Working on the tactical situation display elements, the vector font output was never quite as crisp as I'd hoped for but that's now fixed by keeping the 1:1 scale and changing the ortho projection matrix. Bigger works better than smaller when it comes to float accuracy with consumer level drivers that focus on games and performance I guess.
Still have the map scale to do, that's forming part of the mission terminal code. But the rest of the TSD is coming together. I need to put an upper limi
I was working in the cantina of the school the other day when I noticed a showcase by 2 (second years) game developer students. Their project for the last 6 months was to build some kind of interactive system for a rehabilitation center. I was really cool to see and to think of it that only 2 seconds students made this. Really impressive. They also made a bunch of small games but I didn't make a recording after this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiNCt0m-HXY
Another little progress update but first a diversion. Yesterday I took some time-off to brush up on gaming skills and really enjoyed Disney Interactive's "Split Second", one of the few car games I keep going back to since I typically find racing games tedious (lack of skill and patience on my part). However this game is almost pure adrenaline and I find my self coming back to try and shave off 2 seconds while avoiding exploding aircraft and collapsing control towers. Split Second is actually the
I was looking at the problem of glass again, reflections for cockpit instruments and improving the canopy and TADS optics. FSX manages to do so much with so little (a small 128x128 DDS) for shiny metal parts, such as chrome props it was time to look at adding cube mapping again.
I know this has been added to Leadwerks 2.40 but the corona problem doesn't seem to be fixed yet. Retro-fitting cube-maps to 2.31 is an easy task and the river mesh material was updated (we don't use the single heigh
I can now load models in Leadwerks Engine 3 (as of this morning):
Edit - Here's a demonstration of buffers working (as of this afternoon):
Edit - And here's a comparison of a multisampled buffer next to a regular one (as of this evening):
It's nice to see a feature in Leadwerks 3.0 that 2.0 doesn't have.
I'm getting my iMac this week. I'm going for the dual core 3.2 ghz with an upgrade to an ATI Radeon 5750. Mac is still using OpenGL 2.1, and I have no idea how good the drivers ar
Hello everyone.
I am writing this blog entry to personally thank everyone of the Leadwerks forums for helping me in all the ways that you all have.
Today, I got approved for my job at Microsoft.
This all started when I discovered Leadwerks on The Game Creators and was instantly amazed by it. Soon after, Brandon Hush and I got together and created Third Initiative for our university midterm project. We decided to use Leadwerks because it offered superior technology with great support
First of all, a sincere thanks for the feedback. It's not something to get too hung up about and it's easy to get the idea that we spend hours and hours on making HUDs pretty colours without getting anything else done. Yesterday was pretty intensive in terms of tweaks and adjustments to the HUD but not just in terms of colours.
We've added clipping regions (using glScissor() ) so items like the pitch ladder no longer intrude into areas it shouldn't, this declutters and improves overall reada
That might be a question going through some people's minds. The answer is "yes" I'm still working on it. Just much slower than before.
At the start of the project everything was working brilliantly, I'd got as far as adding an external newton into the project. I'd even got it to correctly build the physics shapes from wavefront obj files on-the-fly, and force and torque was all working too. So where did progress suddenly freeze?
The answer was the player controller. I would have to write
HUDs often used in simulators adopt a green hue and use an additive or alpha blend. It can be hard to read them in some conditions and this is something I was thinking about so I tried a few experiments, non of which I like fully.
First: To improving readability of heads up displays by down-sampling the HUD buffer to a smaller buffer (I called the hud_fx_buffer) with a texture filter, a poor-mans blur. Using the resulting 'fuzzy' version to reduce the intensity level of the background image.
Textures in LE3 give you more control. You can retrieve all or part of any mipmap of a texture to system memory, edit the texture, then send it back to the GPU. Fortunately, the engine checks the bounds of the texture so you don't have to worry about producing any blue screens of death, as can happen when you're having too much fun with GPU memory.
Here's some simple code to retrieve the texture from video memory into a system memory bank, modify it, and send it back to the graphics card:
The HMD of the new MTADS Apache comes with a number of 'virtual' items displayed to the pilot. The currently selected waypoint is made virtual in cruise and tranistion modes, the waypoint position is marked with a flat bottomed diamond with a dot in the centre. See the take-off point (W00) on the image below.
Flying with the flight path marker inside this symbol and you should head right to that spot.
Waypoint marker
Source
Thanks to "GrViper", bit of Russian press coverage courtesy of "Game Navigator". I think I like the intro about raining fire and brimestone? I had to have a Russian friend in Siberia read it out to me over Teamspeak after which he asked, "so you're interested in flight simulation then?"
