Quick update on stuff

Volumetric stencil shadows in C++ (openGL + SDL)

Finally returning to android coding after a large break from it...

I moved house and didn't have the internet for a while so I ended up doing some C++ coding... Nothing amazing, but I did learn real time volumetric shadows through opengl (which I can't currently use in Android... But maybe I can when I FINALLY shift over to OpenGL ES 2.0).



I also finally have a elipsoid -> polygon & elipsoid -> elipsoid collision library up and coded (In C++... but will convert to Android after my current project).

If anyone else is finding a pain to get their head around 3d collisions, you can get the paper I learned from here:  collision.pdf . It's very useful... though you'll have to add to it and rewrite some of it if you want it to be used for something specific (like a game engine). My advice is to add an "isStuck" variable and to save a safe location to jump back to if the elipsoid is ever "stuck". I also think there is a point where the tutorial might set the distance from intersection point to Zero... Which can cause a division by zero... But it's not a big thing... In the CollideWithWorld function, there is a point where is checks if the "collision Package"'s "nearest Distance" is equal or lower then "very Close Distance", I just changed the ">=" to ">" from what I remember.

I recently got a message from someone asking if I could give them the code I used for exporting 3d models from Blender to a custom format (Written in Python) and loading them into an Android game (written in Java) to which I WAS going to write a tutorial about both sides, but I couldn't respond to the persons message because of there privacy settings... But I still might write the tutorial at a later date... Currently my exporter and loader use ASCII which I think may be causing some slow downs when importing them into my Android engine... So I'm currently on a mission to understand binary exporting and loading... I've heard this is faster so I hope this information is correct.

When I have the binary exporter/loading code written I'm going to write a tutorial on both ASCII and binary custom 3d models which will include all the source code and explanations.

Started Android games development

Late last year I purchased an Android phone (just an Optimus p500),
I purchased the phone because my last phone (a cheap thing I've had
for quite a few years); died... I figured if I got an Android phone I
could teach myself how to code for it.

Not coming from a Java background made it a bit confusing at first...
Not really the Java part... but I eventually got it... Multithreading was
a bit confusing for me... but I eventually got that too...

I started with a simple "touch the smiley faces to make them pop"-app,
but then moved onto OpenGL ES 1.1... Being the impatient kinda guy
that I am... I decided to port my flash gFPS engine to android.

Unfortunately OpenGL ES doesn't like dynamic creation of meshes...
And the entire map was drawn from the ground up for every render in
the flash engine... I originally wanted real-time editing in game (for
rocket blasts and such), but this just wasn't working... So I ended up
dividing the 50x50 maps into 10x10 models to display when on screen.

Over time I added 3d model imports for static and animated meshes
(the animation is just vertex based), dynamic lighting (very simple tile
based lighting) and some other stuff....

If you go to my youTube page you can look through my development
videos... My youTube page

I've been finding it hard to find time to finish this project, but I'm hoping
to write in a Finite State Machine and handle all non-engine code through
it... if it's succesful, I'm hoping it will speed up the development and
if it works well, I'll probably write a short horror adventure using a slightly
modified version of the engine after this project using more complicated
FSM connections.

I'll probably post an *.APK file link for testing reasons soon (my internet
connection is being slow right now).

I'm hoping to be a bit more active from now on, so expect more updates...
Maybe people might actually start reading this so that I'm not just writing
to myself.... YAY! :D

New project: Short tales of a tall man

This is a screenshot of a graphics test I just did... I'm considering using a heavily modified version of my GFPS engine for this new game; "Shorts tales of a tall man"... well... that's not the title of the new project, but I am hoping to make a series of games based around the "slender man mythos" (quite interesting stuff, look it up)... This screenshot was just of me raising the resolutions for entity displays and wall testures... it seems to still run fine. The game itself WILL NOT be a first-person-shooter... It will remain first person, but be more like a first person adventure mixed with a visual novel... No guns will be in the game.

The graphics here are also no representation of the game in its final state.... I'm going to be trying to add 3d model loading to the 3d engine so rooms will be decorated with furnature, outside there will be trees and so on... The basis of the engine will be still tile based, but with some additions to make it seem less "boxes and sprites"... Mouse looking will probably be switchable so the mouse can also be used to interact with the world.

