This game was called “Game3″ just because this is the 3rd XNA project I’ve opened on this computer, and that was the default name. I’ve put in somewhere between 500-900 hours into this project (schoolwork being mixed in there makes … Continue reading
Terrain collision was a little harder than I thought it would be. This is owing to the fact that the terrain is a concave body, and many contacts are possible with a single sphere and the terrain. Contrast this with … Continue reading
In the last few days I wrote a physics engine from scratch using a technique that no other 3D XNA physics engine (that I know of) uses yet: Speculative contact continuous collision detection. I’ve been looking for a good physics … Continue reading
If you’re like me then you’re tired of seeing the terrain, and you want to see the gameplay. Sure, I want to work on nothing but the gameplay at this point. However, the gameplay takes place at night — and … Continue reading
I bought a new GPU today, and after installing it and restarting, visual studio decided to stop working, producing random errors (e.g. “Unable to start program. Cannot find file specified.” when trying to run the project). After wasting an hour … Continue reading
Yesterday I added over 1000 (one thousand) moving point lights to the terrain. On the PC this was fine. The scene partitioning used by my forward rendering setup uses a lot of CPU time though, so on the XBOX this … Continue reading
In a GPU Gems 3 article (skip to section 1.5) they solve the issue of texturing terrain at various slopes by using triplanar texturing. The following image illustrates the problem. I’ve done something similar to solve the problem of stretching on very … Continue reading
Today I worked on getting the terrain texturing to match the new procedurally created level from yesterday. In the image above, a dead grass texture is applied to flat portions of terrain, a green texture on the edges at intermediate … Continue reading
I haven’t posted in a while since I’ve been working on physics code. Progress on things that I can actually post screenshots of has been slow. Before next month I’m going to buy a video card that is fast enough … Continue reading
The code that culls terrain chunks was using a 3D bounding box vs camera frustum test for each terrain chunk, which was incredibly slow. On the XBOX 360 this was taking about 4ms for ~200 intersection tests. At 60FPS you … Continue reading
I made this tree last night, and started working on extending the collision testing system (which currently only tests for collisions against the terrain). I do UV mapping in 3D Coat. You might notice that I didn’t map one of … Continue reading
I’ve spent the last few days working on spatial partitioning, object pooling code (and fighting with stackoverflow about it), and other necessary performance optimization code. Most AAA titles seem to support something like 5-6 dynamic lights. I’m sure you’ve noticed … Continue reading
I have a priority queue of game features that need to be completed. E.g.: [-3] Pure black rolling fog to simplify fog shader. [4] Dual paraboid point light shadow map implementation [2] Terrain diffuse lighting based lightning effect. [6] Moon … Continue reading
I’ve added a bloom filter, which every big title seems to use these days. The bloom filter takes the brightest parts of the image, blurs them, and mixes the result back into the scene. This makes lights glow, softens bright … Continue reading
I’ve built a GGR (Geographical Grid Registration) component for the terrain, which will permit better draw call arrangement and in particular, better effect state management when drawing many point lights — which is a goal. Since the terrain is arranged … Continue reading
In order to light the terrain, normals must be generated from which we can measure the angle of a light ray’s incidence with the terrain geometry, so that we can decide how bright a terrain triangle will be. For the … Continue reading
Since the terrain is made up of varying level of detail chunks, when two chunks of different detail levels meet, their edges do not match up perfectly. This results in gaps/cracks in the terrain. To fix this, I’ve created a … Continue reading
I put pathfinding on hold because when implementing a hexagonal coordinate based path finding algorithm, I realized that there would be various difficulties with dealing with constructs imposed on the world such as the terrain grid or quadtree and any … Continue reading
In my previous post about the challenge of path finding on the XBOX with XNA, my A* algorithm benchmarks were abysmally slow. Recall from my previous post that pathfinding was done in 3D, including diagonal movement, allowing 26 possible directions … Continue reading
My reality is that I can’t make every single day a game development day. Today I had to catch up with class work, and run various personal errands. To maintain momentum though, I did find time to do a little … Continue reading
Yesterday, a friend taking an AI course showed me his midterm exam, and I noticed that there was an A* related question. This got me thinking about A* and after 6 hours of (trying to) make an SMT solver for … Continue reading
Today I made a notification manager and some notifiers. This allows the game to intelligently queue notifications like notifying the user that she has a new ability or that an event is about to occur. There are now notifications at … Continue reading
I created the 2D overlay, the 3D holder tentacles, and I diverged somewhat from the draft designs seen in my previous post. The orb contents swirls and is composed of multiple layers — I’ve made numerous optimizations to make this … Continue reading
I actually have several possible indicators drawn out including bars, circular/spherical orbs and diegetic displays. The diegetic display would be a glowing bar drawn on the character in the game world, visible only if a 3rd person camera is always … Continue reading
I’ve done a menu in XNA before, so working from that code and the gamestate management sample as examples of how to proceed, I built the following menu. Getting all of the animations and transitions right was a surprisingly long … Continue reading
For the past two years I’ve been writing down specific ideas about a game that I’ve wanted to play for years, but no one has ever made. I have documented everything from user interface design to various algorithms to network … Continue reading
