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December 04, 2005
I've spent a couple of hours this week end to try to fix the seams problem. You see, when doing texturing, i'm using a normal map in order to correctly texture and light a terrain patch. Each terrain patch has got a local heightfield ( basically, a square area covereing a part of the planet ), and …
November 30, 2005
I haven't posted any screenie for a while, because i don't have new "visual" things to show.. but here is a new one:
(Sorry, i forgot to turn on antialiasing when i took it).
Since i'm debugging the terrain engine, clouds are missing (ah! at least you can see the terrain and the atmosphere shading).
I…
(Sorry, i forgot to turn on antialiasing when i took it).
Since i'm debugging the terrain engine, clouds are missing (ah! at least you can see the terrain and the atmosphere shading).
I…
November 27, 2005
Just a small update. I've more or less completed the optimizations this week end. I still have a few things to do, but that can wait. The framerate was around 75 fps at surface altitude, 2 weeks ago. It is now around 120 fps, a 60% improvement.
I'm now going to work on improving the quality (nasty t…
I'm now going to work on improving the quality (nasty t…
November 25, 2005
I haven't posted any update since a few days, but as usual it doesn't mean that i've been inactive. I've been optimizing the code (it's not completely finished, but it's progressing well), but today, as a distraction, i coded a procedural name generator for the star systems. There will be billions …
November 14, 2005
So, the 4E4 contest is over - congratulation to all the winners.
Once upon a time, i wanted to participate to that contest, but wisely after a few weeks, i decided it would be conflicting too much with my main project, Infinity, so i abandonned the idea.
Now that the contest is over, i can safely pos…
Once upon a time, i wanted to participate to that contest, but wisely after a few weeks, i decided it would be conflicting too much with my main project, Infinity, so i abandonned the idea.
Now that the contest is over, i can safely pos…
November 14, 2005
This week end, i've been working on a few optimizations.
As i suspected a huge CPU bottleneck, i added a CProfile class to my code, which works hierarchically. You call a CProfile::begin(title) function before the piece of code you want to profile, and a CProfile::end() function after. These calls c…
As i suspected a huge CPU bottleneck, i added a CProfile class to my code, which works hierarchically. You call a CProfile::begin(title) function before the piece of code you want to profile, and a CProfile::end() function after. These calls c…
November 07, 2005
I'm still progressing. Last week i've been doing a lot of work on the atmosphere shaders (will that stop one day?), especially the parameters at sunset. Another thing i still have to do is the transparency of the atmosphere at night, since at the moment it's fully opaque (so all you see is black, y…
November 02, 2005
Thanks to everybody who sent in some suggestions for the terrain textures. I found a nice site that sells a huge terrain texture pack (> 200 textures at 1024^2) for a low price (How in the world terrain texture's pack). Hopefully these are of a good quality, and adapted to what i'm looking for. …
October 31, 2005
I produced these a few days ago but forgot to post them:
Texturing on that second shot isn't very good, i know (somebody even mentionned a "golf course", and i can't say i blame him :p).
I'd like to mix my lookup texture with a set of real textures. But for that i need a set of textures (grass, rock,…
Texturing on that second shot isn't very good, i know (somebody even mentionned a "golf course", and i can't say i blame him :p).
I'd like to mix my lookup texture with a set of real textures. But for that i need a set of textures (grass, rock,…
October 29, 2005
I'm still working on the terrain integration and texturing.
It's progressing well but i'm still not happy with the atmosphere haze. It looks pretty good in the screenshots, but when animated it's not as nice. The haze seems to become "red-ish" ( it's very sublte ) in the distance, rather than blue.
I…
October 26, 2005
So, i finished both Quake 4 and FEAR this week end. I'll only be speaking of the solo, since i haven't got time to get far into the multiplayer.
Quake 4: a good surprise. Very similar to Doom 3, but that was expected. More action, more scripts, but as linear as its brother. The game is dark, but a b…
Quake 4: a good surprise. Very similar to Doom 3, but that was expected. More action, more scripts, but as linear as its brother. The game is dark, but a b…
October 25, 2005
So, i am now looking for a 3D Artist who can model/texture space ships or space stations. This is a freelance position with a small pay, not enough to get rich, mind you, but better than nothing. If you know any talented artist who might be interested, please ask him to contact me. Thank you.