This was just a quick concept sketch of "the slender man" I did... I'm still not sure what look I'm going for yet though... My girlfriend is going to also be contributing to the project in a design and probably story context, so hopefully this will make it more interesting that what I'd probably do by myself...

I've just decided on starting the project today, so it will be quite a while to any of the games are finished... engine rewrites will probably take a while... but there should be updates soon.

Released the Complex

This is a bit of a late update but due to my lack of viewers I decided it wasn't really that much of a big thing...
Anywho; I released "The Complex" about a month ago... it can be played here:
The complex at newgrounds

The release was plauged with problems... first being a lack of feedback... or contradictory feedback... I posted it on flash game license but got little interest... then after a while I released it but unfortunatley I didn't bug check the game enough due to impatience so the first release (the one that gets most the views) wasn't as good as the second release (version 1.1)... so... I guess I can take this all as a learning experience...
After a bit of reading I found alot of 3d flash games don't do so well... not much of a audience for them since poeple usually prefer "flash styled graphics" in there flash games...
But it's been posted onto quite a few sites... any support or interest would be nice.

Released a little Tech demo of 3d engine

I've FINALLY released a playable tech demo with the new renderer and such...

The demo can be tested Here:
Play the GFPS demo!

Any feedback would be nice... I'm hoping to shove together the rest of the content and try to get this sponsored soon... After I release the final game I am considering writing tutorials on using 3d in flash WITHOUT having to use an external library...

rewrote renderer

I rewrote the rendering library last night and now the engine uses polygon clipping, the FOV is corrected and now it is possible to look up and down using the mouse... (yes; I folded on my thoughts of mouse aim in flash games... *sigh* ).

I imagine that I might be reusing the rendering library I made a few more times... maybe the map engine too... just for quick projects though... the actual rendering library I made is fed vector points, it then clips them and renders them onscreen... pretty simple but useful to have lying around.

An interesting thing about the new renderer is that it no longer colours the tiles darker using colour transformations... it renders a second texture that holds a transparent shading map... the effect is alot more nice and pretty fancy... It gives more atmosphere than vertex shading... It sort of looks like a volumetric fogging effect at times.

Well... the project is getting closer to being finished... even though the rewrite of the renderer from scratch only took a day; it was quite an effort... I had to resync up alot of the other functions...

Hopefully I'll get around to writing a few tutorials on all this later on... and release the source code at some point.... it could be a good learning tool for others.

Back to coding

Unfortunately my notebook (which I have written many horrible things about) was just getting too slow for what I needed... probably because of the amount of stuff I had on there...

Anywho; I purchased a new notebook which has been very helpful... no more annoying slowdowns while coding or waiting for my computer to unfreeze... So I've went back to my coding...

The first project I have to finish is my GFPS engine (which I SHOULD of finished AGES ago!)...

Now the game has 4 weapons... a new monster (more soon), it's faster and I have written a level editor for it to make level creation faster and to use the potential of the engine even more.

The image of the editor is quite small, but this is what it looks like anywho... I coded it in c++ using the openGL & SDL libraries... The key commands are pretty silly, but since it's just for me to use so far, it's not important for others to find it easy right now. Tile selection is at the top of the screen, item selection is at the bottom... Thankfully the editor makes stair cases and platforms easier to craft.

"So WHY isn't it released yet?" you may ask... Well apart from the lack of time I've had for it until recently; I need to rewrite the renderer... when I originally wrote the basis of the engine (in one night), it was in AS2 and I wasn't think about height differences... just speed. One of the speed tricks was to avoid polygon clipping (too much complicated maths with floating point numbers really slows down AS2)... so I adjusted the FOV and clipping plane... which is now showing dead space on the screen where nothing is being rendered.. and distorting the perspective... making platforms confusing and rooms look smaller than they are... So a better rendering library is going to be coded... This shouldn't really cause too much slowdown thanks to AS3.

Well, that's some of what I've been up to...
Back to coding, university work, painting and reading for me.

If you have any questions, advice, need help on your own projects or wish to work with me; feel free to leave a comment or Email me at "kalisme (at) hotmail (dot) com".
No spam please...