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NVIDIA Competition 2008 / [PhysX Comp 2008] Darkcoder's entry

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dark coder
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Posted: 6th Jul 2008 13:36 Edited at: 21st Oct 2010 09:14
This content has been relocated to my website where I can better update all my project pages.

Hoozer
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Posted: 6th Jul 2008 17:15
@ dark coder: As always you have a very nice idea and I'm sure you finish it so easy like in the other compos!
It looks really fine and I'm sure it could be a lot of fun to watch/play it!

Good luck with your entry! (Well, I suppose you don't need luck, cause you are so good in making games! )


Hoozer

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DP-Sw-Mode-Comp-Entry (updated to V. 1.4):
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=109846&b=5&p=0
Dared1111
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Posted: 6th Jul 2008 18:04
Sounds cool. Would like to see it in action


Where can I get the codes. I know how to build it with codes. GET IT. I HOPE U UNDERSTAND. DUHH
LeeBamber
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Posted: 7th Jul 2008 13:12
My tip is not to try and fill the sea with fluids We're not quite at the point where we can have large bodies of real water yet but we are marching in that direction. The current fluid system is great for making splashes though so puddles (lakes) in your island that things drop into will create a nice effect. Also, perhaps experiment with rain and thunder, etc. Good luck!

"Small, smart and running around the legs of dinosaurs to find enough food to survive, bedroom coders aren't extinct after all "
Xsnip3rX
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Posted: 7th Jul 2008 20:18
sounds too much like Battlefield... you get points for defending stuff...

Dared1111
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Posted: 8th Jul 2008 00:06
This thread deserves more attention...So does the board.

Anyway. When your island defends will it take on how you defend? Or will there be a set algorithm?


Where can I get the codes. I know how to build it with codes. GET IT. I HOPE U UNDERSTAND. DUHH
dark coder
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Posted: 8th Jul 2008 05:31 Edited at: 8th Jul 2008 07:55
Quote: "My tip is not to try and fill the sea with fluids"

I didn't even come close to entertaining this idea :-p., and yes rain could work nicely, maybe even give the user the ability to spawn clouds that rain and thunder .

Quote: "sounds too much like Battlefield... you get points for defending stuff..."


Yes.. points for defending, how did I not foresee other games using this gameplay mechanic . If anything this will be closer to tower defence, but there is no tower and you don't have to defend as you can't lose so it's pretty much a sandbox where you spawn units as well as props, watch them battle and use your special powers to do things to interact with the world.

Quote: "Anyway. When your island defends will it take on how you defend? Or will there be a set algorithm?"


Not sure what you mean by how it defends. If I have some boats in my sea then they will fire missiles at any aliens on the planet, the aliens will fire back as well as destroy buildings, so it won't be a set/scripted pattern; you'll be able to spawn units, buildings, props, special powers, enable/disable ai/waves of aliens whenever you like if you want it to be pure sandbox, so there should be something for everyone.

Anyway thanks for the comments, I'll post an update soon.

[edit]

I added some clouds now, you can spawn these at any time and as many as you like, similar to the props.

Many clouds over the island - I disabled the fluids here else with this many clouds I'd have got 1FPS.
http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/7652/wip12mg8.jpg

A single cloud raining down - yes it's quite hard to see
http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/423/wip11gq7.jpg

A puddle - I actually spawned around 5 clouds to make this(and the other puddles near it)
http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/6944/wip13jf9.jpg

I'm glad I'm not working on a fluids only demo though, as they are so limited! As you may be able to tell from the 2nd screenshot, individual fluid particles are very hard to see, and because they aren't an accessible DBPro 3D object, there's no way I can give them more contrast, change the textures so they look like rain before they hit the ground, or even change the colour or size of them! Luckily their size isn't too bad for my game's scale(1 unit:1 metre), but to get any noticeable downpours you really need to crank up the emit rate.

