alternative spaceship in action...
Community Forums/Showcase/alternative spaceship in action...
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After our little conversation about "arrow" shaped spaceships in astoroid clones I've decided to show what I mean by extreme alternative, hehe... (click to download space.zip!) Meant only as a showcase, it's slowly becoming a game anyway, hehe. Almost everything is rendered at startup including object lighting and fractal backgrounds as well as the generation of secondary things such as stars, lazers and the likes. But, just so you know, on my 3Ghz 8core I can skip precalculations and render the spaceship in realtime at 60fps without a problem.    |
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| Pretty cool! |
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| Takes a while to do the pre render but looks really cool :) Would be interesting to know how you achieved that effect. |
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| dude...why do all of your apps kill my machine? Even a little space ship thingy and some stars causes my computer to lock up when I resize the window. What DO you do under the hood anyway? ;) lol.. |
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| Makes me wonder, too, haha! Resize always works, even on slower machines, but MAXIMIZE can somehow send weaker machines into a koma and I can't explain it. There was a moment when that didn't happen, I think, but a small anticipation... like it has to work something out and I have no clue what. Maybe it's a timer thing? I could suspend the timer while maximizing... hmmmm...on my fast machine I can have the spaceship fly about and resize, maximize and restore while it's doing that, which is actually kinda fun. Once it runs, though, does it run decently smooth, MGE? @Pete... As to how I am doing the spaceship, it's pretty simple, actually. I render a single frame of its normals (rgb = xyz of the normals). Then I create an image with how ever many frames - in my case 360 actually for a good coverage of all angles. I then turn it into a pixmap along with the normal map and a color map and render the lighting with a direct lightsource rotation around it. Voila! Now we have 360 lit frames of a spaceship which correspond directly to rotation angles. I then just use the rotation value as frame number (of course with a modulo so that it wraps around continously). @jsp... THANKS! 8))) |
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| It's becoming a game, slowly but surely... ...I didn't mean for it to happen, but I can't help it! Click on the spaceship in the first post to keep download latest version! (MGE, I still can't figure out what the maximize troubles are, but it really just looses input, while it's still running. Try it! Spawn some enemies or give your ship some good speed and then maximize! You'll see that everything keeps going....I'm still wondering if the timer simply makes the event queue fail?! And again, it never happens on my 3Ghz!) |
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| Doesn't seem to lag with a bunch of mines floating around and at full-screen. I love the graphics style :) |
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| YAY! THANKS, TIM! 8))) |
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| why don't you have the game display fps and mine count on screen to see how our gpus do? |
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| you are one awesome artist!... jeeze, you even made that sound editor look great. I like the nice faint blue fade in the first example better than the curved one in the background this time around though... |
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| Uh, AH, all great ideas! Yup, well... I mean... I gotta eat, but just real quick, there's a new version up! THANKS!!! 8))) |
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| Runs very smooth, very nice looking. ;) Resize still results in a lock up. Spawing mines doesn't register right away, pressing space to restart does not work. Must be a max gui thing? In a real game, wouldn't you just pre-render in a 3d app and save the frames to a AnimImage? |
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| Space works for me.. This is like that middle mouse button thing in Syntaron. Taron, are you still using brl.maxgui...? |
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| is it possible to release this in a zip file or and installer... I can't get the .rar apps to work on my computer :( |
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| oh ...yes, sure! But you should go and get Winrar, really! I've never even seen any system that can't run it... or would be deadly scared of that one! ;) space.zip But I won't maintain the ZIP, unless people ask for it?! I like rar very much and it's wooping 8% smaller... <lol> Thanks for asking, though! (NEW VERSION, by the way!) |
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| Nice... source? |
