Paul in the UK

Uploaded some old projects again

2009-09-30T17:11:00.000-07:00

I just put my university projects on rapid share you can find the space sim project here and the shader project here. I'll upload my other projects tomorrow might also upload the videos from the space sim project again. This links are rapidshare links if you can't use them contact me i might be able to send to in another way. If the source doesn't run you might need to install the latest C++ runtime destributable(2005) which can be found on the microsoft site

My current engine project can be found here

Some more shader work

2008-12-09T14:28:00.000-08:00

Last time I showed the spot light that was working this time round Normal mapping and Parallax mapping are also working.
First up normal mapping:

And parallax mapping:

The only thing the images show off is though that the specular component isn't calculated correctly and that is the next fix. The thing after that is creating a cube map in the application so we can do reflection mapping.

The application I am creating is actually a countdown timer till new year and I want to add a reflection map to the 3d text that is now hidden by this cube.

spot light shader

2008-12-03T14:46:00.000-08:00

And finally I got my spot light shader to work. The problem I actually had was that I didn't realize that the cos function in HLSL needed a radian instead of degrees, grrrr. It now looks as it should, finnaly got this damn light equations out of the way.

Side project

2008-12-02T15:59:00.001-08:00

I finally got a spot light shader working. This bugged my last year at this time when I was doing my space sim and is one of the reasons why I didn't include shaders in that project.

In the new year I will probably redo that project based upon a completely shader based render system this time around. This means I can much easier include effects in to this project like parallax mapping. But for this to be able to be put in my light shaders first have to work.

Here is a screen shot of the spot light so far, i still need to add the fall off in between the inner and other cone.

MSc.

2008-11-11T01:46:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I found out that I have passed my MSc. Games Programming with an average if 67.1. My dissertation actually got a higher point than I was expecting so that is always good.

Next to that the job is progressing good as well, I feel at home there and like the job I am doing. ALthough this week I am most likely sitting home sick as I have a bad flu at the moment.

Schools out forever

2008-09-17T06:02:00.000-07:00

Well last Friday I handed in my dissertation and the report for it and on Monday I had my last day of uni for the foreseeable future. Had to do my demonstration on Monday of the virtual paint brush I had created.
All my goals are now complete which I had set myself 10 years ago, now I have no clue what to do.
My immediate problems now are to find a house in Leamington Spa, or arround Southam, where I'll be working from now on. That's a scare and pleasant thought needing to go to work, it means my free time is over and need to buckle done. But on the other hand I am looking forward to do my job at Codemasters.

JOB

2008-08-20T16:17:00.000-07:00

Well all the hard job hunting and dozens of emails I sent out finally paid off this morning. I got a phone call this morning from codemasters telling me that they were going to offer me a job.
Later today they called me again and said that they were sending out my contract later that day.
So from October my student life is finally ending :P

Job hunting Continued

2008-08-04T01:54:00.000-07:00

Codemasters just gave me a call that the phone interview I had Friday went well. They called me to tell me I got an in person interview with them this week or early next week. That's two confirmed in person interviews, hopefully one of them will employ me.

Job hunting

2008-07-30T07:40:00.000-07:00

So far my quest for a job is going well, today I woke up with a nice email from Ninja Theory in my mail box inviting me for an interview. Yesterday I was called by Codemasters telling me they wanted to do a phone interview on Friday. Hope I get an interview at the company out of that.
And then there is the full fat offer off course from which I still haven't heard a word when the interview is.

Well wish me luck, now it's back to my virtual paint brush again.

Looking back at a (almost a)year(now) of almost full time coding

2008-07-28T20:02:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had an epiphany, and so how much I have developed over the last year as a programmer.
I was looking at some screen shots I made in the beginning of the year as I was starting my first game project. I started this project with no idea how a game engine worked besides of the knowledge of a rasterizer in a game engine.

Some Screen shots of the early development of my space simulator game
This knowledge however gave me a little advantage though as I knew how the graphics pipeline worked. It did not however prepare me for the task of gameplay programming, which is basically the hart of everything. It connects the players input to all the other stuff that is going on like rendering of the scene and physics, to the event system that triggers doors and particle systems.

Some screen shots of the end results of my space simulator game
After this project came three others in the same time span that we had gotten for the first one. This was our very first decent taste of what life as a real game programmer would be like, and I can tell you it's though. Game programming is one of these professions which in the first year or two are not for the faint of harted.
In this second semester we had a Physcis/Network engine to write, do a team project (of which the actual specs came from a real studio, Blackrock Studios) and a shader and AI assignment.

Screenshots of the shader asignment
These four assignments let me learn a lot in managing my own time, doing multiple different tasks at the same time. And increased my coding knowledge and potential a lot.
So yeah after a year I am actually glad I decided to leave my own country and safety net and did this MSc. What I learned was that the game industry is a place where people have to work very hard, but it's also a very rewarding place to work. Imagine you squeezing just that last frame out of your code so your game will run at a constant 30fps, or getting the physics interaction of colliding objects just right so the game looks realistic. These are all techinical achievements which are good in reinforcing your own self esteem.
Then ofcourse there is the showing of to other people this is probably the most rewarding aspect of the whole job. Thats also the reason why I sneak in these pictures of my work. If you want to see more pictures and more details about the actual projects I have done or just want to see if the executables work on your machine go here, or follow the link to my portfolio site.

