38 replies to this topic

[TheNut]

Just thought I'd stir the pot a bit, get some flow going.

I was getting bored at work so I came up with an idea to work on a quick and dirty game called "Bubbles". There's no concept behind this game and I have no idea what the hell to do. I'm just going with the flow on this one, heh. I haven't done much programming yet as everything thus far has been automated by my template game engine. I have quite a few fish models and textures that I am preparing to render animations with in Blender. I'm also compiling a set of puzzle tunes with my ultra sweet Yahama PSR keyboard :blush: I'm looking to spend a week tops on this "game", whatever that might be :lol:




Anyone else want to share their 2¼ cent story? :lol:

[Frank Skilton]

Quote

So what's everyone doing?

Creating 3D models, worlds, textures and audio for a project myself and a small team are working on, named ADF.

Here's a picture of one of the soldier characters that will appear in the game, fully skinned and animated and light on poly count weighing in at only 2836.



I and the other team member who created that model are both learning to program in C++ so that we can actually get him doing something useful in-game. It's going to be a long journey however we're both very persistent.

[Reedbeta]

2836K? That's not light, that's nearly 3 million triangles! Maybe you just meant 2836?

[Frank Skilton]

:lol: Yes 2836!

Obviously those 3 cups of coffee didn't kick in soon enough. :blush:

[anubis]

I'm currently digging around in what the demoscene does and try to come up with some nice procedurally generated models, textures and effects. No screenshots as of yet :|

[SamuraiCrow]

I'm modifying an extensible programming language in the hopes of making it backward comptable with the Amos Basic Professional language from the Amiga years. I may have to cross-develop from Linux as the makefiles are not working under Cygwin at this time.

-edit- fixed link

[TheNut]

Frank,
Cool stuff. I bet you can't wait to get that bad boy running through heavy fire, blowing up vehicles, and gunning down the bad guys ;)

Anubis
Procedural content is neat stuff, I'd like to tackle that beast sometime. I like how one can generate infinite detail in textures and landscapes with only a couple formulas. I'm looking forward to seeing stuff like that in action with Spore when it comes out.

SamuraiCow
Looking to resurrect some old titles like Qbert and Grog's Revenge eh? ;)

[SamuraiCrow]

@TheNut

Actually there is a Scorched Earth spinoff that I want to resurrect called Frontal Assault.

[anubis]

Quote

I'm looking forward to seeing stuff like that in action with Spore when it comes out.

That's what really got the ball rolling for me. Currently I'm trying to form a diploma thesis out of the topic but I'm still al little vague on the details.

[Dim_Yimma_H]

I'm working on a ninja game with semi-realistic physics, and 2D software rendering. Most of the game engine is implemented, and I'm adding some details to ensure stability, like adding a few collision detection tests in case of truncation errors, and adding type-safety to my script interpreter.

I've designed zones to travel, funnily though I've a way too relaxed story, I have background stuff but no serious dialog. It seems I'll have to be a writer for a moment, but programmer's art need to be accompanied by programmer's words, right? ;)

TheNut said:

I have quite a few fish models and textures that I am preparing to render animations with in Blender. I'm also compiling a set of puzzle tunes with my ultra sweet Yahama PSR keyboard :blush: I'm looking to spend a week tops on this "game", whatever that might be :lol:

You have some gorgeous underwater graphics going on there, looks really nice, cozy style somehow. It might be just me, but with the Bubbles title it seems an underwater bubble shoot'em up would suit perfectly. Like, the fishes blowing bubbles on each other and bubble "ammunition" can be retrieved by sucking up air from much larger bubbles. Like a battle for bubbles.

anubis said:

I'm currently digging around in what the demoscene does and try to come up with some nice procedurally generated models, textures and effects.

Procedurally generated textures indeed seem nice. I'd love to use some procedural texture engine that could read procedure layers from an editor like Photoshop, the problem being of course that the editor must export its filter effect procedures to the format of the engine.

[inigo07]

I'm modeling some capital starships for a 3D space shooter at the moment. Also working on updating an abandoned open-source special effects program for Mac OSX. Pretty simple stuff, just have to modify the code for Quicktime 7.2 (from 6.0).

[Wernaeh]

Thread resurrection time ? :)

Well I'm currently doing an internship at a large German company, saving some money because I'd like to buy one of these.

Apart from that, I'm still working on my webpage so I finally have a place to present my game idea testing bed, and I'm working on a small Visual Studio addin, which allows to regenerate projects from a given directory structure (since I'm slowly getting annoyed with manually creating new folders for >500 files projects).

Cheers,
- Wernaeh

[darksmaster923]

a 1412 poly m16 for panda3d

[Nils Pipenbrinck]

I'm doing dynamic code generation on a DSP for a general purpose graphics library at the moment. We have a OpenGL/ES frontend for it (so you can get an idea how complex that thing is)

Blits are already working and perform well. Nice hardcore coding stuff involving multiple DMA streams running at the same time as the CPU is doing the dirty work in parallel. I'm really proud of that part, and it performs well.

Today I've finished the prototype for texture mapped-triangles. Not really dynamic as it only works with a single texture-format and a fixed size. Don't even think about alpha-blending and anti-aliasing at this time. I'll tackle this in the next days. But: It works, and I got my first performance results..