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| Nah, it's not something people should see, hahaha, it looks horrible! Aside from that, I'm kind of protecting my rendering routines a little bit, because they're growing into something more special. Eventually I might well share a lot of it, but I have to become a better Blitz programmer first. Dealing with writing entire programs teaches me a lot, but mostly about just how much I still have to learn. A part of it is disciplin and consistency. ...it's sorta like finding my own groove, you know. For example the naming conventions for variabls, types and other objects. Code structure and logic is also subject to consistency and is in a still considerable state of chaos in my case, although I am getting better... (this is project number 3 and just a gimmik, so I'm not yet ashamed.) On this one I'm actually just writing in BlitzMax's own editor, which is charming but rotten in many important ways! Undo and Redo is total crap and can ruin your entire code (I started to save everytime before I even think of undoing more than one line). Selecting is crude and annoying. Should you select the last word of a line for copying it easily decides to contain the return as well and pasting it anywhere then kicks up the return at the end, pushing the rest of the line into the next... Also, an all time favorite of mine is alt+select, just going along columns. Blitz doesn't have that and in light of the above I'd be almost scared to get it, hahahaha! My synth I'm writing in Blide, which is in many ways nicer, but also has annoying aspects that I just don't know how to control, yet. I mean, I really have just started with all of this, so more times than not I'm blaming my inexperience for what I perceive as flaw or uncomfortable in there. I am, however, deeply used to programming in Visual Studio and I really like how it feels for the most part. It feels like it's weighted well for all the normal editing maneuvers... ANYWAY (digress,digress)...I tell you all this, (not that you would read it, hehe) in order to explain for why I'm not releasing my sources just yet. If I have some nifty little things I'll be super happy to share them, but as long as MGE kicks me in the balls everytime I show something I certainly won't let anyone see my mess, be it that you may look at it as an example, LOL. But frankly, I also want to find my own edge first to understand what I can or should release and what not. I've had bad experiences with something as silly as tutorials at a time where I didn't have a handle on what's going to happen with this stuff in the industry. Bad doodoo, truely... BUT, now I go back coding... much more fun! ;) Thanks for asking, though! If there's anything specific you'd like to see, let me know! |
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| i like zips over rar's as windows opens them nativly getting winrar demo just for one file then nagged once in a while by it when i look at another months later ... |
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| yo I never belived that I would run into taron on blitz forums :) A world known 3d artists on blitz forums, welcome bro :) |
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| Looking good, Taron. I'm assuming you drew the spaceship in a 3D modeller before importing into Blitz for the render? Any chance of a screenie of the game for those of us who don't have Windows? |
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| Haha, wow, I thought I was safe from my reputations here, hahaha! Thanks Maximo! 8))) It's a wonderful joy for me to goof around with this blitz, programming freely and finally exploring games and other apps I could make. Not to mention that I can make my work interactive, YESSSS!!! 8D @John my workflow: - model lowpoly subdivision based model in lightwave (ship had 210 quads, whilst having been wasteful!) - run it through zbrush to make displacement details and colormaps - rendering in messiah:Studio (output: Normals, Colormap, Specmap) If other machines wouldn't be so slow, I would've made animated maps for realtime lighting in bmax, which works beautifully here. But I know it's tough. However, the spaceship is just an image (3 images, well 4, but that's a different story), let me show you the raw pieces:  Normals are used for computing the lighting, colors multiply the lighting, specularity is a mask for adding computed highlights over the rest, while I should rather call it glossiness as I much rather control the sharpness of the highlight then the strength in this case. Before I do all this I create an image in blitzmax with however many frames I want for the lighting pass. I tell this to my lighting pass and how many degrees I want to cover and it spits out however many frames over my desired range of degrees... fairly simple! 8) I'll add a few snapshots to the top, but it's not really worth it, yet. I'll replace them later... @Ginger You sold me on it... I'll migrate to Zip then... (i tend to deal with things that annoy me and almost forgot about the buy online reminder in winrar, while they SO deserve it.... damned....but even i'm too grudgy to choke up the 2bucks50 it costs...don't ask. ZIP IT IS! |
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| Don't worry about my low spec madness and comments. Keep chugging away on the higher spec. I'm stuck in "casual game" land worrying about every little frame hiccup on my crappy intel 82845G gpu. I'm starting to think it's a maxGui thing that's causing your apps to behave strangely on my computer. Blide is awesome, are you a plus user or standard? |
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| @Ginger You sold me on it... I'll migrate to Zip then... (i tend to deal with things that annoy me and almost forgot about the buy online reminder in winrar, while they SO deserve it.... damned....but even i'm too grudgy to choke up the 2bucks50 it costs...don't ask. ZIP IT IS! $2.50 is that all, ive never read the website, i just dl'd the demo to 'unzip' something cos windows cant mind you ive never tried making a zip with windows (never had to) perhaps its extract only? on mine it did its x frames of 180 iir then called itself 'rock and roll' and promptly needed task manager to beat it with a "ctrl alt delete" enscribed baseball bat |