Applications continued

2008-07-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

As of now I have heard back from two companies to which I send my CV two weeks ago. One is Rebellion and they sent me a test which I messed up and so got no employment opportunity. The other one is Pivotal Games saying we aren't looking for people anymore. So far no luck so today I decided to send out another wave of applications.
They went to:

So far I had one reply from this list already from Full Fat they invited me to an interview with them.
So lets hope I´ll get a job now so I can stay here in England and do what I like most make Games/Software related to games.

Painting on a 3D model

2008-07-22T11:36:00.000-07:00

Well today i got the disseration in such a state that I can start thinking about painting on a 3D model with a soft brush.
Here is a screenshot of the hard brush i am using currently for painting on a 3D model, and the generated rendertarget:

The rendering is done by moving a brush over a 3D model and drawing a circle at the texture coordinates under that point in a shader.
It's not yet anything advanced but the next one is going to either use joint springs or particle systems to achieve a brush like effect.

Dissertation Shaders

2008-07-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

Ok I found out what went wrong yesterday.
First of all the circle radius is so big that it encompasses the complete model so we won't see a nice circle, that has no been fixed.
Second was that the origin most likely was passed wrong which is now fixed as well. To do here is to get the actual collision point to be circle origin but that isn't a big problem.
The actual thing now looks something like this:

It's input is still all slider based but at least the shader works as I had expected it to work. And the color passing is a bit off but that is an error in bit shifting I think I made.

Effect rendering

2008-07-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

Today i fixed the effect and shader rendering part of my dissertation it now should look like this:

The fx file adds a circle arround a certain point in the texture passed on parameters like:

Circle origen in texture coordinates
Circle Radius
Circle Color

But the actual end result more look like this, circle color is turqoise in this version:

So my next step is too see what the hell is going wrong in the shader that isn't going wrong in RenderMonkey. :(

Dissertation

2008-07-11T10:53:00.001-07:00

As far as the dissertation is going I am now trying to implement shaders through DX effect files. I am doing this as the paint brush is much easier to create inside a shader. After talking to my supervisor we both agreed that the pipeline approach which I was using before wasn't a good idea.
It isn't a good idea mostly because it's slow to develop, when using shaders you can use packages like rendermonkey and fx composer.
Besides the goal was to create the virtual brush using shaders anyway in the end.

Send your application day

2008-07-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Today i decided it was time for another round of applications, I hope this time round I will get some more positive responses. This time I send my CV and stuff to Rebellion (Alien vs Predator), Rockstar North (GTA of course), Curve Studios (PSP games now stepping over to X360 and PS3), Stainless Games(Xbox Live arcade games) and Pivotal Games (conflict series). Tomorrow I will be sending some more applications to companies like Sumo(Virtua Tennis) and Ninja theory(Heavenly Sword).
So wish me luck in my quest for a job.

Welcome to suburbia

2008-07-05T09:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I moved from 79 Cranbrook Avenue to 500 Inglemire lane to live for the next 3 months.
The packing of my old room actaully went swift in 3 hours I had everything boxed up and out of the place. It always boggles me that when you think you don't have that much stuff in a room how much it actually is. And this is just basic stuff and the stuff I collected here over a year.
I moved in now for a day and it's a bit adjusting because the walks to uni are a bit longer but also to the pubs. I now need to walk for about 15 minutes to get a pint instead of 5. So I kinda am getting a bit more of movement then I had before. The other thing is the house I am living in now is a lot smaller so that's gonna be a big adjustment as well.
The the nice thing though is that this neighborhood will be a bit more secure than the last one I lived in. This house is smack in the middle of a suburb.

Dissertation progress update

2008-06-14T11:15:00.001-07:00

After another ten days the dissertation is finally looking like the end product should. The application now loads an .x file on command and we can change the mesh at run time. The collision detection for the mesh is implemented and the vertex color is changed when the mouse moves over the mesh.
The next tasks to do is to actually render the pen color in to a texture and display that instead of using vertex colors.
Here is a screenshot:

Projection errors

2008-06-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

OK the error I had in the previous post has a very easy solution the projection matrix was setup wrong.
Instead of setting it in "OnD3D9CreateDevice" part of DXUT it needs to be set in "OnD3D9ResetDevice".
It now looks as following:

X files rendering

2008-06-05T12:06:00.001-07:00

After a week wrestling with DX 9 again I got an x file to render. When I tried this last Christmas it wouldn't render for the world of me. Apparently the tutorial in the DX sdk are a bit out of date. When I started looking at the function calls involved I found that I wasn't supplying everything. It now renders although I have minor camera problem with the rendering so thats the next step to figure out.
Remeber in the following screenshot light is on in the first and off in the second to show that textures are also working:

Resurrection

2008-05-05T16:16:00.000-07:00

Today we finished the team project which this time has an installer so you all can try it out at home.
Do read the readme though as this installer needs to install OpenAll first if it isn't present on the machine and if it has to you need to run it again to install the game.
Link is here. And link for the redistributable msvcrt.dll is here. Copy the contents of the folder in the second zip over to the installation directory.

