2006-07-10

Demo complete, downloads available

I just finished my 3D demo for Stardock and sent it off. If your interested you can download it from here. Also my tesbed application for my 2D stuff is also available here. They require Windows and DirectX 9. A graphics card would be helpful, but I think it will run without, albeit rather slowly.

I had a lot of fun working on the 3D demo. The fact that I had an implied deadline, as I wanted to send it as soon as I could, helped me to work on it more than has been the case with my game project. And once I got some stuff on the screen I couldn't stop.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do at first. I just added functionality for lighting and the camera at first. The first data was all hand coded arrays. Then I wrote a Ruby script to extract data from an X file and write out a C file containing the vertex data. Once I had some stuff working I decided that an outerspace scene would look nice instead of just a bland model viewer. Plus a normal mapped earth would be cool. The end product isn't great, but it's mostly what I wanted for the demo. But I can think of a lot more I'd still like to add, like an animation part, with skinning, and other rendering techniques, like environment mapping, and more lights for the normal mapping.

I've got the programming bug now, so hopefully I'll get more done related to my game. And I'll post more often if I have something to talk about. Until then....

2006-07-04

Quick Update

Just thought I'd post an update since I haven't posted in a while. I recently moved to Ann, Arbor. Still getting settled but I'm mostly unpacked. Waiting for school to start in the Fall. I now have a cable modem, which is nice after having dial-up for over a year. (I'm watching the shuttle launch stream right now. Never watched it before.)

I applied to Stardock for a job, since they are hiring game programmers and are local. I'm currently in the process of making a 3D demo for them. I sent my testbed application with my resume but it only has 2D stuff in it, so they wanted to see some 3D. I've been busy all weekend trying to put something together. I made my first branch in my SVN repository. This way I can avoid putting all the HACKS I'm making into the trunk's code base. I'm trying to get the demo done as quick as I can so there is a lot of temporary hacks happening at the moment. Plus this way I can make isolated changes that only affect the demo without relying on #ifdefs all over the code. I may upload the demo to my web space at school and add a link to it here if anyone is interested.

Happy Coding!