Dream 2010-06-12
There was some buildup; apparently something like a generic medieval fantasy plot; some random magical overlord type creature was taking over the generic kingdom and enveloping it in generic darkness and distributing generic dark villains over the generic lands. Generically.
Well, me, mike, reed and zach were armored up to fight these things (These cool black-obsidian armor suits with colored light beams), and went about doing so. Running around the countryside, slaying doom-like demons and monsters with powerful weapons; well eventually we got into a castle, and ran through it mario galaxy style, eventually finding the end boss and kicking his ass easily. As a reward, it dropped this strange silver hang-glider looking apparatus; which, allowed you to glide-fly.
So, you don the thing, and it spreads out like a pair of batwings/batman style. At that point, if you get a good running start, you generate enough lift (somehow) to go airborne, then you hand glide to gather height and momentum. I believe it had some sort of futuristic scram-jet on the back of the unit, because you were propelled quite fast, fast enough you would actually fly (airspeed) even in real life.
Since I happened to be the plane guy, I tried it first. It was amazing.
No dream about generic flying could beat this; I could run, jump and take off into the air, gliding with minimal effort, flapping my wings if necessary for a quick change in course. It was like being a bird, you could soar over landscapes, dive down through rings and even shoot your enemies down while flying. With practice you could gain altitude in any condition as well, so there were no gliding limitations.
Well, we had to go onto level two, so I was designated "dragon-man" because I could fly + shoot plasma via plasma rifle. Level two was much harder, and required some tricky aerial switch throwing, IE dropping bridges and the like to allow the companions time to maneuver over. At this point, things got difficult, and we were forced to split up, I solo, and the other three as a strike force on the ground. I flew on ahead, taking out defenses and barriers from above, fighting some of the larger sky-predators as well. The ground team pressed down into the caverns to destroy the generators powering the evil machines that created force fields and creatures.
Eventually, I got bored of being a human with a flying suit, so I typed in a cheat code and just became a dragon instead. A big red cartoony looking one, was pretty strange. (Kinda, I have a model I made of the exact creature) Technically, no abilities changed, except that shooting plasma/fire was much more powerful and much faster, although I had a shot-cap, so I couldn't fire more than 8 fireballs at a time, like old arcade games.
Being the dragon, I could maneuver in the air way easier, and hover if I needed to, plus gain a free attack bonus on everything I did, and intimidation for lesser enemies. After assaulting the tower, I flew down into the caverns to rejoin my team; turned out they were doing just fine even without flying ability, so when I met up with them they kinda freaked a little, but figured out it was me pretty quickly. (cue mustache gesture)
Then, we tag teamed moving up this complex twisted tower, full of odd gravity puzzles like super mario galaxy, moving blocks, fighting vastly upgraded iron knuckles, hitting switches, fending off mobs, solving puzzles... It had just about everything you like to do in video games, but a flexibility in approach that was unmatched by any. You could kill all the enemies, use the environment to your advantage, negotiate, threaten, or even just slip by unnoticed. There was no set "objective" to complete except the main one, although every decision had consequences. Eventually, after winding up this long tower, we came to an impasse; The only way to go was up, and I couldn't carry anyone thanks to load restrictions (wasn't THAT great of a dragon).
So I grabbed an extra gun, and went upward to fight the boss myself. Turns out, it was some generic lich demon that had no real purpose in taking over the world. I'm sure it explained some crap to me, but I just shot at it instead of wasting time talking. It ran around like the end boss (The Campaigner I think) in the N64 Turok game; Was very hard to hit. Eventually he went down, but then morphed into this giant darkness form; And began the generic projectile-pause-claw swipe-pause-vortex loop of attacking. However I was privy to physical knowledge, it never was able to even hit me in that form, and eventually gave up on it and morphed into it's TRUE form, which was some weird looking alien-dinosaur skeleton with rotted flesh dripping off it (think Odin Sphere's King Gallon). That made the fight hard, since I had trouble determining the weak spot without an obvious bright red heart to pummel. Eventually I gave up because plasma and fire was useless, and just physically tackled the thing and tore it's head off; instantly killing it but making me lose dragon powers and flight wing just like mario when he collides with an enemy.