AI

2008-04-28T09:55:00.000-07:00

I finally found the bug in my AI ACW last night after 3 solid days of working on it, as I fixed it I am now at a winning rate of 5/5 for no, 1 and 2 ghost 4/5 for 3 ghost and now testing 4 ghosts. At least is can win now it didn't do that for the last couple of days.
The first version I had could complete the no ghost one, but the next versions couldn't even do that. And i think i still have a minor bug in the path finding when it can't find a path with a value now it always goes to the left bottom corner instead of searching the full grid to see if it can find a path with a dot in it. I also think I need to decrease the value for the bonus when there aren't that many dots left. It will now almost always go for the bonus. I definitely have a problem in the full search as you can see from a the screen shots.
Ah well here is a screen shot:

Applying

2008-04-14T17:10:00.000-07:00

Today I applied for a job at Bizarre Creations and Blackrock Studios (formerly Climax). Now it's hope and wait until I get an answer. Later this week I will also be applying at Rebellion, Codemasters, Ninja Theory(although they dont have an opening they do however understand the importance of cake) and Frontier.
Tomorrow I have to go to a Game Republic event and a showcase in the morning. I have to go to this showcase because my professor couldn't find any volunteers to go. So he figured while Sam and me have to be at the event in the evening anyway why not make them go, Sam is a fellow student who like me has gotten a Game Republic Bursary. The showcase isn't all bad luckily there are cash prizes involved for the winners and it's a good way to show game studios that are there what you can do. Lets see if I can do some shameless self promotion there and score some interviews with some other companies.

On a side note I finally handed in my Shaders project for some more screenshots go to this website. And go to the shaders thing, as of now that are the only screens online later this week I'll put some more up that so the final product.

Portofolio, Family Visits

2008-03-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

Well today and yesterday i have been working on my portfolio site, which is now almost done and the link to it can be found on the right.
From tomorrow on till 25th of March I will finally be having a bit of vacation as my Mother and brother are coming over from NL. This semester is even worse than last one as they have given us so much todo and not enough time to do it in. Well at least i got my Shaders almost done and Physics is coming along nicely as well.

Shaders Continued

2008-03-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

I changed the shader i showed you yesterday into looking a bit more realistic. This is done by actually texturing the terrain with its approriate texture instead of assigning colors to heights, although that approach is still used for the water color. I also added a transparent reflection map for the water implemented as a pixel shader, i later still wish to add refraction to it so it looks more realistic. Here is a current screen shot:

Birthday and Shaders

2008-03-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

So last Friday i held my birthday party here at Cranbrook Avenue, it actually turned out to be a better party than i had expected. I got so drunk that i cant even remember the last part of the evening, its all a blur now. And to finish the birthday we went to a metal club last night, which is always good as the drinks there are cheap.

On another note i have been doing a bit of shader programming and here is a screen shot of a procedurally colored terrain:

Earthquake

2008-02-26T17:34:00.000-08:00

About 30 - 40 minutes ago (no is 1:35 UK time) we got hit by an earthquake, 4.7 on Richter scale. Was kinda funny, I just thought who the hell is running down the corridor like a elephant. But apparently a lot of people felt it because the streets here filled up with people to see if anyone else felt it.
It wasn't very heavy just a minor tremor, still a girl next door got very scared and didn't dare go to bed again, and asked the next door neighbor to stay in his room (Damn!, she is quite hot).
In other news happening here my professor (the one of the bursary) said Rockstar Leeds was interested in speaking to me, so I am now waiting foor their invite for a interview for an internship.

Marks and Distinctions

2008-02-17T17:57:00.001-08:00

Well i got my marks from the previous semester and scored two distinctions (C++ and real-time computer graphics). The average is also still a distinction luckily :P.
C++ Programming and Design = 76 / 100
Game Development Architecture = 59 / 100
Real-Time Graphics = 79 / 100
Average 71.3 / 100
So all the hard work has paid off luckily.

Ice Hockey

2008-02-15T03:36:00.000-08:00

Next week I have to match to play.
One is in New Castle where we are going on Tuesday, match time is at 00:00. On the bus back we are gonna have the skinny man drinking contest which is going to be a good laugh. The contest consists of an endurance drinking race, its who can down the most bottles. The contest is between our two skinniest members of the team.
Then on Friday we have normal practice and on Sunday there is another away match.

New Video of The ACW

2008-02-13T10:14:00.000-08:00

I uploaded a new version of the video of my game today this is the final version and high and low quality versions are found at http:://paul.walterheck.com/

First Ice Hockey Match

2008-02-09T09:09:00.000-08:00

So yesterday was our first ice hockey match, which we won with 9-6. We played against a team that already had played two matches so for a first match this is a nice result.
I stopped two slap shots and got one shot at goal, sadly I didn't score.
After the match we had a team social in Pipers and they did some rewards. Basically the rewards were just an excuses to have everybody down a pint of beer.
After this I went to a house party again because well it's Friday and that means heavy drinking here.
The plan for tongiht is gonna be spiders and that's gonna be a lot of fun as well.