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| http://www.7-zip.org/ |
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| I thought winrar gave you the option to create zip files. |
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| Cheers, Taron! I always think that if I just know people's workflow, I might magically reproduce their artistic flair... but maybe not! :) |
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| Sometime I hate forum codes that link away from your reply when clicking on anything like a name... ridiculous... I wrote this nice thing for you John, but now I'm too lazy to write it again... short: Workflow is normally the result of an idea, not the other way around! tip: Draw smily first, then give it hair, then robot-suit, then flower in hand, lean against tree infront of mountainous landscape! Then you're ready! 8) @Ginger... OUCH!?! Would you mind telling me about your machine (cpu speed, make) and OS? @Jesse...that's what I'm doing! I still love winrar... I think i'll buy it after all. ($29 by the way) |
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| dual core (XP) with onboard gfx (probably the culprit) via/s3g unichrome igp with 64mb (probably shared with main ram) havnt tried it again as ive been feeding ipod and now its decided to virus check (again) will give it a go on a reboot incase something else borked it |
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| nice work! very cool effects. Just wondering how does it work... is it a software renderer you wrote yourself or is it minib3d?... either way it is very interesting. :) |
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| Hmmm...I'll eagerly await your next round of checking it. I've noticed that things like Skype on lesser laptops can radically cut into the performance by frequently interrupting it, while it still won't crash it, though. The maximize is still destructive on such machines, but well... I'm really not doing anything outrageous, once the initial render is done, but I'm actually hoping it is me and not bmax. As suggested by Framework Assistant I'm using the BRL.GLMax2D Framework....hmmm |
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| Runs, resizes and maximizes like a dream here on my stock Dell Latitude D620 laptop. You need to reverse the vertical scroll of your star layers though. I love this style! It looks and feels very organic. Don't forget to take a peek at Absolute Blue :). |
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| UH, HAHAHAHA! Yeah...funny, now that you mention that... LOL. I thought there was something funny, but totally dismissed it... 8))) DONE! (updated) Yup, I'll have a look at it, too! THANKS Stayne! You know you're my Asteroid hero! 8) |
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| "BRL.GLMax2D" You're using OpenGL and not DirectX? That might explain some things on my computer. |
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| Yup... i even thought i read some place that blitz would use opengl eitherway... don't know the exacts anymore, can't find the thread, but it's alright... |
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| Yup... i even thought i read some place that blitz would use opengl eitherway It most certainly does not. |
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| Just tried the d3d7Max2d framework and it runs fine here, but on the laptop it totally failed... ...so yeah, if anything it kinda seems to say that it tries using it. The quote, by the way, was in context of line drawing or something like that... |
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| What version of Bmax are you using? |
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| Are you STILL using the defunct version of MaxGUI? |
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| v1.30 And eh...I'm still on the regular MaxGUI release... looking at the maxgui.bmx it's version 1.20 |
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| nope it still died with hourglass mouse over window and when right clicking the taskbar to close the list comes up blank redownloaded incase you had bug fixed (it read like you had), still the same, task manager to the rescue |
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| I can't explain it, but it would help if you could hint if you've encountered similar problems with anything else, preferably a different blitzmax game compile?! Thanks in advance and I'm really sorry to hear that! |
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| an artist, a programer a musican, man of many talents :) hehe very nice to see your interactive work, this is such a simple game you should consider also porting it to iPhone, look up unity3d.com I've bought it, has lots of promisse. It can do 2d games, you just ignore the one of the axis :) There is indie version that is quite cheep. |
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| btw I've tested the exe on my work laptop Compaq 6710b, after all the loading I get blank white window and nothing happens :( |