Work update
Last night I added the waypoint/navigation system which is rudimentary but has the needed functions for other bits of code to insert them into an aircrafts avionics. It's a linked list with some
Spending time working on my laptop here, which now has some reliable memory from Kingston has proved to be a fantastic little work platform for developing with Leadwerks.
The FFD or Free flight dynamics physics engine is still a little rough around the edges for putting into Combat-Helo proper so I'm working on a small test platform which hooks into the Leadwerks entity update callback and calls the FFD update.
I'm not sure if this is a good method of doing it, FFD is just a flight model
A couple of days I've worked on a GUI solution, and I made good progress. I tried to make as simple solution that completely fits the style of the engine.
Of course I have not finished everything I planned but I already have a version that works.
The basic idea is to be modular and variable depending on size of screen, it must look the same on all screen resolutions, and everything happens automatically in the background.
This is how everything works:
CreateGui();
addFont("fonts/
Let's start with some code for making instances and unique copies of a material:
Material* mat1 = new Material;
mat1->SetColor(0,0,1,1);
Material* mat2 = mat1->Copy(true);
Material* mat3 = mat1->Copy(false);
mat1->SetColor(1,0,0,1);
mat1 and 2 will be red. mat3 will be blue. Shaders, textures, and entities work the same way.
Drawing commands are in. I like how OpenGL3 gets rid of all the built-in matrix stuff and just lets you deal with pure matrix multiplication. It
I have a bunch of books on coding that I like to approach slowly. Everyday I read a section or two from a book and let the idea's resonate so I can really understand them and see where they're applicable in my own work.
The latest book I'm reading is "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. It's a book full of concepts and ideas to make you a better programmer. One of the things they discuss is a principle called "Don't Repeat Yourself" or DRY.
When I initially read t
For every project, a coder is ultimately caught between 2 opposing ends of the spectrum. The first end is the goal, the purpose for developing the software. The other end is how the machine implements the code. I'm realizing that through development, we're trying to produce code with a balance between efficient implementation, readability, and of course the ability to accomplish the task it was designed to do.
You could say the most efficient implementations would always be written in some
Another disaster strikes, PC wont boot at all. Strange thing happens on the BIOS screen, the moment any attempt to detect any drives (and I tried a few different drives that I know were fine), a bright underscore character appears under the circled comma (picture above).
So apart from my laptop I'm now without a working PC and no means to fix it atm :/
Source
More flight symbology added today. Raining almost non-stop and my cars wiper motor has failed, so wasn't going anywhere.
We added a couple of items that make it possible to do some precise flying.
Velocity Vector
Acceleration Cue
The Velocity Vector is the blob on the stick that originates from the cross in the centre of the HMD. This is a representation of the direction and speed of your aircraft. Think of these as "top down" views with your aircraft in the middle, forwards move
Technically the title isn't really correct since game development hasn't really started yet. The first 10 weeks are introduction weeks, which are probably neccesary for a lot people who do not know which business unit they want to choose. As for me it has been clear that Game Development is my direction but in the mean time I get all sorts of classes from different IT directions:
System and Network engineer
Software engineer
IT manager
Human Centered Design
Technical Computing
HMD = Helmet Mounted Display
Remember when Virtual Reality was going to be the next big thing? Seems odd having to re-create something virtual in a game that is virtual, the modern Apache has evolved a bit since the late 1990s. Being able to display in the pilots 3D monocle (yes that's a joke) a lot of data to the crew about targets hidden behind objects, terrain contours. These 'virtual' items are matched 1:1 with the crews head movement unlike a lot of the symbology that is static.
The
So I'm the guy who writes 7k lines of code only to find out that "I'm doing it wrong." If you haven't been there then you probably haven't learned much.
This is going to make me sound like a complete idiot, but damn! I really feel like one. After coding as a hobby for 3 years I'm finding out now I never really knew how OOP worked and how fantastically useful inheritance and polymorphism really is.
It seems like everyday I'm learning something new about programming, languages have so muc
It's a sentence I pulled out of context from the recent Unity newsletter. It relates to a Mobile Generation Education Project, a project with a $250k giveaway to help students become the mobile innovators of tomorrow.
Now, when I was a student, we didn't have mobile phones, or the world wide web. And if we did, we'd have moved onto something else by now. Teachers point out that 60% of the jobs their students end up doing haven't been invented yet. I helped develop Risk Assessment software us
