nVidia's new Parallel Nsight

This is quite possibly one of the most awesome things I have seen recently. nVidia, someone needs to bake you a tray of cookies. In short, nVidia unveiled their feature-rich graphics debugging tools for Visual Studio. I'm not even going to try to go over it here, just follow this link.

It Starts...

I set a personal goal recently to get a least one post up per month, so ready or not, here it goes! While the title screen may not make for a very impressive screenshot, there has been a fair bit of coding going on in the background. Well, as much as is possible when you have no real free time to speak of anyway. Of particular note, the GUI system has been rewritten to have a cleaner and more user-friendly interface and, as you may be able to tell from this post's screenshot, the "Bounce!" project has been started. Unfortunately, after getting a good ways into the project I learned that there is already another indie game with the title "Bounce" so I will need to come up with a different name before too much longer.

The game will basically be a 3D remake of my old Pong-type game from back in college, featuring a variety of characters batting a shiny glowing orb back and forth while moving around on hovering platforms. I intend to add a few new game concepts to spice things up a little, and ultimately I'd like to give this tiny little game a very high level of polish. This might actually even involve paying an artist or two to replace my horrible programmer art! I still don't have tons of time to devote to the project, but I am excited that things are moving forward, slowly but surely.

Font Builder - Part II

Yay, a new update! I'm not exactly at liberty to say why I don't have any free time these days, but suffice it to say that I literally get about 20-30 mins per week to attribute to continuing to move things forward. Not much, but slow progress is still progress! Between the last update and now I have reworked the font tool a bit. You can now add custom ranges to a font palette with full unicode support. Again, FreeType is awesome for helping me not have to manually decode fonts, I highly recommend it to anyone finding themselves needing to render fonts in a bitmapped fashion.

Writing this tool had the desired effect of helping me to find and fix some bugs with my font system, and now I should be in a good position to begin moving forward on actual game-related tech. Inching forward day by day, I will get this project finished no matter how little free-time I have to do it!

Font Builder

Updates, go! In a continuing effort to gather all of the things I need to make my fancy-schmancy version of Pong, I've thrown together a font tool in what little free time I have these days. This tool allows you to build font definitions usable by my engine to display text. The engine can support any standard true-type font and will be eventually extended to allow for custom bitmapped fonts through the use of this tool. The code to support the GUI environment has been rewritten and everything is a lot cleaner and more user-friendly than before. All in all it's a pretty small step forward, but at least it's a step forward. With the holiday season coming upon us, hopefully I'll find a spare couple of hours here or there to make a good bit of progress as I did over Thanksgiving weekend. Anyhow, till next time!

3DS Material Plug-in

Wow, 3 posts in a single month! Thanksgiving break has given me time to complete the model exporting portion of my 3D Studio Max plug-in utility. As you can see in the image to the left, I have written a custom material plug-in that allows you to create materials in a way directly usable by the engine, minimizing the amount of time and potential bugs that go along with creating textures and materials for game objects.

Working with MaxScript to create the plug-in is actually pretty simple. This site was a pretty nice starting point for figuring out where to start with creating the plug-in, and the MaxScript documentation itself is not half bad. I'll likely write up a tutorial on how I went about creating the plug-in at some point in the future, as some parts of it are not so obvious as others. With this, I no longer have to manually code little debug primitives to test things, so I'm quite excited about moving forward to getting the actual game started.

And yes, to answer the question, that is the Yuna model from FFX-2, and Rikku from FFX. They just happened to drop in to help me test my plug-in and make sure things integrate smoothly into my engine. The models came from a place that no longer exists (I believe), so I can't really offer a link to where you might find them, but I'm sure they're still available in some forgotten corner of the internet. . .

Attack of the clones!

In my attempts to post a little more consistently, this is a miniature progress update. The latest feature to grace the DM3D Engine: The ability to clone scene nodes and resources. The image here was generated using only primitives and the clone functionality, creating a nice (physically impossible) stack of boxes that all properly share mesh, texture, and shader resources. I am currently working on revamping and extending the 3D Studio Max plugin I began working on back in July. Once this is finished, I will be able to finally begin work on my special version of Pong. Hurrah!

Materials, textures, and models

Finally getting back into the groove of life after all of the big changes that have happened recently. I have next to no time to work on this project these days, but that doesn't stop me from putting in an hour or two whenever I get the chance (which seems to be maybe once a week or so). Anyhow, in the time since my last tech-related post I've completely revamped the way meshes are loaded and the way materials and textures are handled and I really like how nice it has become.

I've also updated the engine to be initialized using an XML config file, which makes setting things up nice and easy. Getting the window created, mesh, textures, and shaders loaded, and everything rendering is done in just a dozen or so lines of code. With my lack of free time I may be moving a little slowly, but I am getting somewhere. Stay tuned for more updates.