XVidcap isn’t capable of capturing OpenGL windows very well due to my oldish CPU, so sorry for the low resolution of the video. It was either that or slideshow.
As the video shows, Tsunami now has full skeleton-based skinning support.
And it’s pretty fast too. The screen shot on the right is 50 bugs clapping at the same time on a Turion clock-locked at 800Mhz and integrated video. 60FPS, 36% CPU usage. I should be able to halve that pretty easily by adding VBO support and tightening up some of the inner render loops a bit (along with the graphics on Level 3).
Nothing really fancy going on here, just bog-standard extension of vertex positions along normals, flip the face culling mode and render solid black. I thought about doing it as a post-processing effect using a Sobel filter, but I like having the lines get smaller on the objects as they get farther away.
Sadly, it wrecks havoc with non-volume geometry, such as the antennae. Thankfully this is easy to work around by just modifying the model, but I might put an edge case in to handle this sort of thing later on, if I should really need it.
Well, I put my Labor Day weekend to good use. I gave up on trying to shoehorn Ogre into doing what I wanted (which was really impossible to begin with, since it would have never done portables) and have started just floating my own engine. I toyed with the idea of extending some of my existing rendering code, but even though I’m not going to use the engine directly, I learned a LOT from my time poking at OGRE and picked up some great ideas for library structure and design. So, I decided to start over, and, four days in, I’m making some good time.
That is an image of my previously demoed bug model rendered in the new engine. There isn’t any outlining in place yet (should be done fairly soon), but as you can see geometry and texturing are largely in place. He’s also spinning, but you can’t see that here for obvious reasons.
Also, this is using my own file format, which is something I should have done a long time ago. I was shopping around for a good model format to replace lib3ds, as it’s animation support is just horrid, when somebody at gamedev suggested I try writing my own export plugin for Blender. I love Python, I wrote the entire exporter (geometry and pose skeleton w/vertex weight info) in one evening.
Up next are:
Outlines. NPR for the win!
Skin deformer and keyframe animation. The reason I was looking Ogre in the first place, but I’m actually looking forward to writing this now that I’ve got my sleeves rolled up. Having my own export scripts and a custom-tuned format simplify the task to an incredible amount.
Just posting a quick concept drawing I did tonight for my new game. Total time taken was about 30-40mins, including scanning. Which I personally think is a little long, but I’m a coder by trade, after all, not an artist. Although I wouldn’t mind if those two roles did a flip in importance ;).
I wanted to give my Muse character more anatomically correct proportions. A lot of games take the tack of squishing characters up to make them friendlier to screen real estate, but I think computer resolutions have hit a good enough level that I can get away with these proportions, even outside of an FPS/RPG game.
Another addition is the hat. I like hats, been meaning to get a fedora for quite some time, and there is no reason for my Muse not to have a hat. So a hat she has.
Below is the result of my first go at making one of the design sketches for my bug villains. I’m going to trash it since it didn’t turn out with quite the right feel for the game I’m working on, but I think I learned enough to get it right the second time around.
Model is fully rigged and pose-able. Test poses done below were made with the Blender internal renderer.
