My first year in college is now over and done with.
It was definitely a learning experience, and I was definitely out of my comfort zone sometimes.

However now summer is here and I’m back in Chicago.

Right after the tests were done I finally got to actually trying to learn HTML, CSS and PHP for real and put together a preliminary website and Portfolio.

Thanks to that Portfolio I was able to get a job at a media and advertisement company called ‘Either Way Works’ where I am now working hard on designing parts of their new website.

Specifically I am using the 3D engine ‘Papervision‘ for flash to make the elements of the site that will be in full interactive 3D.

This is very challenging for me, never having done 3D work with flash before, and i’m absolutely loving it.

You can see a preliminary test I finished today of a spinning gear at the top of this post.
You can move around by using the AWSD or arrow keys, and dragging the view with the mouse

I will be adding more interactivity to this soon and many other cool elements, like Augmented reality that uses your webcam.

Among all that Geoffrey and I plan to keep working on our game, more news on that soon as well.

Cheers,

-Johannes

I’ve been working hard to catch up on my HTML, CSS, PHP and javascript, and so far have a working system that reads image gallery data from an xml file via simplexml and some custom-made functions. nothing fancy, but good practice and it works.

The current theme/look is only temporary, i’ll be sure to polish it up in the future, maybe even have switchable CSS styles.

For anyone that is interested in learning, or getting up-to-date on the latest web standards visit www.w3schools.com

Special Thanks to Wolfire’s Jeff Rosen who graciously helped me work out some bugs.

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

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!

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

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

Johannes: We need this feature. Can you code this feature??

Me: Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but I’ll try. Would this be ok?

Johannes: But it needs to be bigger! Much bigger! And more complex! And more realistic! And sum (-inf, +inf, BIG)!

It took all of three seconds for me to realize that no commercial engine would provide the power Johannes was looking for. I’d have to write one from scratch, specifically tailored to meet his outlandish demands. Thus, the Carnot Game Engine was born (named for the Carnot Heat Engine).

At the moment, I am putting finishing touches on how it handles static objects, and finally have something concrete to talk about. Carnot composes static objects out of a Node and a Mesh. A Node contains meta-data seen by users, and most importantly, a transformation matrix that defines the object’s position. A Mesh contains an object’s geometry. When deciding how to handle objects, I came up with three basic goals:

1) No geometry should be stored in memory more than once, regardless of how many nodes use it (example: rendering a classroom. The chair mesh should only be stored once, even if it is used by twenty chair nodes around the room).

2) In any single rendering pass, geometry should be sent to the GPU at MOST once.

3) Handling different LOD’s (levels of detail) should be automatic, and require no changes to actual geometry.

This lead to the following simplified object structure:

When a Node is loaded from a file, it has a list of LOD’s and corresponding mesh files. Carnot checks whether the mesh is already in memory, and loads it if necessary. Otherwise, it locates it in memory. Thus goal #1 is satisfied.

It then connects the Mesh to the Node for each LOD at which the Node’s geometry is stored in the mesh. The Mesh contains a list of LOD’s, each containing a list of Nodes for which the Mesh is the Node’s geometry at that LOD.

Convoluted? Yes. Memory overhead? Yes, a bit. Fast? Extremely. Let’s consider what happens when rendering a frame. Rendering is done per-mesh, as follows: If the mesh is being stored as a VBO (vertex buffer object) in video memory, it is set as the current vertex array (and how Carnot decides what to store in video memory will probably make a post of its own). Otherwise, its geometry is sent to the GPU. Then, Carnot iterates through every node pointer in the Mesh. If the Node’s current LOD is the same as its LOD in the mesh, then the OpenGL Modelview Matrix is multiplied by the Node’s matrix, and the geometry is rendered. Thus, goals #2 and #3 are is satisfied. All you have to do to change what LOD a Node is rendered at is to change one integer, and assuming that Mesh is in memory, it will automatically start rendering.

So what’s next? A few tweaks to the VBO’s, and ideally a PNG loader for textures. After that it’ll be time to hammer out a good file format, so Johannes will have something to play with, and will hopefully hector me less about my progress

~G2

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”.

Back-Story

The story behind Endless skies begins during my junior year in High school. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had just been released, and Geoffrey, myself, and a couple of friends were hooked. We loved the huge expansive world, the beautiful terrain, the Lucious Forests and stunning graphics. We marveled at the fact that you could play it for literally weeks, without ever touching the main storyline. (We also played many other games that would inspire us such as Wolfire’s Lugaru but this post will focus on ES4)

But all was not well in Cyrodill. Over time Geoffrey and I noticed that ES4 was lacking in a few departments, most importantly a multi-player aspect which was non-existent. Often we yearned for cooperatively exploring the world or taking on monsters as a group effort. We were not asking for an MMO; Simple 2 player coop would have been enough for us, and though we were not to be satisfied in this regard it got us thinking:

If we could change this game, what would we do better?