A week of parting and partying

2008-01-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

This week was a week of say goodbye, because all the students that are here on Erasmus scholarships are going home. So we had a goodbye party for Peter a Polish friend of mine on Tuesday, which actually turned out to be a good party.
Friday was the birthday of another friend of mine, which we celebrated in Spiders, the only metal club in town here. And they were actually playing good music this time not too much gothic and more metal. We all got very drunk there, price for shots and cocktails there are ridiculously cheap.
And last night there was a major house party, it was organized to celebrate the end of exams, which we did in style. Good party we came in and after a few minutes a couple of guys were already dragging in a Christmas tree to burn it in the back yard.

This week I'll put my game up for download, i still have to figure out how to run it on other pcs. So when that is done I'll put it up for download with some description of the controls.

So we'r back

2008-01-18T17:54:00.000-08:00

I have been in the UK for a week and a half again, I just couldn't find time to post earlier. Preparing for an exam i had took up most of my time.
About the exam I am not so sure if I passed it I hope I will because it was kind of a strange exam. The problem is in how i wrote stuff down, it's kinda hard to structure your answers in a different language when you have a time constraint for writing it.
Ice hockey has started again, today was the first practice and it was a good one. I was kinda dreading on going there but I had a really good time so I am glad I joined the team. We are going to enter a league here so that means I am going to play competitions in a lot of places in the UK. Finally I am going to see something from the UK, without having to do too much effort for it.
Last night was the first party like night, drank too much vodka there but that's what you get when you go drinking with Polish people. Tomorrow is the first house party of the year and I am looking forward to it.
Now I only have to write two reports, do a presentation and design a poster and next semester will begin again. Which will probably mean I'll be talking about coding again and party's, oh I will also keep track of how we do in the league here.

It's done

2007-12-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

Finally i am about to hand in my coursework and have vacation. I really need a vacation at the moment, i have never in my life worked so hard.
Last two days were spend coding and cleaning up my code. I am really glad it's is done tomorrow or the day after I will put up the executables and resource files so you all can play it. It will be about 50Megs.

Controller

2007-12-06T18:53:00.000-08:00

Since I have my laptop I had to walk around my game with the keyboard. This is not easy when your used to using a game pad for this for 2 months, so I went out and bought a game pad today. I ended up buying an xbox 360 pad for windows, chose this because I kinda like the xbox controller anyway. The only thing is that the xbox controllers need a massive dead zone, and you can't calibrate it out with the windows controller options. So I had to code this out, although the main code is the same as a normal controller the buttons and axis on a xbox controller are different, so that required a new class. Only I made some stupid mistakes like returning the value for moving left or right on the left thumb stick instead of the up down value. That cost me two hours of work to figure out. Well I finally have it working.
It beats the shit out of moving around with the keyboard it's a lot easier and smother you will probably notice that in the next movie I put up. If i got time to make another movie because the deadline to hand it in is Friday next week, and i still have a lot to do.

Mini map screen dumps

2007-12-05T04:53:00.000-08:00

As promised here are the screen dumps for the mini map.

And here is the you tube movie. You can get the file here http://paul.walterheck.com/

Mini map

2007-12-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

Today the plan was to make a working mini map, and so it does here is a screen dump of it.(will be up tomorrow dial-up doesn't allow me to upload images.)
My first notion was to just redraw the whole map in wire frame and draw it into a new view port. This didn't work of course because I tessellate my planes in the map quite heavily. It look really bad.
Second try was to redraw only the outline of each face, this is the good approach only I tried it in the wrong class. This effectively took me back to the problems I had when I first drew the map. Then I remembered that I had already transformed all the vertices in the map, so I just had to take the first and the last vertex of a tessellated face.
The first and again wring approach in this version was that i copied the whole array over to the class were i needed it. This dramatically dropped my frame rate, which was around 5-7 fps on my new laptop. As you can imagine it was copying a lot of unnecessary data, but at least the mini map was drawn.
The final approach was to just copy the first and last element of the array and this speeded the rendering back up to acceptable frame rates.
I'll put the screen dumps of it up tomorrow it's now bedtime here so I say goodnight to you all.

Laptop

2007-12-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

Finally my new Asus G1S has arrived today, so I did absolutely no work on my project today. I spend the day installing the new laptop so i could work on my project on that. I am now installing Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, I knew there were some problems with the compatibility with vista. What I didn't expect was that these would start in the install. Some times it can't find a cab file on the iso file while I know it's there. For now the only option seems to mount another cd image and that just failed as well. Apparently one of the cab files was corrupted, well lets see if the the pro version will install. I'll get back to this tomorrow.