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| there is a chance that I'm pushing the GFX board memory a little hard, I'm not sure... it's a question for blitzmax infact... I don't know how it handles larger images?!? One other thing is the potential "impatience", if you were trying to move the window, while it is calculating it may just look white, while it's still finishing the process... You may just sit back without moving it and see if it finishes the "blob". After that it should open into space, hehe. Honestly, I'm not seeing exactly what I am doing that is so outrageous, but I hope I will find out soon. It's all one big experiment and it begins to annoy me at that I have to say. But well... maybe I stop, I'm not sure. Let's see if there's anything that can pick me back up, but not knowing my limits is really unpleasant. Thanks, though. Sorry, again, to hear that. |
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| Taron don't be discouraged so soon! |
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| seems to run fine on my old and pathetic computer. ------------------------------------------------- xp (sp2) amd xp2200+ (1.80GHz) 1 GB ram GeForce 7300gt(512mb) @ 1024 x 768 ------------------------------------------------- btw the lighting effect looks really cool. |
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| Any non power of 2 texture will be resized to the nearest power of 2. So a 1024x768 image will be 1024x1024 internally for instance. Anytime you push more graphics into vram that the gpu can handle, you will get severe paging as the gpu pulls/pushes graphics in and out of vram. This will kill an app and a frame rate. When you do your image frame creations, make sure you delete (null) the old objects and do GCCollect() right afterwards to free up the resources. I've found out that if you do a garbage collect on unused TImages right after removing them, it immediately releases them from vram. Otherwise you have to wait till Bmax does a garbage collection on it's own. This demo runs fine on my system, except for the screen resize. I don't have maxgui, but for starts, you may want to code the same demo without using maxgui. I think the way things are latching into the render pipeline might be bogging a few things down due to maxgui. |
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| Honestly, I'm not seeing exactly what I am doing that is so outrageous, but I hope I will find out soon. Nothing is really 'outrageous', just that people usually don't use maxgui for *just graphics* (usually only if gadgets are necessary - like a map editor); thus the problems you are getting into, no one else has had yet to experience. What really is outrageous is the version of maxgui you are using :P |
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| I've desperately tried switching, but it creates errors as soon as I build modules! I can't compile any maxgui app anymore after that... I have no idea how or when, but for a brief second it appeared as though i was able to compile with a copy of the SVN, but when i thought that's my opportunity to try framework assistants suggestion of importing maxgui.maxgui, not only did it fail to compile, but ruined maxgui itself again, so that i couldn't compile anymore, same as before. So, I've been trying that in about 100 ways, which is why I'm not giving up "SO SOON", but rather patiently and intensely try to figure it all out and stay on track, but it makes it damn f#%$ing rough on me, I'm very honest here. MGE, THANK YOU, that was one other thought I had for a while now, how to do garbage collection when i know there's waste! Fantastic... and good idea, I'll try n... OHHHHH, the reason, get this, oh man, the reason for why I kept making maxgui compiles...oh dear lordy... is a wild one. After having tried to do the SVN hookup, which worked fine for blitzmax itself, but not at all for maxgui (FOR ME! BECAUSE I'm HOPELESSLY FOOLISH), I struggled hard to recover and get anything to compile with maxgui anymore and in the process I must have done something that wouldn't allow for anything to compile unless maxgui.drivers are imported! Just yesterday in my frustration I uninstalled Blitzmax and made an all fresh start again, encountering these problems from a different angle and with a better sense of security. Even with the regular built of maxgui, if I was so bold to let blitz build modules, it would go through gui and ruin it for me...(same compiling error on maxgui apps as before!)...is that normal? Now you know two more things about me (on top of the foolishness that is!): - can't for the life of it get SVN of maxgui working - couldn't compile anything unless maxgui.drivers were imported(not relevant anymore!) |
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| - can't for the life of it get SVN of maxgui working The forums are here to help, if you'd like to ask. - couldn't compile anything unless maxgui.drivers were imported(not relevant anymore!) That's a problem? Yes maxgui.drivers has to be imported (in your case, windows, you should only need to import maxgui.win32maxgui). |
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| hmm.. sounds like things are a little "weird" on your IDE dev kit Taron. I've never used SVN for Blitzmax apps, I just download complete installs from the download section in the account menu. In any event, your obviously one step away from complete guru level, so keep at it, you're one of those guys bound to discover new and exciting ways to do things. It's nice to shake up things once in a while. :) |
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| <blush> ....thank you, Dave! Feels like there's hope for me after all, especially now! 8) |
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| you should only need to import maxgui.win32maxgui Ahem... I think Plash means MaxGUI.Win32MaxGUIEx! :-P |