So there I was, atop the tower splattered with rotted blood, rifle scattered on the ground, darkness turning to light again, and no friends nearby (they can;t get up the tower, lol). I just looked off into the distance wishing I could fly again, because that was freakin awesome.
I was *about* to re-don the flight suit, but then, horror of horrors:
The cat woke me up. I took every measure to prevent this from happening. But it still meowed and woke me up anyways.
$@#^*(#$& Data.
-Z
2010-06-12
2010-06-11
GHOST, Mingl, XCore, Core, XGFX
Continually working on improving all the above components;
Here is a quick overview of what all this garbage is:
ghost - Lets you make programs for X11, Windows, Mac
mingl - Draws stuff in hardware lingo
core - Does everything you don't want to write yourself
xcore - Does things you should be doing anyways
xgfx - Makes everything look pretty + move around
In more details:
GHOST - Made primarily by the Blender.org guys; this is their generic host operating system toolkit; In other words, this is the code that allows you to receive low level input events and a OpenGL context; And the ability to create windows and draw to them/receive messages from them. I've heavily modified it to include some more game-friendly features, timing looks, multithreading and some specialized input event abstractions, joysticks support and other goodies. It's at least as good as SDL, and in many ways, far superior. Hard to find something better than code that has been attacked by many people.
Mingl - "Minimum Graphics Library"; essentially a wrapper around OpenGL; but, it's designed to specifically mimic OpenGL 3.0 specifications, and does an insanely good job of managing more annoying aspects of OpenGL programming; It makes writing graphical routines trivial, where you may spend hours trying to orient yourself in 3D space using any other toolkit (that includes you, blender. F*** your armature space conventions!). However, it's also interface abstracted just like GHOST, so it can use OpenGL, DirectX, software... it doesn't care. But it is primarily designed to expose low level hardware techniques to force you to write more efficient graphics code; and does a ton of things internally (like managing VBO/IBO/RC, states, transformations, ect...). It is still missing FBO operations, but those are trivial if you have a GL 2.0 + system (just need to sit down and do this)
XCore - Operating system and hacking level tools. A quite extensive library I made of tools I use frequently, such as texture conversions from DXT to / from anything, mathematical algorithms, VA/IA generation algorithms, numerical methods, statistics, even some unique IK algorithms and other tools. IT also contains agressive memory management and a slew of commonly used structures.
Core - The heart of everything; Based on the std C++ library; core contains separate components that should not rely on any one other component, like vec3 vec4, matrix3x3, matrix4x4, index_array, geo, and a lot of other commonly used, but often not needed tools. Chances are if you need any one of these tools, you need all of them.
XGFX - My rendering system built ontop of using mingl as the renderer interface. IS still under construction for the resource abstraction and management of massive resources.
No good screenshots; Just the city level again after implementing multithreaded loading + mingl improvements.
Here is a quick overview of what all this garbage is:
ghost - Lets you make programs for X11, Windows, Mac
mingl - Draws stuff in hardware lingo
core - Does everything you don't want to write yourself
xcore - Does things you should be doing anyways
xgfx - Makes everything look pretty + move around
In more details:
GHOST - Made primarily by the Blender.org guys; this is their generic host operating system toolkit; In other words, this is the code that allows you to receive low level input events and a OpenGL context; And the ability to create windows and draw to them/receive messages from them. I've heavily modified it to include some more game-friendly features, timing looks, multithreading and some specialized input event abstractions, joysticks support and other goodies. It's at least as good as SDL, and in many ways, far superior. Hard to find something better than code that has been attacked by many people.