Ice hockey

2007-12-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

A frend of mine convinced me to go ice hockey tonight. Man that sport is though, it's good but though.I have never skated on ice that was just prepared by a machine, thats slick stuff. I can skate but on this ice i really needed to find my balance again. Might also had to do with the fact that you are wearing full body armor. I mean you are really suited up, and try to get a jersey over your head when wearing it is no fun.
Although i had already skated there last Saturday for fun. Bad ice that day to much marks in it, couldn't even attempt a hockey stop. Today hockey stop was easy, although trying it with a stick in my hand was a new thing to do.
Tried something new todat too goping in a circle backwards and trying to speed up. Ow yeah and it's murder for your back.

On the laptop fron it still hasn't arrived god**** it, think i'll be calling the company monday or tuesday. So they can inform me where the thing is stuck at, it's really agravating me cuz they said it would be here in 2-3 working days on wednesday.

Gunturrets work

2007-11-30T10:42:00.000-08:00

Just finished implementing the gun turrets, we now have enemies in the map. Although work is a big word the render thats all for today.
Ow and I fixed a nasty memory leak in my particle system today without having to redesign it all.

On the laptop front of things they haven't come by my place today sadly enough hope they will deliver it tomorrow. Other wise i got more waiting on it to do and i don't want to wait.

Particle Systems Continued

2007-11-28T07:24:00.000-08:00

I changed the particle system slightly it now more resembles the nebula devices one. Although mine still does the interpolation on particle level instead of on emitter level. If we do it on particle level it looks a lot nicer than on emitter level. Here is a screen dump of a fire effect:

If the particle size isn't set you get a nice effect as well, this happens because particles are then spawned with a infinite size. Here is an example of that:

Side note on the laptop I got a mail today that they got it and are sending it to me today. Yay I am really happy to get this one no more dinners at 23:00. I can eat at normal times again and still do some work.

Laptop Confirmation

2007-11-27T13:16:00.000-08:00

Today I got the confirmation for my laptop, it will arrive at Laptops4u tomorrow or Thursday and then they will ship it to me. Next week I'll have my new laptop, finally i can work at home on my ACW. Too bad it's due in two and a half weeks, still might enable me to get shaders to work in the 2 weeks remaining. As of now I have texturing and point lights working through vertex and pixel shaders. Spot lights are hard to implement in shaders. The problem with shaders is they are not debug-able which makes it kinda hard to write them. Although the result is a lot nicer than the fixed function pipeline behavior. Planes can now consist of 4 vertices's and still light will look good on em instead of the hundreds of points I am using now.
Here is another particle system effect:

Long overdue post

2007-11-26T05:03:00.001-08:00

Ok this post is long overdue and it's about all the crazy stuff thats going on on Fridays over here.
This story starts on halloween when we got invited for a party that on the last minute didn't happen. Lucky for us there was another party going on somewhere else. When we walked in to this party, of course we weren't invited but who cares, there were only girls there so we felt well this is gonna be a good night. After we were in for 5 minutes this girls comes up to use and starts yelling at us we we weren't dressed up, and what we were doing there. This lasted for a bout 10 minutes and afterwards we actually had a good laugh with her. This night ended a bit weird though.

The next party was that friday at asylum the night lub an campus it was an ISA party, you know the society that signed me up by having a party, good way to get members though. This was a weird night as well as i couldn't get drunk that night and I was drinking double vodka shots. In retrospect though i might have switch to hard liquor to early that night.
To continue the next week we crashed a party again, he sounds like we are getting good a this thing here. This party turned out to be a birthday party, we a group of about 20 people just walked in and started drinking. Here one of my friends try to climb a wall, more accurately what happened was he walked into the wall. He ran up to it and jumped but couldn't get high enough so he sacked into the wall.
This is also the night the legend of the giraffe was born. See picture blow the guy eating the leaves.

Then finally we come to two weeks ago this was a crazy night as well, also the most expensive one I have been on here. 7 quid 50 for 2 shots of brain hemorrhage. This was just basicly a pub crawl that ended up at some friends house were I saw the greats pile of dishes ever.

As you can tell i don't really remember everything that happens on Friday nights here but thats just because we start to early.

Particle Systems

2007-11-25T16:14:00.000-08:00

Today i got the particle system for the end sequence of the game done. Although done is a big word as it still massively memory leaks, but we brush that aside for the moment. The particle system also serves another purpose in the game, as lasers hit a wall there will also be a particle explosion. The only things left to do for the ACW now are:

Recording and play back functions
gun turrets
Alternate 3d person view
and HUD

Need to pitch a game idea tomorrow, and it has to do with the environment. During Christmas I need to make an A1 poster for this idea. The idea is to have an adventure game to build a bio diesel gas producer and a car to run it on. Then the end of the game is to race it as environment friendly as possible. It's not a grand and great idea but it will have to do.

Multi texturing

2007-11-23T06:22:00.000-08:00

Finally I got multi texturing working!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The problem was that I was calling the wrong function to set up the texture stage, instead of calling glActiveTexture is was calling glClientActiveTexture. The last one you use when you tell GL where to find the texture coordinates. Well enough tech talk here is how it looks.