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| I must say... it's a pain in the neck NOT to use MaxGui... I think it drives me too nutz... one of the main gimmiks of the game is the resizing of the window, for example. Also I had tremendous troubles to just deal with all the inputs, while I did solve all that, but man... wonna read a sample of my brief odysee: Mousemove events don't seem to be recognized, so I went for the classics ( MouseX(), MouseY()...) Made me think I could just screw the whole event concept and go totally low... As I come to MouseHit or MouseDown I realize there's no MouseUP, which is actually quite vital in my engine (if I may call it that). Albeit in the meantime I had all sorts of inconceivable pains to get any of this to work smoothly or even at all... I ended up making a hybrid with events and used mouseX() and Y() to get my movements elsewhere. However, Whyever, I didn't get nearly the performance out of it then what it was doing under maxgui. Certainly I'm doing something wrong, but what the heck... so many steps backwards and still no banana (or what that was, LOL). Certainly a fruitcake, that's for sure! 8P So for the time being I'll see how far we get with making maxgui work fine... Thanks, Seb and Tim! |
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| Just for shits and giggles there's a new version up.... ;) |
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| Taron - reply to my benchmark thread when you have a chance. ;) |
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| Just for shits and giggles there's a new version up.... ;) Is it just the blur/speed effect? It's awesome! |
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| OH MY... download now! This is fun! 8))) I've decided to start up differently... I think that's far more entertaining. |
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| You might want to try doing a PollSystem call in your loading loop, I easily got it to stop responding just by clicking on the window (it was still loading, I just couldn't see it until it was finished.) |
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| errrrr.... yet another thing I have to test on the other machine...yikes! I'm not sure how brutal this will impact the build-up, but if it has to be it has to be...thanks! |
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| Alrighty, try it now! 8) (thanks again!) |
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| Thrust stuck and I lost control of my ship. Looks very cool while it lasted! :) |
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| LOL.... eeeek! I'm sure it's still the same trouble, where one ACTUALLY looses control quite literally! Events don't register any inputs anymore, while the rest goes overdrive... or rather... moves on. |
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| Is this version using maxgui at all? |
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| Try this one... ...it's perfect on my machine with FLIP 1 (but it shows funky crazy wild traits on the laptop... size of window effects speed...(???)...whilest GFX claims to send Vertical Blank...no clue!) (and yes...they're all on maxgui!) |
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| no bugs on my machine |
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| FINALLY! I got the MaxGUI svn to work... so get the latest update of "space" up top! :) |
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| Does anyone else have the problem where clicking sends the spaceship's speed skyrocketing so that it blinks around the screen, and then slows down to a stop again? The same thing happens when I shoot mines... the mines go at like mach 4, and it's really unplayable. |
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| funny stuff... some gfx cards act like they wouldn't send proper vertical blank triggers...don't quite know. Maximize the window and tell me what happens! I'll upload an update in a moment, too... I'll write a post! |
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| Alright, try it NOW, Buggy! 8) If for some reason the window goes black if you maximize or enlarge it, simply update your gfx drivers! Should work beautifully! Now I'd really love to get a lot of feedback to see if it runs everywhere decently!? |
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| And another rather intense update! I can't believe I figured out how to use C code now, because I have two tons of my procedurals and other nifty routines which are sure to make this quite interesting! 8} Not to mention that I do still prefer to write in C (for old times sake) and have a feeling that certain things may end up running faster. But I'm not so sure about that... can't tell just yet. Anyway, get the update, it's already quite a bit prettier I think and truely smooth as far as I can tell... |
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| C? Oh cmon now.... now you're cheating. The joy of bmax is to get all these toys running in a high level language. ;) |
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| Woot! 21FPS!! What you don' now? |
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| errrrrr....Tim, would you refresh my memory on your system specs? What's your gfxboard and how on earth is that now possible? You're not janking my chain? I switched to directx, that's about the major thing I've done in terms of performance change! I felt like prefering openGL myself, but it was the culprit and had to go... I could make it a choice, though! And that rhyms and what rhyms is good! |
