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....

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I downloaded your demo and got a kick out of it - kinda fun. The stars and the rotating moon were nice touches. Are you using fonts for your text or a texture with the text already embedded? Cuz your text is really clean. I wrote a font module that gets font info/images from MSoft's TTF system... but the kerning never really looks 100% right.

6:20 PM EDT  
Blogger keith said...

The menu at the bottom and the help pop-up in the demo are just large textures. I'm still ironing out my font creation tools so I figured I'd save some time and just make big textures.

For font creation, I'm currently using a free program to generate a font texture and all the font information. I wrote a Ruby script to package the texture and font data into a binary font file. The debug font (the one used for FPS and the boot menu) is a large C-style array generated from the same script. The "Menu Test" in the Testbed application uses a binary font file loaded from disk.

The stars and the moon were the fun part. I thought it made it more intersting. I tried to use the proper values for the simulation as well, then just scaled the speed up, but the relative size and distance should be accurate. Although I relized that the moon mesh isn't a unit sphere (I made a new mesh in Blender at the last minute) so technically it's bigger than it should be. I wanted to put small satelites orbiting the earth but I decided against it because of time. Now I'd like to do a complete solar system simulation.

Thanks for checking it out. Now I know that it runs on at least 2 computers. ^_^

7:00 PM EDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Any luck with Stardock?

4:24 PM EDT  

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