Aug 212010
A new trailer for mod-project-gone-pro Nuclear Dawn was released yesterday. I’m glad to see a project I’ve worked on for 2 years coming close to release. Nice how they seem to have nailed the RTS overview and node structure system, all running on the Source engine. All the best & congratulations to Interwave Studios!
Aug 192010
Is it alive? Does it work?
Looks like it does. Thanks to the WordPress for Android app (one of the more slicker apps I’ve seen on the App Market) I can now blog on the go from my HTC Wildfire. Wohoo.
Aug 162010
Skull, 40000 faces
The little download counter on my super secret world domination dashboard indicates that my thesis code implementations of rendering suggestive contours on 3d meshes has been downloaded over a hundred times. Which tickles my curiosity.
If you’re doing anything fun, serious, silly (or can’t get the damn thing to work at all) with any of my implementations, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. After shedding tears, sweat, blood and probably various other bodily fluids over those implementations during the last year, it would be great to see them ending up in something awesome.
Aug 162010
Just a quick thank-you to the guys at Zombie Cow Studios. In exchange for some bug reports on their newest game Privates, I received an e-mail yesterday with free download links to their back catalogue, including the well-written point-n-clicky adventure games Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentlemen, Please. Thank you, kind sirs!
You should definitely check out Privates. It’s a game which was released by Channel 4 in the UK as an information game about STD’s and sex education in general. Don’t take it too serious though – it’s incredible fun, the dialogue is witty and the game contains a bunch of references to other games. And really now, how many games feature a level which takes place inside a cervix. Really. Downloads here!
Aug 122010
Can recommend this game. It’s a fairly linear shooter set in post-nuclear Moscow. It’s developed by 4A Games, an eastern-europe studio which had some developers from the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl games, which really shows. Play it with the original Russian voice acting, because the English voice-overs are atrocious. I like how the game shows that a good scripted gameplay experience still can provide for equal or even more amounts of fun than the most ambitious ‘sandbox’ games.
Oh, and I guess it looks pretty nice too. Hefty amount of post-processing to give it that grainy feel (cracks in gas mask, diffraction of light on screen edges), and some pretty impressive lighting effects too. This game has the best ambient occlusion rendering methods I’ve seen in a game to date.
Aug 042010
Today I found a way to render the shadow volumes used in the stencil buffer technique I posted about yesterday in Ogre3D. Sometimes all you need is a ninja and three penguins to get a good insight. These are the shadow maps for one single point light source. Notice how the ninja’s katana extends the shadow volume significantly, and how the intersections of the shadow volume with the objects themselves define self-shadowing. Not shown in the picture is how the shadow volumes extend to infinity: this is necessary to be able to use Carmack’s Reverse.
Aug 022010
I’ve spent the day reading up on shadowing techniques for real-time rendering which can be used in the Ogre3D project I’m working on. I was not familiar with the details of the shadow volume method using stencil maps. It’s actually pretty clever, and it’s interesting to read how John Carmack (ID Software) developed the depth-fail-method (also known as Carmack’s Reverse) to be able to use the stencil shadow technique in scenes where the player/camera was inside the shadow volume. This is how they established the shadows of those things creeping up behind you in Doom 3.
Here’s a comparison I performed in Ogre3D:
Some good resources (some outdated, but the basics still apply):
Jul 312010
I’m working my way through Ogre3D at the moment, to freshen up my C++/Visual Studio skills. I got my student copy from DreamSpark : seems that I’m still registered as a student, and thus qualified for free software - Yoink!. Browsing through the samples, I thought this was a nice touch: the SDK includes an ASCII shader (made in CG), sampling a 3D ASCII cube for values. It seems like a totally backwards way to approach rendering, but I like the silliness of it.
What I’ll be doing with this engine is still a bit uncertain. I’m thinking about implementing my GPU-accelerated technique to draw suggestive contours, cooking up a game from scratch (an educative experience), … we’ll see where it leads!
Jul 312010
