All systems online

Hi there again! I've decided to start blogging again. It's been a whiiiiiile since the last entry. Well it doesn't matter because all that is history - I restarted the project early this year, around February I think. Why? It was lacking all structure in code and was becoming a pain to handle and develop. So I started fresh, this time actually thinking about how things fit together. And it's going well. Recently my team size grew from 1 to 3, which is nice. Still looking for an artist though ..

Anyway, I've decided not to post lengthy posts once a week/month, but a short summary of each day I do some programming or whatever. Okay, I won't hold you in here any longer. But make sure to check back after a few days :)

I'll go write some options screen code now.

Climbing up

Today I can report, that I finished with ladders. Now I can climb up from walls and things. How cool is that?!1 The code itself may not be perfect yet, but works quite well. Onto the pictures now, shall we.

Engineer climbs up the ladder to do some engineering .. things.
















What you see in the editor is the placement of the top and bottom end of the ladder. These lines show when player can get off the ladder by crossing them.

Update #1

Hey! What's up? Today I can make my first entry to the blog. I finished a simple occlusion query. And by finished I mean it works but it's not perfect yet. :) It is based on colors, where each color represents a certain node. I render my scene to a texture using their unique solid colors. Then I read the pixels in the RTT and find out, which nodes are visible in the current frame. All the other nodes are set invisible. I don't render to texture on each frame, but after a certain time. Currently the perfomance bottleneck for this method is the reading the pixels. I'm using 256x256 RTT and when updating too often, it tends to slow down. I need to optimize the pixel reading part. Basically what I need is to extract unique colors from the texture and then work with those. My guess is I need to write a shader of somekind? There are other kinks that need to be worked out as well. One being that transparent materials are rendered solid, so when you (player) can see a wall trough the leaves of a tree, the program can't. But the overall perfomance has increased substantially, especially indoors when trees, plants and other nodes that are outside are culled. So the effort was worth it. Anyway, that's it for today. Bye!





























Next on my ToDo list: new chararacter movement model and new vehicle physics

One-two, one-two .. is this thing on?

Hey. This is the first post and I'm just testing the blog. Expect real stuff in a few days. Until then. Take care!