Lasers and Scorchmarks

2007-11-21T09:55:00.001-08:00

In the last two days I revised the switches they now look a lot sharper, added lasers and their scorch marks. While doing the scorch marks I also figured out why multi texturing wasn't working, OpenGL demands two vectors or arrays of texture coordinates. So we can't reuse the texture coordinates from one stage to use in the next stage, which is a pain. Or if some one knows how to please let me know because that would make things look so much nicer. As for now the only place I use multi texturing is in the scorch marks, they have a color and an alpha map. There is still something wrong with them as the are effected by the material of a laser, although before I start drawing them I reset the material.

On a side note I ordered a shiny new laptop last week a ASUS g1s. It still hasn't arrived but it should do in the end of this week or beginning of next. This machine is the most money I have ever spend on a PC or Laptop. It's gonna be sweet to have it though means I can go home earlier in the day and work at home instead of being in the labs all the time.

On the ACW

2007-11-19T06:14:00.000-08:00

I didn't really do that much last week I implemented the lasers and switches although they do not really work with collision detection yet. I also saw today that I have to redo the geometry for the switch because they look like shit. Here is a screenshot of it.

Just saw I need to increase the size of the lasers because they are really small.

First Shader

2007-11-19T06:05:00.001-08:00

We had a lab on shaders this morning, although only vertex shaders. They are nice to work with if you use version 2 or higher, the assembler ones are horrible. They do give nice effects but to program in assembler is just not nice especially if you compare them with GLSL or HLSL. It's like comparing asm to C++, I like the higher ones more. Here is an example of a vertex shader and it's output.
//c0 = matrix
//c4 = colour
//c5 = lightpos
//c6 = another color
//c7 = lightpos
//c9 = scalar constants

vs.1.1 // version instruction

dcl_position v0 // declare register data
dcl_normal v4 // v0 is position, v4 is normal
dcl_texcoord0 v8 // v8 is texture coordinates

mov oD0, c4
//mov oPos, v0

m3x3 r0, v4, c0 //transform normal

mul r6, v4, c7.x
add r6, v0, r6
m4x4 oPos, r6, c0

//m3x3 r1, c5, c0 //transform light pos
dp3 r1, r0, -c5 //dot product
mul r2, r1, c4 //multiply dot product with lightcolor

dp3 r3, r0, -c7
mul r4, r3, c4
mul r5, r2, r4
mov oD1, r5 //move to output

m4x4 r7, v0, c0
mul r7, r7, c9
mov oT0, r7

As you can see they are not nice to look at although the outcome does look nice. This shader transforms and lights and does a texture map for the skull mesh.

Again bursary

2007-11-12T06:15:00.000-08:00

Just found out that I have to go to Bradford on Thursday to comply with this bursary thing. Next week I will finally get my money :), that means the next day or so I'll probably buy my macbook pro. Finally got a pc that works here lol.

First Version

2007-11-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

Here is the first installer. Remember I am not sure what the hardware requirements are at the moment. You need to have a joypad connected to fly through the application. The main.exe is located in the install dir and then the bin folder. There is only one .exe and you should double click on it to get it to work. Please download both files. If you have a rapidshare account you can download it, at the moment i can't find anyplace on the web I can place it so people can download it. If you now of a place place tell me in a comment.

	http://rapidshare.com/files/68564643/InstallSpaceSim.msi.html
	http://rapidshare.com/files/68564644/setup.exe.html

YES it has collision detection

2007-11-09T08:55:00.000-08:00

The axis aligned Bounding Boxes now do correct collision detection. The problem I had was that i was calling the wrong function, instead of calling intersectMovingBboxes, which checks if a moving boxes collides with a stationary, I was calling intersectBboxes. The later just checks if two boxes collide and if you do that for every box in a map it collides. This happens because the camera is a moving entity and it moves beyond a max value in a BBox and the function just checks for that. The new function takes into account in which direction you are moving. Just need to fix the camera to return it's up vector and collision detection works as expected. If I get it working I will put a installer up for you to test. Remember it's still a work in progress. Tests have only been done on game labs pc's so i don't know if it will work on others. The specs of these are: AMD X2 5600+ dual core, 2GB Ram, NVIDIA 8600GT. But 32MB of Ram should be enough to run the program, don't know about the Video Memory though so to be save go for a machine with at least 64MB

A piece of Code

2007-11-09T06:47:00.001-08:00

As asked for in a comment by Walter here is a piece of code, it's the draw code for the forcefield which is sown in the previous post. The forcefields is a class that has a draw method and this is the code for it.
[code]
void ForceField::draw(float elapsedtime)
{
glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
glMatrixMode(GL_TEXTURE);
if (m_texturespeed < 1.0f)
{
m_texturespeed += 0.01f;
}
else
{
m_texturespeed = 0.0f;
}
Matrix44 m;
translate(m, m_texturespeed, 0.0f, 0.0f);
glLoadMatrixf(m.transposed().m());
glEnable(GL_BLEND);
glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
TextureManager& tm = TextureManager::getInstance();
tm.activateTexture("..\\Textures\\ForceField.bmp");
//glTexEnvf(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_COMBINE_ALPHA, GL_MODULATE);
glDisable(GL_CULL_FACE);

glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);

glPushMatrix();
glTranslatef(m_position.x(), m_position.y(), m_position.z());
//translated.writeM();
m_forcefield.draw(elapsedtime);
glPopMatrix();
glMatrixMode(GL_TEXTURE);
glLoadIdentity();
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glDisable(GL_BLEND);
glDisable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE);
}
[\code]