We had many long discussions on the topic and slowly we began to expand outwards and think not solely about ES4, but about making a game of our own, and how we would do something that had not been done well before.

And then one day it hit us… Why aren’t there any good dragon games out there? We could make a dragon game… And not just any dragon game, not just riding a dragon, or simply going down a rail-style path and destroying x-many villagers, but a massive, free-to-go-anywhere world, where you are the dragon, and similar to Oblivion’s style, you would be able to choose what to do freely.

Once we had thought of it it seemed obvious. To the best of our knowledge no such game had been made at that point, not how we wanted it at least.

Over the course of a year we slowly figured out what we wanted to make:

The engine

1. We would write our own engine. Geoffrey had already done a good bit of work programming with C++ and OpenGL, and strongly believed that for what we wanted, writing the majority of the code ourselves would be best.
2. As such Geoffrey would write most of the code and I, having more experience with computer graphics would provide the art.
3. This engine would be cross platform. With Geoffrey being A windows/linux and me a mac, this was the only possible solution.
4. The engine would support large maps, huge in fact. the whole world would, similar to oblivion, be one large chunk, no loading screens, no small sections, all accessible in one piece.
5. Multiplayer could easily be done, but wouldn’t have to be in MMO style. small, locally hosted games would be enough.

The Game

1. You would be a dragon. Not riding a dragon, but actually being one.
2. This means you would be able to do anything a typical western dragon is known to do: Run, Fly, Perhaps breathe fire, and do so anywhere you chose to. First and foremost the game would be sandbox-style, with no limitations on what you do or when.
3. Though the player would be able to be ‘evil’ or ‘good’ if he chose to, it would be important for the dragon not to be portrayed as the typical fantasy game dragon, namely the big bad grotesque monster. Ofcourse dragons are mythical beings and therefore there is no wrong or right way of portraying a dragon, but I believe that a dragon would be powerful, yet graceful, strong, fast and brutal, yet beautiful and wise. A ballance of opposites, and it would be up to the player of how they chose to tip the scales when they played.
4. First and foremost what would matter is the experience of flight and really feeling as though you were the dragon. Once again, how it would feel to actually be a dragon is up for debate, but I feel that the thrill of flight, the speed, the power should be a state of adrenalin-filled bliss. I have a very clear picture in my mind of how this should feel.

Where we stand now

Since we decided that we would make this project, between school and starting college, and moving to different states, progress has been bumpy at best. We took a break from the project for a few months but have recently begun work on it again.

Geoffrey has finished the bare bones of the engine, and over the months I have  begun to make some tentative concept art.

Neither of us have ever attempted anything like this, and as such we do not know if we will accomplish all that we would like to.

In the coming months I will try to show our progress in this here blog, and talk more in depth about various aspects of this Project that I’ve only touched on here. Hopefully I can get Geoffrey to make some posts about the engine as well.

Please let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions or just comments in general =)

In the meantime, I think this post has gone long enough, and so I will leave you with a few pencil sketches I’ve made for the project.

Flying concept

Dragon Concept Sketch

Critter Sketch

Waterfall Village Sketch

If you enjoy watching the discovery channel, history channel, etc. you have probably at one point or another seen a documentary or two on asteroid collisions. Sadly most of the times the depiction of what such a collision with earth would actually look like is hardly breathtaking, and you don’t grasp the scope of just how big and powerful of an event this would be.

A few years back I found a video of an asteroid crashing into the earth that did a really nice job of showing, very nicely rendered, just what such a collision would look like, but it was very low quality, and with Japanese naration and subtitles.

However today I found that someone had uploaded the original footage, in HD on youtube, and to top it off, there’s pink floyd’s “the great gig in the sky” playing in the background.

I strongly encourage for you to click the little ^ arrow in the bottom right, and select HD, then watch it in full screen. It’s breathtaking:

For Those of you that are curious about what’s happening, here’s the original footage with the original english narration, from the discovery channel special: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTKau14cvQ4

First I assumed it was a reference to the recent ‘the day after tommorrow’ but turns out it’s more meant to referrence the original planet of the apes.

Nonetheless, I just thought this was way cool. See attached photos ( Taken with crappy iPhone camera. ) I wish I had had time to come back later when it was fully set up.

- Johannes