October 25, 2005
Been a while since i last posted some screenshots:
Things are becoming messy, to say the least. It looks nice and clean in the screenies, but i still have to face a high amount of bugs or problems. I've recently been working on matching the lighting with the sun direction as seen through the atmosph…
Things are becoming messy, to say the least. It looks nice and clean in the screenies, but i still have to face a high amount of bugs or problems. I've recently been working on matching the lighting with the sun direction as seen through the atmosph…
October 21, 2005
For a while, i've been unhappy with the colors of my atmosphere. When the camera was positionned on the planet surface, perfectly under the sun direction (hence at noon), it didn't really look like daylight. There was a large band of white at the horizon, and the blue color high in the sky was too …
October 18, 2005
By popular request, i have posted two new wallpapers (1600x1200) on my website. You can also get them directly here:
Sunset
Moonrise
Sunset
Moonrise
October 17, 2005
I'm progressing well on the terrain integration. I have fixed a problem in the frustum culling code, which caused some planets to disapear when they were close to the edge of the screen. This actually wasn't a bug, but a restriction that i was unaware of, to the standard frustum culling algorithm (…
October 12, 2005
I partially solved the Z-Buffering issues. One of the problems when rendering a planet, is that (unless you're cheating), its dimensions are so big that you get Z-fighting very quickly. Today, i tackled the problem by reworking the piping system, and adjusting the ZNear/ZFar values for each planet.…
October 10, 2005
I've been pretty disapointed by ATI in the past year. It looks like the golden age of ATI is done. Since the Radeon 9700, ATI has improved their drivers a lot, and the developer support was excellent and responsive. But since a year, i've submited driver bugs twice and have been ignored - a simple …
September 30, 2005
Yesterday i tried to implement quickly some trees on the landscape. Unfortunately, the test didn't work out very well.
When generating the last levels of the terrain LOD, i'm placing some trees randomly over the patch surface. The trees are made of two crossed quads with a texture on it. For each ve…
When generating the last levels of the terrain LOD, i'm placing some trees randomly over the patch surface. The trees are made of two crossed quads with a texture on it. For each ve…
September 29, 2005
September 29, 2005
So, i've fixed the normals bug i mentionned in the previous entry. Just to have fun, i also added back the heightfield geometry, so that the terrain's no longer flat. Cracks and seams are present but i don't care since it's only the texturing prototype, not the terrain one. For the same reason, i'm…
September 28, 2005
So, i've discovered a major bug in my texturing code. I'm not scaling the normals amplitude with the terrain patch's size. I think this is the cause of the mismatching look between low-altitude slopes and high-altitude slopes. More on that later, hopefully i'll fix it soon.
Am i posting screenshots …
September 28, 2005
I promised it a few days ago, here it is:
Terrain texturing prototype video (10 Mb Divx 4)
I've fixed a lot of little details, implemented blending to hide transitions (although some popping might still be visible sometimes), but keep in mind that what is shown in the video is only the texturing prot…
Terrain texturing prototype video (10 Mb Divx 4)
I've fixed a lot of little details, implemented blending to hide transitions (although some popping might still be visible sometimes), but keep in mind that what is shown in the video is only the texturing prot…
September 27, 2005
It's nice not to see any repeating pattern, thanks to procedurally generating uniquely every terrain patch. This is a shot of a mountaineous area as seen from 5 km above.
Here is one closer to a coast line:
September 27, 2005
So i've finally implemented the texture manager and the cache. I've also added a simple quadtree that refines the textures based on the distance to the terrain patches. It's working pretty well.
I'm a bit disapointed by the terrain textures though. It looks pretty good in the screenshots, but quite …
September 26, 2005
By adding more noise octaves and adjusting the parameters, i succeeded to make the texture look less blurry and generally, have more details than the last one.
In other news, i've discovered a driver bug on ATI cards, from Catalyst 5.5 to 5.9. Some operations in a pixel shader get corrupted, and som…
September 25, 2005
So, i just finished "Farenheit". I don't regret buying it, especially as it's an adventure game, a genre that is pretty much dead now. Unfortunately, it's far from being perfect.
The good:
- the scenario (at least the beginning - the end is.. hum... too much Matrix like for me)
- the user interface: p…
The good:
- the scenario (at least the beginning - the end is.. hum... too much Matrix like for me)
- the user interface: p…
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