My appologies for not having update in a long time.

Enless Skies is currently on temporary hiatus for a few reasons:
• On the third day of our work week, something very unfortunate came up in in Geoffrey’s family, and he had to leave on very short notice. This made our close one-on-one collaboration that had helped us be so productive before impossible.
• Soon afterwards, Geoffrey’s computer died, and he is currently in the process of getting a new one.
• School has picked up again, so progress can be a bit slow.

I myself have spent a good bit of time on other projects, for example helping work on Wolfire’s new future game Overgrowth. Much of what I learn in my work for them will be of great use later on when we get further with Endless skies.

I will post about some of the stuff I have done there specifically soon.

Happy Easter!
-Johannes

The second day of our spring break development week is over and done with.

New developments:

• UV Mapping is working fully now.
• A Skybox (or rather sphere) is implemented now (will have some nice screenshots to show there tomorrow)
• Getting more aquainted with WorldMachine2 and beginning work on our terrain:

Old Sketch for the Main island

WorldMachine2 Render of the island

Among our to do list for tomorrow:

• More work on the dragon model
• Gradient based Skies that can change the time of day.
• Basic Heigthmaps.
• Re-writing various Mathematical functions in assembly for more speed.

À demain!

Today was our first day of working on Endless skies during this free week.

With a good 12 hours of work it was quite productive.

Here’s what was accomplished today:

• The Camera Class was fully implemented and is finally working in both XYZ rotation and translation (though for the time being we won’t use Z rotation much since that rolls the camera. This however will be very useful once we get to flight) Much frustration and fun was had trying to get a monkey’s head to spin properly. Here is a screenshot from Geoffrey’s Computer, with an earlier version of the dragon’s head:

• Carnot now has a full png loader, capable of loading *.png files of any size that are either: Bitmap/RGB, 8bit/16bit, and interlaced or not, fully according to Portal Network Graphic Specifications (although we did have some issues with the ’save for web’ photoshop png files. Might look into it more, but really the way things are right now is pretty much all we need.
• UV Texturing is implemented but still buggy.
• Looked over some possible compression and image storage technologies.
• Finished the Head of the dragon. I had a version of this before, but today I added the teeth and cleaned it up a bit more:

(Normal Detail Mouth Positions)

(High Detail Head Shots)

Tomorrow I hope to put some work into learning how to use World Machine 2, as well as working more on the model and once Geoffrey gets textures working properly he will implement a sky-box (or probably dome in our case) which I’m hoping will support both panorama textures and gradient textures (used to store the different colors of the sky for different times of the day all in one texture. More on that at a later point.) After that, it will be time to start work on heightmaps. and the actual terrain.

See you tomorrow!

-Johannes

This week both Geoffrey and I will be working together thanks to our coinciding spring break.

At the moment Geoffrey is furiously coding the camera class (Geoffrey: “GAGH! Segmentation fault again!?!?”) And I am working more on the actual head of our dragon.

Overall Carnot is looking good though: We did a stress test with over a quarter million polygons, yielding a frame-rate of about 100 on a fairly good computer, and that was before adding VBO (vertex buffer objects) which makes it a lot faster. Much optimization will still need to be done and more advanced shaders are yet to be implemented, but all in good time

Here is a tentative To-Do List for the beginning of this week:

• Finish the Main Dragon model (more on that later)
• Get a version of Carnot running on mac (we’ll first try to just use X11 like the Gimp)
• Finish first-person Camera movement
• Get Image loading working properly
• Add a Skybox.
• Settle on some more of the file-formats (after reading its documentation geoffrey has learned to love pngs) and just how we will structure the data for the game.

(Notice how most of these are Geoffrey’s Domain. Not much for a graphics designer to do before Graphics are even implemented.)

Once these basics are out of the way, due to the nature of the game, namely being able to fly over a huge landscape, one of the most important aspect to work on this week will be the terrain, which means effectively managing large volumes of height map data, viewed from a high altitude where culling is useless, while still getting a reasonable frame-rate.

The first step towards that was the implementation of LOD (Levels of Detail) which Geoffrey discussed in the previous post.

I will be looking more into World Machine 2, which seems to have a lot of nice features including weathering simulation, tiling of large textures, and is able to export data like snow-buildup or vegetation density in a realistic manner, all information which we are planning on using in our engine.

We will post daily updates on our progress.

In the meantime, I will leave you with a test Screenshot of Carnot:

-Johannes

Endless Skies

Disclaimer: the following blog post is lengthy. Grab a snack.

Flying Concept sketch

A major focus of this blog will be a number of Games and program I am working on, or would like to work on in the future.

One Major such project has been unofficially in the works for about 2 years and is a collaboration between me and Geoffrey, a close friend of mine who will be more properly introduce in a later post.

Said project is a Dragon game, which from now on I will refer to by the working title of  ”Endless Skies”.

(continue reading…)