Project Update: Solar Flux

Feature: Lights & Effects

Things are really coming along, the last few features are making their way into the game engine.

Recently I've been working on the lighting and effects. The effect engine is alpha complete. We're really pleased with the results we're getting, by having a custom effect tool (Unholy Mess) it's allowed us to have alot of power over how the effects in the game will look.

The lighting engine is in its early phases, and I personally feel it will end up having a huge impact on the overall result and look of the game.

The following video is some test footage of both the lighting capibilities and the effects engine. Enjoy.

Project Update: Solar Flux

Feature: Mesh-Batching

In my last post, which I admit was a while ago (this is because I've been adding loads of new features to Unholy Mess), I was ranting on about Mesh-Batching.

Well since that post, I've integrated Azzaman's Frustum detection and my Bounding Volume Hierarchy code, which means non-visiable meshes are actually not draw, which inadvertantly boosts the total number of meshes that you can play with in a scene to about 100 thousand, which is actually absolutely insane.

So as a result I knocked togeather a little video of an asteroid field, with some depth of field applied (DoF is very expensive, my little laptop cries and slows down to 30FPS), I also did a quick flocking algorithm and stuck some drones in to help give the scene a sense of scale, at which point I removed the DoF. Everything is happily rendered in full HDR !

Anyways, enjoy.

Project Update: Solar Flux

Feature: Mesh-Batching

It's not as good as mesh instancing, but it's certainly quicker and easier to implement than mesh instancing.

On the 8th of april 2008, Solar Flux will be mock pitched, and our prototype demo shown to members of Team 17, so these last few weeks certainly are requiring that some corners be cut, so we can get our little presentation togeather. As a result, one of the features which we will be handling at a later date is mesh instancing, there just isn't time to get all the features into the game before the 8th of april. Without any form of instanced mesh rendering, its time to say goodbye to the idea of 10,000 asteroids on screen and approch the problem in a more pragmatic manner.

Thusly I've begun implementing a batch rendering technique, which is certainly adequete for now, on my meager laptop it begins to drop below 60FPS with 4000 meshes being draw, which is quite an improvement over the non-batched rendering result of about 800.

While 4000 meshes are available to be batched, it's more likely that the technique will only at most be used on 1000 meshes at this stage, but atleast we can render 1000 asteroids now, before that would have been a mere pipedream... Oh and did I mention that they're all normal mapped?

Project Update: Solar Flux

Feature: Unholy Mess & The Chaos Particle System.



I promised that when I had chance I would, or should I say when I had completed more of it. Which I now have, I recently added a brand new emission system.

This takes our particle engine and treats it like the filthy whore it is, an absolute Unholy Mess. I don't think any self respecting programmer could work on a space shooter without having a top notch particle system capible of thousands of different effects.

There are still pleanty of features left to go into the system, such as a hierarchy control so subsequent particle effects can be played in the correct order to achieve said final result.

Anyways I ramble too much, so without further ado... The Unholy Mess Emission Tech Demo.

The video took about 1.30 hrs to 2 hrs to generate all the particle effects, and composite the video. Some effects I admit aren't great which is probably my own fault, but I took alot of care with one or two of them and I hope it shows, with some effort some really great results can be had.

Thanks for your time.

Project Update: Entropy Earth

Feature: Applying the Skin(CPU)

It's really early on in the development of applying a correct 3D skin, to my skeleton of a tree which has been generated using an L-System, but as I actually have something new on screen I thought I'd share it with everyone.

So what's wrong with this picture? There is currently no varience in the radius between trunk and branch, there is no code in place either for correct blending between limbs, nor is there any sort of correction to the verts in regards to direction. This is afterall a very early prototype, I am currently more interested in getting features working than getting it to look all nice and pretty.

If the code is written properly, actually getting the L-System to generate a more accurate tree is a matter of L-System construction, so it can all be tweaked later.