Current development status
Currently, all development is geared towards the implementation of the Forward+ renderer, command based rendering queue and GOAP base AI with all 3 approaching working status. Expect updates/screenshots/videos. In the meantime, development can be tracked over at XP-Dev.
Autumn 2013 - Winter 2014 Progress
Current development update
- Multiple obstacles / multiple agent support
- Navigation mesh generation and caching is working for both imported geometry and terrain and path finding between 2 given points on said mesh is calculated using A*
- Implementation is based on the very powerful ReCast library.
PhysX triangle mesh cooking with caching to/from file is currently working without major issues.
Also, more work is being put into the new in-engine editor. Currently, only navigation mesh recalculation is supported:
Debug info rendering is also extended with render target preview, skeletons, axis gizmo, bounding boxes, etc. :
Some other work in post processing, optimizations and general code cleanups is also done as a side-task, but navigation is the main goal for now.
- Current side updates:
- - HDR rendering is newly introduced to the code and can be examined in the BloomPreRenderOperator source file.
- - Camera classes are now fully quaternion driven and the main code can be examined in the camera source file.
FoV: Why it matters!
A small Youtube video demonstrating the effects of various "field of view" angles in games.
Most games, especially console ports do not include any FoV options and some are stuck at a hard 60 degrees horizontal. While 60 is fine for TVs in the living room, it is not OK for PC gaming where the monitor is usually 1 to 2 meters from your eyes. Some people can get motion sick from low values.
I would recommend to any developer to add an FoV option (slider in the options menu, config file setting, console command, etc). The excuse that it will break rendering does not hold ground. (The Darkness 2 case - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPDq_q... - is clear evidence).
Any UE3/4 game has FoV options (config file minimum), any CryEngine game has FoV options (console commands minimum) so why don't some idTech based solutions (like CoD: MW3, look it up.) allow you to change this on PC?
Two scenes are presented: an outdoor environment and a small cluster of objects to simulate 2 different gaming environments.
I am not a designer, I am not an editor, I am a programmer, so please excuse the video quality.
A small dedication to our P.R. manager
This is a small "I love you" message to Geo that I posted on Youtube earlier this year.
Thought that carving it out of solid ground would show off terrain handling in the engine. The number of polygons in the VBO is huge, but batching and frustum culling makes rendering possible on an old Radeon HD4000 series.
P.S. "Te iubesc" = "I love you" .
Reminder: BLOGS!
Just a friendly reminder, that although nothing new has been posted for some time (due to the lack of relevance for the overall project), our activity can still be monitored on our blogs:
Also, remember we are on Facebook and Twitter so keep an eye out there (also on the various widgets on the site and blogs).
Thank you!
Light Branch Features
Short update:
As development on the light branch is nearing conclusion and the merge with the main trunk is getting closer, some things changed from the original ToDo on to the final version of the branch:
- Radiosity is postponed for a later date
- Deferred renderer is still buggy but interchangeable with the forward renderer with a simple recompile
- OpenCL support is postponed for a later date
- Multi-threaded asset loading code is added but untested for now
Features that made it in:
- Light model revamped completely
- Shadow model changed to match those found in SDK's such as Unity or UDK
- Hardware occlusion queries for visibility checks
- OpenGL3+ support only
- Cleaned up a lot of code and classes