Mingl - "Minimum Graphics Library"; essentially a wrapper around OpenGL; but, it's designed to specifically mimic OpenGL 3.0 specifications, and does an insanely good job of managing more annoying aspects of OpenGL programming; It makes writing graphical routines trivial, where you may spend hours trying to orient yourself in 3D space using any other toolkit (that includes you, blender. F*** your armature space conventions!). However, it's also interface abstracted just like GHOST, so it can use OpenGL, DirectX, software... it doesn't care. But it is primarily designed to expose low level hardware techniques to force you to write more efficient graphics code; and does a ton of things internally (like managing VBO/IBO/RC, states, transformations, ect...). It is still missing FBO operations, but those are trivial if you have a GL 2.0 + system (just need to sit down and do this)
XCore - Operating system and hacking level tools. A quite extensive library I made of tools I use frequently, such as texture conversions from DXT to / from anything, mathematical algorithms, VA/IA generation algorithms, numerical methods, statistics, even some unique IK algorithms and other tools. IT also contains agressive memory management and a slew of commonly used structures.
Core - The heart of everything; Based on the std C++ library; core contains separate components that should not rely on any one other component, like vec3 vec4, matrix3x3, matrix4x4, index_array, geo, and a lot of other commonly used, but often not needed tools. Chances are if you need any one of these tools, you need all of them.
XGFX - My rendering system built ontop of using mingl as the renderer interface. IS still under construction for the resource abstraction and management of massive resources.
No good screenshots; Just the city level again after implementing multithreaded loading + mingl improvements.
2010-06-04
TED Exporting + Mingl
"Walk the Walk"
I talk a lot of smack about things that I do. It's really nice when I visit artists that I can actually pop open their files and show them how to export them so I can load them in game.
It's much easier to convince people you aren't just blowing smoke when you can show them what you are doing in real time. Hard to dispute that kind of presentation.
So, more improvements on the TED file's; the exporter is more robust, and I'm in the process of verifying the data output is correct. So far this seems to be true, I've seen textures, models, scenes, and just about everything in the file working perfectly, especially animations. It's wonderful to just be able to load in a file directly exported from blender, and import it, then see your work immediately and accurately duplicated in a realtime game.
So here are some example shots; the next long haul is building the xgfx resource management system so I can maintain a logical coherence for all of these vastly different resources + files. Resources are essentially reference counted, but are not cleared until flagged to do so. Instance objects exist physically, so once they terminate they just dump all data. Plenty of re-use optimizations, tons of weird paradigms like "resource-source-instance" ideas with meshes; But this will be demonstrated eventually.
In order from top left clockwise;
Rayne from BloodRayne on PC with a static keyframe applied,
two of my custom levels,
Charizard from Super Smash Brothers Brawl on Wii with standard_wobble applied and hacked texture
another custom level,
The first boss from Dragon Blade on Wii, with wobble, note the material colors are showing now; easily removed.
Bowser Trophy from Super Smash Brothers Brawl on Wii
Rayquaza Boss from Super Smash Brothers Brawl on Wii with wobble.
Looks like I need a damn artist.
-Z
I talk a lot of smack about things that I do. It's really nice when I visit artists that I can actually pop open their files and show them how to export them so I can load them in game.
It's much easier to convince people you aren't just blowing smoke when you can show them what you are doing in real time. Hard to dispute that kind of presentation.
So, more improvements on the TED file's; the exporter is more robust, and I'm in the process of verifying the data output is correct. So far this seems to be true, I've seen textures, models, scenes, and just about everything in the file working perfectly, especially animations. It's wonderful to just be able to load in a file directly exported from blender, and import it, then see your work immediately and accurately duplicated in a realtime game.
So here are some example shots; the next long haul is building the xgfx resource management system so I can maintain a logical coherence for all of these vastly different resources + files. Resources are essentially reference counted, but are not cleared until flagged to do so. Instance objects exist physically, so once they terminate they just dump all data. Plenty of re-use optimizations, tons of weird paradigms like "resource-source-instance" ideas with meshes; But this will be demonstrated eventually.
In order from top left clockwise;
Rayne from BloodRayne on PC with a static keyframe applied,
two of my custom levels,
Charizard from Super Smash Brothers Brawl on Wii with standard_wobble applied and hacked texture
another custom level,
The first boss from Dragon Blade on Wii, with wobble, note the material colors are showing now; easily removed.
Bowser Trophy from Super Smash Brothers Brawl on Wii
Rayquaza Boss from Super Smash Brothers Brawl on Wii with wobble.
Looks like I need a damn artist.
-Z
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