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Patch 0.1.6.0 has been released a few weeks ago. This patch introduced improved cockpits with lighting & shadowing, the hauler NPC ship ( static at the moment, but once the game becomes more mature there will be A.I. ), military bases and factories ( currently placeholders: undetailed and untex…
Hey Everybody, long time no see, Ysaneya here ! I haven't posted in the past 6 years if I count well. Most of you probably don't remember me, but the few of you who do should remember the Infinity project and how it all started back in 2005. It started with a dream, one made of stars and full of pr…
ASEToBin is a tool that is part of the I-Novae engine ( Infinity's engine ). It allows contributors and artists to export their model from 3DS Max's .ASE file format and to visualize and prepare the 3D model for integration into the game.
Thi…
In cameni's Journal of Lethargic Programmers, I've been very interested by his idea about using a logarithmic zbuffer.
Unfortunately, his idea comes with a couple of very annoying artifacts, due to the linear interpolation of the logarithm (non-linear) based formula.…
Anybody who tried to render to a dynamic cube map probably has encountered the problem of filtering across the cube faces. Current hardware does not support filtering across different cube faces AFAIK, as it treats each cube face as an independent 2D texture (so when filtering pixels …
Audio engine
As Nutritious released a new sound pack ( of an …
In this journal I'm going to review some of the recent work, without going too far into details. In a future dedicated update I'll come back more ext…
It is showing a station blowing up. Another concept, showing the original station, can be seen on our forums.
You can see more of his work on his CG Portfolio
First of all, Happy new year 2009 !
Looking back at 2008, I can't say I'm particularly happy about how things went. There has been some serious delays on what I intended to achieve, and it's not due to a single reason, but more to various causes that accumulated and became critica…
In the last journal, I was explaining that one of the main benefits of working on the GPU instead of the CPU is the ability to create normal maps. Of course, it would be technically possible to generate them on the CPU too, but it would be far too costly, even with multithread…
Motivation
Until now, the planetary generation algorithm was running on the CPU synchronously. This means that each time the camera zoomed in on the surface of the planet, each terrain node was getting split into 4 children, and a heightmap was generated synchronously for eac…
In the past weeks, I've been concentrating on the new website. Thanks to Amshai and Choub, the layout is pretty much finished, but a lot of components are still not yet integrated ( like the galleries, videos, forums, etc.. ). Choub is in charge of this part, so don't hesitate to ch…
In the past two weeks, I've been working a lot on "polishing" the engine. This means investigating all sorts of bugs and problems that I had noticed, but didn't have the time to fix so far.
For example, I added support for minidumps. When the engine/program crashes, the exception get…
Introduction
As you may have heard,…
In the past 3 weeks, I've been busy working on the meta-server. The meta-server is the server on which the client is first connecting. It handles connections to the server clusters ( shards ), patches, authentication, etc.. I won't go deeply in all details, but here are the list of thing…
Most people don't realize that bilinear filtering an RGBA8 ( fixed point, 8 bits per channel ) texture results in a fixed point value.
What I mean is extremely simple. RGB8/RGBA8 textures are a standard used commonly everywhere. In shaders…
Sub-tiling
The whole technique is based on sub-tiling. The idea is to create a texture pack that contains N images ( also called layers or tiles ), for example for grass, rock, snow,…
Sometimes, things that you thought would never happen, do happen. Today, I learned it the hard way.
I'm a pretty paranoid developer. I always keep 4 copies of my work, as backups, in case something happens. In the worst case, only a few days or weeks of w…
If you usually don't…
The result is a mega thread of 25 pages, each containing hundreds of thumbnails of pictures t…
- clouds don't have a coriolis effect
- no storm effect
- motion blur / bluriness in starfield
- clouds have patterns
- terrain too blue
- atmosphere too thick
- over saturation to white
- areas too sharp / contrasted
- terrain only based on altitude / too randomized
- texture pack for ship is too…
It took me months to figure out ( of course, not full time. Just a couple of hours here and there ), but I had a serious problem to combine anti-aliasing with multiple render targets.
Inn OpenGL, it all comes down to how to make the EXT_framebuffer_object, A…
First of all, a little status check. I know I haven't posted a lot of dev journals in the past 2 months, but there's a good reason for that. And it's not because I've been inactive, quite the contrary. I easily spent 80+ hours of work ( split 50/50 between normal job and Infinity work ) in t…
Which method ?
When making asteroids for a 3D game, an artist can spill out asteroids with three different methods. Simplest way is to model low poly asteroids and slam diffuse/bump maps on them with simple texture projections. There are two more advanced ways: di…
I've been experimenting a new idea for faster SSAO. To keep it short, it's a post-processing effect that only requires the depth/distance buffer. The depth buffer is blurred in a smart way ( the amount of blur is determined per-pixel, depending on the absolute depth d…