Day 10: Height Map

I am satisfied with that height map – no multi textures, blending, water or even trees.. I need to concentrate on logic now, polishing details will be last thing.

plan for today/tomorrow.

picking + adding objects on the map..

good luck Luke..

thanks Luke.

edit:
ok 2 more thing left before I ll be ready to go with picking and objects,

1. need to set up camera in 45 degree
2. I need to think of optimisation.. some sort of quad tree or so..

Day 9: Motivation Kick

I need to figured out what I want/have to do with University and work.. need to find a balance,

Today after chat with my Program Leader I have decided to start going forward and developing stuff that I actually will need and polish small things at the end, that’s why today I have managed to create 1024 by 1024 grid map which will be base for my 3D hight map based strategy game, decisions has been made. nothing else left than developing..

Element Covered Tonight:

  • movement class
  • terrain class
  • grid helper

Tomorrow – Height map.

Day7: Quick overview

Just quick overview for end of day 7.

  • Input handler gets mouse position and escape button
  • Drawing 3D maya objects
  • Sound player
  • drawing 2D over 3d object
  • Font engine – well subsystem but..
  • High precision timing
  • FPS
  • CPU usage
  • Lighting

Still loads left to do but as for one week it is fairly enough!

Vortex Terrain Model

First of all: My class that loads objects from file is working now! v0.6 is able to load vertexes and put them into buffer! Great success!

I was thinking about topic for Games Engineering module. There are plenty ideas in my head of what I can create,

but last idea seems to be a challenge – Simple Vortex Terrain model (little bit similar to the one in minecraft) that will allow player to have ultimate power to change things on it – not sure what that will be exactly but, I am pretty sure player will be able to make “holes” in a ground, caves, flood, destroy object and create craters,

well I see the future for that kind of map for RTS games..

I need to make research and design data structure for vortex terrain – but I am sure that’s “doable”

Game Engine C++ – Overview

Lately I have started developing Game Engine for my Game Architecture Module at University.
It is C++/DirectX (at the moment it is directX 10 with HLSL but in the future it will be kinda smart and will detect what DirectX can be lunched on PC in future maybe OpenGL as well – we’ll see.)

Target for this project is to create basic but flexible and easy to extend RTS game  engine.

To present features of engine on every milestone I’ll publish release, and a code for it because I guess putting code in a post may be kinda messy. However some simple methods or smart ideas I ll post ;).

The engine is designed in a way that extending should be fairly easy.

Current features:

  • Starting Windows’ window
  • Creation DirectX device
  • Loading/Processing Vertex and Pixel shader file
  • very simple camera
  • very basic  input handler
  • model class
  • simple shader debuger
  • error handling

Milestone 1 (01/02/2011)

Working 3D environment – Terrain

  • height map – loaded from file
  • lighting
  • sky box
  • multi-textures
  • blending
  • water
  • loading object from graphics programs

    Milestone 2 (01/03/2011)

    Object system

    • Collision Detection
    • Picking elements and movement
    • Basic AI
    • Placing object on the map
    • Simple Game Logic – building units, balance

    Interface

    • Simple 2D interface

    Milestone 3 (01/04/2011)

    Working Scripting System

    • LUA scripting language implementation

    Milestone 4 (01/05/2011)

    • networking?
    • I bet I ll find something

    Release (02/05/2011)

    • Well documentation and tutorial
    • Party!

    This is just draft probably this days will change eventually however I will be aiming in release date which is be totally accident a day of my birthday 🙂

    Today I am putting a Debug release of Engine – it is really deep alpha and it works only on pc’s with DirectX 10 or later. (Vista or 7)

    Version 0.2 – this version is rendering green triangle on a screen to make that it uses shaders, basic input class manage to close program when escape button is being pressed.

    Software Development 3 – MP’s management System

    Below is full code for my SD3 assignment – or you can download it from here – zipped project or here – .jar

    Raport

    “You should write a report about your software (max 2 sides A4) in the report you should discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the Strategy pattern and discuss how you would have implemented your code not using the strategy pattern.”

    How is it working?

    Current solution as a first thing checks files for serialized data and if there are any it adds MP to arrayLists  – so in a sec it will allow us to operate on this objects.

    After adding MP’s to lists my program creates new instance of Program Class which is basically engine that interacts with user (displays communicates, gather inputs), process events, and deal with MP objects.

    Program Class is divided to flexible layers which are

    • Display Communicates – Methods that are called only to display information
    • Logic  Processors – Methods that manage whole input/output processed – heart of the program
    • Object Factories – Methods that are creating objects or  changing  attributes of already existing ones

    Continue reading Software Development 3 – MP’s management System

    UML Diagram

    For over a week I was trying to transform touch on screen coordinates to 3D coordinates in game world.. as far as now.. no success.. I was trying them all.. color picking.. gluUnProject.. nothing.

    probably my math is not good enough for gluUnproject but still.. there is no way of finding good examples or tutorials how to actually us this tech.. or there is something wrong with me.

    anyway.. deadline is approaching and I am still straggling with picking an object.. if anyone knows simple solution.. i am more than happy to get it 🙂

    the other hand – yesterday I have spent couple hours with friends of mine at university pc lab on other uni project.. Software Engineering UML different diagrams. Below story:
    Continue reading UML Diagram