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| HEY, I've uploaded a something just for you! Try it out, please, and let me know if that behaves any better... I've also updated the directX version to make perfectly sure they're both the same. |
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| Works perfect here in Dx mode. Slows down to less than 30fps when there is about 20 mines active. Based on the amount of rendering, it shouldn't slow down that much. Could be collision realted? I don't use the internal bitmap collision handling, I have no idea how fast that is? Just import both opengl and dx and have it selectable at game start. ;) Graphics are very nice. There's a game forming for sure in this one. ;) |
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| Just import both opengl and dx and have it selectable at game start. ;) Seconded. would you refresh my memory on your system specs? What's your gfxboard and how on earth is that now possible? EDIT: Specs in sig! HEY, I've uploaded a spaceGL.zip just for you! Try it out, please, and let me know if that behaves any better... There we go.. 64FPS. DirectX was doing everything slower (the graphics generation goes ALOT faster in GL, as is also evident by the FPS in the DirectX version).I have previously noticed OpenGL being faster then DirectX (I think they showed in some of the other 'Benchmark' threads). |
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| this latest version... the one with the much better, now awesome looking nebula, is very choppy on my machine. this wasn't the case with the previous versions. |
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| Yeah, I'm having a hard time detatching myself from the framework, hehe... gotta see into how I could arrange for the switch without bloating the file too much. (I like it slender, you know) 2 dmaz: have you tried the GL version as well? (see a few posts above!) 2 plash: LOL guess I was a bit in a rush and didn't notice it in the signature?! Somebody ready to tell me why on earth we have the wrench in the system for damn openGL? BLITZ TEAM, WOULD YOU PLEASE LOOK INTO THAT? It's a horribly redundant annoyance, while at least it turns me into one, hahaha! But don't take my laughter lightly...it's the giggle of agony! |
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| 2 plash: LOL guess I was a bit in a rush and didn't notice it in the signature?! I added it after posting that, realizing it made no sense to keep having to post it! No worries :) Yeah, I'm having a hard time detatching myself from the framework, hehe... gotta see into how I could arrange for the switch without bloating the file too much. (I like it slender, you know) Keep your framework! Just add an import to brl.d3d7max2d and at the start have the user choose which graphics driver to use. |
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| Your wish is my command! :) (turns out that importing the d3d7 drivers isn't inflating it as much as I was scared it would.... (phewww)... by now it's pretty fat eitherway, while about 350kb of it are graphics. Good thing the whole sound will only add a few bytes, hihi...well...yeah. 8) Anyway, you got it! Thanks for the push again everyone! AND THANKS FOR ALL THE WONDERFUL COMPLIMENTS! (totally forgot to shout that one out!) Oh I have something for you that'll be just so much fun. It's not in this update, yet, but I'm sure I'll have it in a few hours.... |
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| Heres something to throw into the spanners. Why not try using the threaded blitzmax functionality to "stream" calculation of the ship renders in the background. If video memory is causing you nightmares, it could be interesting to calc angles you know are going to come up soon and render them in a seperate process. I take it all of you post processing is done in system memory. You could make it so the rendered angles have a lifetime counter before they are dropped and need rendering again. If the angle is used, or the angle of the ship is getting close to the players current angle, then the life counter would decrease slowly. Otherwise it would rapidly decrease and then be freed. You wouldn't have to free it from machine memory, it could just from graphics memory. Kinda like a refined asteroids garbage collector if you like :) |
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| Very nice idea! Scares me to death, but it's very nice. You wouldn't believe the bashing my head would get from those, who for what ever reason don't have multithreaded machines, hahaha, but naturally I could find some way of checking for it and then try my best to pick automatically. I'll have to run some experiments with the threads, that's for sure! Thanks for the inspiration! 8) |
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| Oh no.. 8core = 8 threads? LOL.. :) JK!! |
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| If your reallly worried about a couple hundred kilobytes use UPX. |
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| HAHAHAHAHAHA, Dave! 8)))) Plash, UPX, sounds interesting, I'll look into it! I think I'm getting to where compression becomes an interesting option, assuming that that's what it is?! |
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| Taron, in a world of terrabytes...a few meg for a space game or breakout game is no biggie. :) Hell.. my game is going to chime in around the 30meg mark it's just a simple click/match game. :) |