Wisdom of the day: No need to worry about the cycles per pixel. The performance of a loop, even if it's far away from the theoretical optimum, is dominated by the memory throughput and cache usage. Just because the optimizing compiler generates code that needs 30% of the cycles per iteration as I need does not make a measurable difference in rendering performance.

Guys, dig this. Rendering a quad with an image 90° rotated is 14 times slower than rendering the same image unrotated. Cache effects are *the* performance-killer on the machine I code for.

Next thing to try is to twiddle the address-bits and get things moving.

[.oisyn]

I'm working, among other things, on the occlusion culling system for the next Tomb Raider game. Obviously I'm not allowed to post any screenshots

[TheNut]

SamuraiCrow
Wicked. I remember my bro and I use to fight over the computer (then 286 machine) to play that game. Although the version we had was called "Tank Warz" or some such. Heh, the good old days.

Dim_Yimma_H
Sounds cool. We programmers should be proud of our multiple skills. We are capable of so much more, and yet so gravely misunderstood :)

inigo07
Most people play space sims to build their empire or engage in battles. Me? I like sending in those massive capital ships and putting on a wicked light show! Nexus I think had the coolest capital ships, but the battles in Wing Commander and Descent Freespace were equally tense. What sort of theme are you using for your designs?

Wernaeh
Whoa, expensive gear! Are you a musician/DJ? I've been trying to produce some stuff as of late for my upcoming game, but my gear is pretty limited, heh.

darksmaster923
Nice model. I remember my first modeled weapon. I was developing models for a WW2 mod I wanted to make with the "Savage" engine. In the end it didn't work out though as my team were slackers and the work load for me was just to great. I'm kind of making up for that with my next game though.

~1000 polygons.

Nils
Whoa, sounds pretty complex indeed (far outside my reach, heh). What sort of hardware are you working on now and what's your desired target hardware? I myself would like to start seeing more 3D capabilities in portable hardware. Just to open up that potential.

.oisyn
It's ok oisyn, we won't think any less of you for just teasing us :lol:


As for myself, I finished up Bubbles and I have resumed development on Action - Reaction. I'm still having a tough time dedicating to it, but there are some days where I get a lot done, so I guess that makes up for it. I've mostly been working on the sounds/music and graphics for the game. I completed the intro cinematic (realtime 3D) just a couple days ago and I'm focusing next on the multiplayer design and lobby system.

Here's a load screen I whipped up for the game.

[inigo07]

Quote

What sort of theme are you using for your designs?

Unfortunately under the terms of the NDA I can't say too much. I'm not even going to tell the name of the company for fear of releasing info...but the capital ship I'm working on now is inspired by Ferraris and other Italian sports cars...sleek, organic, yet with some angles. At least I hope it'll turn out like that.

[_Pix_]

Hello, I am new on these boards.

I am currently developing a game engine called vieWTerra and making use of real-time 3D procedural algorithms combined with satellite data, running on PC OpenGL only ATM.






This game engine allows the user to move on the entire surface of the Earth, seamlessly from below sea to space. I work with a satellite database engineer who provides the project with databases in natural colors, DEMs, landcover databases, meteolorogical databases etc...

Screenshots and videos gallery

[Wernaeh]

Quote

Guys, dig this. Rendering a quad with an image 90° rotated is 14 times slower than rendering the same image unrotated. Cache effects are *the* performance-killer on the machine I code for.

Woha, that's interesting :)
That's exactly the reason why I'm not too much into manually optimizing any code apart from basic algorithms. There's just too much to consider...

Quote

Whoa, expensive gear! Are you a musician/DJ? I've been trying to produce some stuff as of late for my upcoming game, but my gear is pretty limited, heh.

Well, I've been on classical piano for ages, and just recently, a few friends of mine wanted to start a band, and asked me in. However, I'm slowly getting sick of being played into the wall by the lead guitar, and decided to upgrade on a more, say, competitive instrument :)

Anyways, I don't know what your gear is, but there are very usable freeware software instruments out there, see for example http://www.kvraudio.com/. As long as you have some ability to send midi data to your computer, and have an up-to-date system, this works pretty well, actually, especially for composing needs.

Quote

This game engine allows the user to move on the entire surface of the Earth, seamlessly from below sea to space. I work with a satellite database engineer who provides the project with databases in natural colors, DEMs, landcover databases, meteolorogical databases etc...

Impressive screenshots, I have to admit :) How do you generate specific detail, such as the animals and buildings ?

I once tried implementing a planet scale renderer as well, but then decided that it would be too time intensive to properly fill a world that huge with the content it deserved...

Cheers,
- Wernaeh

[.oisyn]

Nils Pipenbrinck said:

Guys, dig this. Rendering a quad with an image 90° rotated is 14 times slower than rendering the same image unrotated.

Guy, dig this: you should consider using a tiled texture format where texels are locally arranged in blocks, depending on the cache-line size. All major hardware rendering platforms are doing that already . That way, it doesn't matter if you fetch texels horizontally or vertically - you'll always cross the same number of blocks (and thus the same number of potential cache misses).

Quote

Cache effects are *the* performance-killer on the machine I code for.

I think that statement is true for most machines.