. I'm doing the graphics by hand :) Here's a screenshot of the newest tinting. <img border="0" src="joe/Daily092203/tint.png" wi
I whole heartedly agree! You can also make 2d games that look like 2d games using a 3d engine. You still get a lot of benefit making your sprites 2d quads in 3d space. But, if you go that route, it's not too hard to make things fully 3d anyways.
Short daily today. I'm tired and I want to go home. To make a long story short, we spent the day tweaking the demo and adding a few things we didn't expect to add including: Added a couple of new ships Added more parallax Added some UI tweaks we didn't expect Fixed the battle sequence More.... Here's a screen just for fun :) <a target="_blank" href
Today was an eventful day. It started out pretty slow, I was doing research on progressive meshes and level of detail issues. When Brad got into the office and ran the demo, a slew of new requests came in. Cari and I are busting through them, but they can't all be done in one day. Here's an update with what I have so far. It's not much different from what we have, but we had to do a lot of low level work to get things proper. <a target="_blank" href="joe/Daily
Red Alert, Battleship in range... Check this out. We hooked up Cari's battle processes to the scene graph and this is the kind of battle we can do. [Note to Brad and the Art Czar: We'll clean this up a bit so don't start freakin'!] This animation shows a colony ship just about to colonize a planet when a battleship comes up from behind and whacks it. Isn't it cool? Kudos to Cari for getting that in. <OBJEC
Glad to hear your excitement. We're really excited too. Yeah, currently the weapons do have lights. They're pretty cool to see zooming by a ship. The explosions will also have a light. At least we think they do. We have some more work to do to tweak them. As far as the ships go, I think Brad wants them to be lit a little bit differently from the rest of the world. We'll make sure they are bright so that they can be seen.
Thanks to Scott, we've got the star halos working right. Check this out. I think we're all set with the demo graphics now. I was notified by Cari that we're leaking memory like a sieve. Time to fix that. No doubt the scene graph isn't being cleaned up properly. Ugh. I'll start looking into optimizations after that. There are few I know I want to do. Support for tempo
Boy, what a productive evening. I spent most of it debugging the darn lighting problem that I had earlier. I finally figured it out. The SceneGraph rendering code was severely broken. Some things were being drawn before others were finished. It was a mess. Anyways, fixed it up and now everything is back to normal. Except. We have serious problems with our lighting scheme. The graphics cards that I play with (including Cari's) can only support up to 8 lights turned on at o
Left-handed or Right-handed. That is the question. Cari and I had a discussion today about the merits of each system. What do you think? I prefer the right handed system. Here's why: It's more natural. All through high school, I've been taught that up is up. All through college, elevation has always been in the positive Z direction. Our modeling software uses a right handed coordinate system. This is a weak argument because the export
Sure. You can add those things to the graph. They're short term objecst so it may be inefficient to keep adding and removing them from the graph. No big deal though it's better their than just lying about in the game loop. Maybe I'll create special short list for these kinds of objects. That'll make the add/remove time quick.
I hope they don't kill me. After the "m_" fiasco, I wonder how much I can push... It's time to use C++ to write object oriented programs. I started looking into implementing the scene graph into our code and was stopped stone cold because of some intersting C++ practices. In order to add the scene graph cleanly, I'd have to rip apart 30% of the project and put it back together again. Not something I want to do for a day project. Instead, I'm going the path of lea
First off, some background. For the final release, and maybe for the demo, we want really cool things out of the graphics engine. A couple of them being: Rings around planets Moons around planets Other things orbiting planets Cheap star halos Swappable ship parts Articulating ship parts (maybe) All good and, for the most part, easy to implement given the right framework. Not so in our case. All th
Wait 'til we get moons, rings, and star halos. Then it'd be reeeaaalllly cooooool.
Woohoo! you're on. Keep em rolling. Screen shots always help too :)
Flyin Hawaiin just had an interesting experience. He bought some music from BuyMusic.com and downloaded it to his machine. He wanted to burn the stuff, but didn't have a burner on his machine. He then tried copying the files to another machine to burn, but it wouldn't let him because he didn't have a license on the other machine or some nonsense. He then tried it on my machine and the same thing happened. Well, thinking he needed the license on the machine with the burner, he re-logged into BuyM
Today is a weird day. I'm getting all of my work done really late after lunch. The morning was spend checking in my code from last night and doing some computer futzing so that I can check in and out directly from my laptop. It's better than copying all my stuff over to the main machine and sorting it out. Cari's done some phenomenal work on the background and nebulae. It looks really cool. So, on to the work: I spent most of the morning/lunch time tracking down a DX9 i
Today's journal is a kind of twisty one. I know I won't work for long stretches today, but rather in short bursts of pure speed. Actually, as I start this little log, I hear the middle school kids heading off. 8:00am. Seems a little early. I don't remember going to school that early. Do you? Anyways, back to the journal. The reason I won't be working for long stretches is that I've got appointments today that break up my day into 3 chunks of time. Some longer than others, but the
That is pretty sweet. If we add the height to the layer, then we have to watch out for the viewing angle. If you want to display the nebula directly on top of a ship, you can't place it directly on top. We'll have to offset it a little bit down for that to work. Don't worry about it now, but watch out for nebula floating off the map.
I must really love my job :) I was planning on spending a quiet evening tonight, just relaxing. Instead, I got sucked into doing work. Go figure. I was just going to spend a little time doing some research on the scorch marks, trying to figure out why they wouldn't work. Turns out it was a one liner thingy in the texture stages and I was scorching like a champ. <img border="0" src="joe/Daily0
Kinda a slow morning actually. I checked in my stuff from last night. Worked with scott to get a better texture for the phaser and explosion. The afternoon picked up a bit. I evaluated a couple of max->.x exporters. The best one I've found so far is the freeware one: Panda DirectX Exporter http://www.pandasoft.demon.co.uk/directxmax4.htm Congratulations to PandaSoft. If you haven't used it, I highly recommend it. Plus it's free whereas PolyTr
tureCoords[1] = D3DXVECTOR2(1.0f, 1.0f); pTextureCoords[2] = D3DXVECTOR2(0.0f, 0.0f); pTextureCoords[3] = D3DXVECTOR2(1.0f, 0.0f); *ppTextureCoords = pTextureCoords; } return S_OK; } Short and sweet. Just the way I like it. Now to expand this class so that we can create thick polylines and thick curves/splines. That'll come later. I think the hardest part of doing the polylines would be getting the mite
We can work on that. I'm just glad that we finally got a handle on all the material and lighting properties so that we can control them. I thought we did that before, but something must have snuck in to muddle the whole situation. We spent about an hour cleaning it up to day so that we have exact control over the lights. I think Cari and I will try to implement a lighting manager so that no sneaky lights can get in and screw up what we have.
I can see it too. Looks like it's working :)
Spent the morning tweaking the exporter a little bit and recovering from the mistakes made yesterday. That darn exporter still isn't working right. Or maybe it's something in MAX. I ran some experiments running a mesh from max to 3ds to milshape and back and that whole process seemed to straighten out my mesh problems. I don't know exactly what in max wonking me up though. It appears that if I separate an object into parts, then export them as frames, there's a funn
Started my morning by getting George to help with joe.joeuser.com. Due to my own user error, I completely screwed up the site and I couldn't even edit the article that screwed it up. Many thanks to George for getting this right. Then, I checked in the my political machine stuff and chatted with Scott about the political machine code. On to the project... Spent a lot of time today trying to get the explosion animations in. Turns out that the mesh file I was using was truncated.
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