Forcefields, sliding doors and rotating blades

2007-11-09T06:33:00.000-08:00

Two days ago I implemented moving objects in the map. I needed them to react with a material especially the forcefields as they need to seem to glow. The problems I had were that my vector that stores them wouldn't accept a change in the data if I gave it. Today I made the forcefields have a moving texture it looks like this.On a side note I also fixed the placement of the bounding boxes. As I fixed my matrix class to work with OpenGL I can now make my own transform matrices and use them. This enabled me to pre-transform my plane vertices and then calculate the bounding box on them. So I don't have to transform the existing Bounding Boxes and as this is done at load time it saves me a multiply in the render state.

Spot lights make it look sweet

2007-11-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

Finally I got the spotlight to work as it worked out there was another error in my light class :(. Hate these sneaky bugs hitting me. I finally got the outside of the space station done, we can now fly in to the space station from the outside. Here's the latest screen shot:
I changed the textures because they didn't look as good as they do now. The light you see is from a spotlight in front of the spaceship.

Let there be light

2007-11-01T13:05:00.001-07:00

He said and there was. I made a mistake in my light class that made my light behave in an unexpected manner. Besides the normals of my Right, Floor and Back faces were inverted, by fixing it all it now looks like this:
I now also output the amount of vertices's that the whole scene contains, and back face culling is working. To get that to work I needed to change the way a front face is detected in GL. I had to change it because my faces are created by one function and then just rotated and translated into place.

Finished redefinment of the map

2007-10-29T17:26:00.000-07:00

Finally got the tedious work done, next up moveable objects and forcefields and collision.
Here is a screen shot of how the outside looks textured:

The Level

2007-10-29T16:11:00.000-07:00

I basically redesigned my entire map file again, the decision I made to go to 2 vertexes per plane didn't work out sadly. Would have saved a lot of load work, so I am back to my original design. Only this time I don't have to put normals or texture coordinates in the map they will be generated through my face class. I wrote a wrapper for it so that is rotates and translates the map in to place, might still want to add this functionality to face later on, but for now keep it where it is.

Here are some screen shots:
First corridor:

Second corridor:

Textures work continued

2007-10-28T17:46:00.000-07:00

I redesigned the how the textures work, in the previous design I just loaded them straight from file to a texture in system. I added a texturemanager that checks if the texture hasn't been already loaded, if it has it doesn't load the file again. The program still has to ask the texturemanager if the file already exists otherwise it will just be loaded. Hmmz that's actually a good point to improve on if i have time later on. Now i need to fix my map file or face creater again because the map isn't loaded correctly. And I think I have a nasty little bug in it, because if CPU usage goes to 45 to 50% on a dual core system it crashes. I mean control will no longer respond although if you hit the cross the program exits without a failure.

Some screen shots follow below. The screen shots include fullscreen textured and wireframe and the windowed versions. The yellow polygons seen in the screen shot is the way the the map should look .

Fridays house party

2007-10-28T10:54:00.000-07:00

So i went to my first house party around here, and they are different from back home. Here you have to bring your own beer instead of paying 5 Euro's to get in and drink as much as you can.
The houses here are small so almost all of the visitors were standing outside and messing about. A friend of mine climbed the rain pipe, he is always looking for things to climb. Here are some crazy pictures of the party and some of the T-shirt in a brick I forgot to post em previously.
I seem to be unable to post pictures today something is wrong with the software so I'll post them as soon as I can.
Luke:
Manuele:

Textures Work

2007-10-25T12:10:00.001-07:00

It's coming along nicely yesterday i finished my Bounding Boxes so we can start to implement a collision detection algorithm in a few days.
Today I got textures working, it took me a whole day where I was expecting it would only take 30 minutes maximum. OpenGL is where things get really different from DirectX which I am used to0. I like the D3DX function for loading a texture more, at least they build the mipmaps for you. Here if i forget a call to gluBuild2DMipMaps things wont even show a texture.
Here is a screen shot of the state my project is in now.
The next thing to do is let my map file include which textures where to use. Step after that will be add Normals to the map file so the Fixed Function lights will work. So much work to do and so little time to do it in.

The map

2007-10-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

Finally got the program to load my map file. It now works as I had expected it to work. Also finished my INI file reader so i can read settings form a file into my game. This also kinda got me back on schedule. with only a week or 7 left it's gonna be a lot of work to go through.

First View of my Level

2007-10-23T11:35:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I made the map file for my space simulation game. The object of the game is to fly through some corridors and pass some barriers. After you have done this you will come in a Core room where you need to blow up the reactor.