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| Plash, UPX, sounds interesting, I'll look into it! I think I'm getting to where compression becomes an interesting option, assuming that that's what it is?! Yep. UPX is for compressing. |
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| Hehe, 30Megs, the horror! <lol> ... kidding! ;) Yeah, I remember years ago when I was into UT for some reason I was a little shocked to find out how many gigs it eventually swallowed. Nah, I just love the little things, you know. There's something compelling about getting a lot out of a little. If I was left to the deepest depth of coding, I would probably try to do 40k games again, hihihi... man, imagine you could virtually paste a great game into a codebox, LOL! There's something really wonderful about it, kind of magical, you know. Seems like there ain't too much magic left right now, but I'm digging! 8) |
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| the opengl zip above was smooth as silk! I love a high level explanation of the nebula routine if it's not a secret! |
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| Well, it's only partly "secret", since it's my very own noise formula, but it has it's basis in perlin's noise. You can find plenty of examples of his procedural foundation. However, I took off from that and developed some proprietary turbulence algorhythms that create more complex and bizarre shapes with nearly the same computational efforts. This implementation is a little simplified, but it's fun already, I think. I wrote a bunch of procedural plugins for messiah:Studio, after effects and even lightwave (in the good old days). I think if you have enough bravery, you'll find plenty of ways to go beyond the basics of the noise and may even stumble across my lil' tricks! ;) |
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| yeah, I assumed its base was perlin but with something else I didn't recognize... very nice... now, create of few of them slightly different so you can size,color,rotate them realtime very subtly! :) not super realistic for something so far away but it can look really good. |
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| Well, I have an idea for going from level to level, which would involve coming closer to the nebula or rather going deeper into space. I like the idea of rotation, while I then should change the aspect ratio to square. I still have to look into how to go about the multithreading. Eversince my initial mgui troubles with the SVN I'm a little scared with recompiling the modules, because it always resulted in mgui compiling failures... I still have too much to learn. Anyway, thanks, dmaz! I consider your idea as very encouraging...maybe it will become a nice little game?! 8) I've also just bought BLIde Plus... Yehah! ;) (UPX working beautifully!) |
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| New version is up with a few beautifications! :) Magic wrapper that won't need to have the items vanish on one side to appear on the other. I wished there was a more elegant solution, but it's doing nicely, too. |
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| My first sound experiment added... is in the new version! Try it out and let me know how it works for you? It's just a test. |
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| Hah epic. Works fine for me. |
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| the default sound driver doesn't work very well on vista... huge delay, there is much talk about this on the programming forum "FreeAudio DirectSound" and "DirectSound" work without delay on my machine. but "FreeAudio DirectSound" has some noise problems on some machines. DirectSound seems to be your best choice for all versions of windows unless you choose a third party like fmod or bass... |
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| DirectSound seems to be your best choice for all versions of windows unless you choose a third party like fmod or bass... Or irrklang. |
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| Taron: I'm getting the same problem in OpenGL minimized mode, but fullscreen works fine. DirectX works fine, too. Am I the only one getting this problem? |
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| Re: multi threading -- You would have some problems when it comes to send the processed images to the graphics card.. with threading. Youd just have to allow your threads to render in system memory and then flag when its ready to send to graphics. Only the main program should be accessing your graphics enviroment, but it is fine for you to twiddle with sys memory as much as you want. (as long as you apply the apropriate locking). Even without a user having a multi-core system, they could still take advantage of this. Your system probably has TONS of cpu power left over, as the majority of the runtime will be GPU intensive!. So as long as your game engine is running in the main core, your render threads are not going to interrupt the game too much (on a single core). Naturally with the second core+ cpu's they are going to have an improved performace! Keep it up anyway, its amazing what a WELL DONE graphics overhaul can do to an old game idea. |
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| Ah, I'm finally back! I already started missing all this! And -wow- did I miss stuff! Very cool! Thanks Skn3[ac]! I'll definitely dig into the multithreading as soon as I get a handle on it. I've uploaded a version using directsound, too! Let me know if that works any better? I'll make a selector later, too. |
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