Shadow Graphics

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