The map file is read in but there are still some render errors in it that I need to fix. For now I just hard coded the planes of the level. I gave all corridors a different color so you can see how it is laid out. I know one corridor isn't in the correct space and am gonna correct this later one tonight.

Here are the first screens shots of the level.

T-shirt as a brick

2007-10-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

Just went to a Microsoft lecture and got a free t-shirt. The T-shirt is packed as a cube that's 5cm x 5cm x 5cm.

In the instruction, which is a piece of paper that's packed with it, they tell you to just add water to a brick and it will give you a T-shirt. They could have made the drawing a bit clearer so that you immediately know it's unpack this cube and add water it's a funny picture though will add one later.

The lecture the gave was kinda boring it was more a way to sell the company to students. I was expecting a bit more of an in depth talk.

St. Patrick's day

2007-10-20T06:22:00.000-07:00

I think I made some plans yesterday to be in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day.

Dave (an Irish course mate) invited some of us to come over to Ireland on St. Patrick's Day to get hammered for a week.

Camera

2007-10-19T10:10:00.001-07:00

The camera is finally working. It now pitches up and down as specified and rolls and even yaws the correct way.
The only problem I know still need to fix is the movement of the camera. As it now only moves along this axis (0,0,z). It needs to move in the direction we are looking at.

It's good I am writing this blog cause it gives me time to think about my problems and come up with a solution while writing.

For the movement I am going to need a direction vector thats giving me the direction I am traveling in. If we transform this direction vector to the way we rolled, yawed or pitched we are moving in the right direction.

Here is a screen shot of how the scene looks today.

Edit it's been a few days since I posted this and my camera is still not working. If I needed to do this in DirectX it would have worked in an hour. I hate OpenGL for not having a notion like a camera.

Step into

2007-10-18T15:39:00.000-07:00

The step into functionality in VS 2005 seems to be not working for me this is really driving me crazy because this halts all my development on my project.

There seems to be no way to resolve this problem, well lets hope someone on the msdn formus knows how to fix this. Sorry for writing this boring post but i needed to vent my frustration.

It's drawing and the game pad works

2007-10-17T06:34:00.001-07:00

Finally got something to show for all the work I have been doing the past couple of weeks. I got my program to draw stuff to the screen yesterday. These are the triangles you see in the screen shots.

And today I just got the game pad to work with my application. It's really funny to do this now i am finally getting somewhere with my coursework. Now if the network administrators would give me the repository I am waiting for, I'd be totally happy.

The image to the right is the first screen shot i took, the image below shows where i moved the rectangle to.

The color change is due to a button that's being pressed.

Bursary continued

2007-10-15T07:05:00.001-07:00

I accepted the bursary, so I'll be here until christmas '08. The nice thing about this is it will give me a place to work at. I hope it's at some high end game studio so I can get some real experience in how these guys go about there stuff.

Bursary

2007-10-05T06:11:00.000-07:00

I have just been offered a bursary for my studies. If I accept it the games companies in this area are gonna give me £3000. The only catch about it is that my dissertation needs to be done at one of those companies. And it will be longer I need to stay in Hull until next Christmas for this. Then again this isn't even that big of a catch because they are gonna pay me during my dissertation stage.

I have to let my supervisor know what I'll do about before Monday but it think I am going to do this. It solves a lot of cash flow problems that might arise this year.

Second and third lecture and first lab

2007-10-03T08:30:00.000-07:00

Well i had to lectures yesterday one was in C++ programming and Desgin, the other was in Real Time Computer Graphics.
In the first lecture the prof basicly introduced use to all the basic elements of C++. Wasn't that hard but he warned it was gonna be in a few weeks. He also asked who felt like a good programmer at the start of the lecture. Most of us put there hands up, at the end of the lecture he asked the same question and almost none of us put there hands up. This had more to do with respect for the teacher and feeling we couldn't match his knowledge, than beeing humiliated.
The second lecture was about Graphics, this was actually a pretty cool lecture because he showed us a lot of game trailers. He also told us what the project was going to be for these two courses.

We have to write a spaceflight simulator that's going to destroy a spacestation.

The tutorials we get are hard but good because we are getting up to speed really fast so we can start our projects. The 5 C++ tutorial was a bitshift one which is not that easy to understand.
The OpenGL ones are a bit nicer and go a bit slower.

First Lecture

2007-10-01T10:21:00.000-07:00

Just had my first lecture about game development and architecture.
Basicly it was just a layout of how our course is going to be and what we can expect of it. During the lecture the teacher showed us some of the projects people did in the previous years.
They actually look really professional, so I'm wondering what my skill set will be at the end of this course. I hope I can managed it all because I think it's gonna be really demanding of me.

Wel tomorrow is the next lecture it will be about C++, lets see how good I really am at it.

Irish pub

2007-09-30T06:21:00.001-07:00

I went out to an irish pub last night. It's totally different from back home. As we have a mix of old and young people in these bars here they only have old people in em on saterday. Besides they even listen to some sleepy music.

After the irish pub i went to a bar were only people from the age 30 to 40 go. It's funny to see a totally different crowd that has a night out here.