Flavius Alecu

It’s been a while since I had the time (and material) to post anything here. Work on BRINK is nice and cool now after E3. We’re all busy making the game more awesome everyday, but not too busy. I’ve had a great holiday week on Tenerife and now I’m back and fully refreshed.

I’ve done some work on my small 2D engine I’m work on from time to time. It’s starting to shape up now with a fairly scalable data definition language and a parser that loads content into the engine. It’s really easy to define object properties and such now. I’m hoping I can expand this into a system where I can script large parts of a game, but we’ll see how it turns out when we get there.

As there’s not much point in writing an engine without a game, I’m trying to write some game related code while working on this project. Unfortunately it doesn’t feel like I’m progressing much but that’s mostly because I have to do a lot of architecture coding right now. The project is still pretty young so I can’t write much game specific code. I might be able to get some player/enemy interaction in now since I have the entity and object manager up and running, but we’ll see. I’ll try to post a video soon just so I can can keep track of how the project evolves.

Just thought I’d post some colors. Here’s a zombie I got from my kind colleague MoP. It’s exported with 12 octree levels of detail and rendered at different levels to see the result. You would get something like this when you would cap the octree level based on the distance to the viewer. Although you’d probably not go all the way down to level 2, like in the image. As you surely noticed it doesn’t give very good results. It might look OK at a distance but still… Perhaps using some sort of smoothing to get rid of the blockiness would improve the visual quality. We’ll see when we get there. Click the image to see all screens.

Don’t you just love those periods when nothing you work on wants to function correctly? Bugs running everywhere avoiding the mighty, crushing boot of debugging. Of course you do. If you don’t, you’re probably not a programmer. If it weren’t for those times, how would you ever appreciate when things finally start compiling with a “Build Successful” message? 

Today I got more done than I dare reveal. I’m afraid I’ll wake up tomorrow realizing that nothing actually works and I have to start all over. Still, I feel adventurous so here goes.

For a couple of weeks now I’ve been stuck with a nasty bug in my voxel exporter for Maya. I tripple checked all the calculations and pretty much every single line of code (there aren’t that many) and I just couldn’t find anything. I finally managed to fix that today, almost by mistake (but not really) and now I’m happy goat since I can finally export my voxelized models flawlessly. Yay for me! Now I need to continue work on my voxel renderer. Perhaps start making some minor optimizations since I actually have genuine geometry now.

All is well in voxel land but I’ve also been doing some scripting on Airborn. I got in a custom HUD class which got rid of the modal(!) copyright tag (thanks Steffen’s buddy, wherever you are) and I managed to get some sounds in. We now have not only the weird beaver sound for Tokachu but also footsteps and jump sounds. True next-gen!

Ok, so I didn’t actually do that much but it’s enough for one day. I can’t believe I’m actually working on two projects at once without completely scrapping one of them. Doing productive work on both on the same day must win some sort of an award, no?

There’s a long weekend here on the island of Great Britain (and probably in other places too) so I’m taking advantage of this. Since I’m not at work doing the usual programming related stuff I can use this time to be at home and do the usual programming stuff.

I’ve been doing a lot of scripting on Airborn and it’s starting to shape up. I managed to remove pretty much all dependencies on the Unreal scripts, which I later heard from experienced Unreal Engine developers was a very stupid idea. Still, I think Airborn is very different compared to Unreal so no point in doing hacks just to get some free implementations. It works now so I’m happy. We have some basic AI behavior for the pawns, a custom menu and the level is starting to look great. Perhaps we’ll have a demo to show soon.

I’ve also done some coding on my voxel raycasting project. I now have a custom and naive voxel format which I’m using to export polygonal data from Maya. The exporter works pretty good but there are a few critical bugs which causes it to not actually export the data correctly. I need to fix this as soon as possible obviously.

To test the voxel files exported I made a small demo app with Irrlicht (which by the way I really like now). It’s nothing fancy but it lets me read in voxel files and display them by rendering the voxels with traditional hardware shading. I used this to make sure my voxel renderer was correct, which it seemed to be. Unfortunately this showed that there are some serious bugs in the exporter.

Hopefully I can get some things done during the weekend so I might have some nice new screens to put up soon. Until then…

Not long ago I saw a video of a high detail model being rendered at high FPS with the help of voxel ray casting. The video I’m talking about is of course Jon Olick’s SVO demo. Inspired by Mr Olick’s awesome results and in lack of anything significant to do in my spare time, I set out to create a similar project.

My attempt is of course not as in depth and only for me to see how far I can take this. I had very low thoughts about this project when I first started but believe it or not, it’s starting to shape up. Don’t get me wrong, I still think it will be very hard optimizing the code to get it anywhere near acceptable frame rates, but nonetheless, it’s not looking all too dark right now.

My current state is a small and naive renderer that loads a custom voxel format and renders it to the screen. I have a simple quaternion based camera to let me fly around and admire the blocky geometry. I render to a very low-res texture so it’s nothing impressive. The next step in my battle plan is to create a Maya exporter that lets me export polygonal geometry to my voxel format. I’d like to see some real geometry in there and perhaps even some baked textures.

Till next time…