Furthermore, the is a limit of around 500~? fluid particles that can be visible from a single emitter at any time, I noticed that when I raise the emitter rate to around 2000 particles/sec(quite high I know), many of the earlier spawned particles started vanishing before their life(20 secs) was up(same for lower rates too, it just takes longer), they are most likely being recycled as there's some hard-coded limit to the amount there can be. And also related to this, if you set the emit rate to 2000/sec the emitter only spits out particles for about 10 seconds, after this the emitter just stops emitting anything. I've tried various settings such as setting the max particle count to a crazy number, changing it from Constant Flow Rate to Constant Pressure but nothing keeps my fluid emitter running forever. To remedy this, I will have to make it so that the fluid emitter gets deleted and recreated every minute or so, this way the cloud will look like it's stopping and starting, but it's the only real way I can keep a semi-continuous flow.

Also if you noticed in the last screenshot there are some drawing errors with the fluid particles, this is due to particles from separate fluid emitters coming into contact with one another, if I only spawn one emitter I don't get this issue, coupled with the limit to how many active particles I can have per emitter and the limit time of particle flow don't hope to see any interesting puddles forming.

On a brighter note, I added a soft body teapot, and torus, but the teapot is cooler(and all games are required to have teapots in!)
http://img73.imageshack.us/img73/4664/wip14ny0.jpg, you can also see to the left I have a big arrow, this is essentially the spawn cursor, though the screenshot didn't capture the actual desktop mouse that it follows, this big thing sticks to the map where you point so you can spawn things where you want. It uses the DarkPhysics raycasting commands, but these only seem to work on static geometry, such as the map and not rigid/soft bodies, despite me using the Phy Raycast All Shapes command, the arrow also points to the surface normal so you will be able to direct the attack angle for certain things, much like the call for heli/airstrike in COD4.

Van B
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Posted: 8th Jul 2008 10:51
Hmmm, tea and donuts - My kind of tech demo!

Looking good DC.


less is more, but if less is more how you keeping score?
Dared1111
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Posted: 8th Jul 2008 12:45
What I mean is can you teach your defense systems?

Would be pretty awesome.

The only suggestions I would make atm is start adding in the enemies and to add textures.


Where can I get the codes. I know how to build it with codes. GET IT. I HOPE U UNDERSTAND. DUHH
dark coder
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Posted: 8th Jul 2008 13:15
Quote: "What I mean is can you teach your defense systems?"


Teach them? Well if I have time, I was originally just going to make it so that you have a large spawn list of boats, tanks, alien ships etc and they just shoot each other until there's nothing left, no actual in-depth AI as that's not the point of the demo/game, the actual extra special powers you have are.

And yes I'll be adding some very basic units soon, luckily I've made a lot of games/demos/mods and stuff in the past so I have easy access to temporary media .

dark coder
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Posted: 11th Jul 2008 11:09
Update time!

I've been working on the HUD and finishing up the base code for the engine, it's now fairly easy to add new props and things and you can easily navigate the spawn/ability groups and then select an item in that group via clicking the arrows or using the keyboard shortcuts.

A big mess of props - You can see some UFOs too!
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/4021/wip15yt7.jpg

Singularity(forcefield) ability - You can click to suck in objects where you point, though you can't see the cursor
http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/20/wip16qu6.jpg

As you can see from the first pic I added in UFOs, currently they just fly around the island and spin. I will make them fire at props soon, as well as record a video.

Xarshi
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Posted: 11th Jul 2008 12:23
Looks very good so far. Will be a fun competition

I believe falling asleep at keyboard is now a religion for me.
dark coder
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Posted: 14th Jul 2008 10:51 Edited at: 14th Jul 2008 10:57
I recorded a video showing off various features and aliens!

You can see it here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Adkn4x9vOhM, [edit] the forums fail and I can't upload the file, so you'll have to live with youtube.

The game isn't meant to be really serious(more comical than anything) in case you didn't notice, eventually I'll add speech bubbles on the UFOs when they get hit and things as well as add way more spawn items. Currently the aliens only shoot at the centre of the map in-case you wondered why they never shot the prop blob and I'll hopefully release a demo once I add more fun things so it's more than just placing props around too.

Inspire
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Posted: 14th Jul 2008 20:05
Nice, dude. The clouds are pretty sweet as well.
Syncaidius
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Posted: 14th Jul 2008 22:15 Edited at: 14th Jul 2008 22:15
The pyramids remind me of goa'uld motherships. Looks fun Dark coder.

Xenocythe
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Posted: 15th Jul 2008 19:04
That looks bloody awesome.

Winning idea: make skyscraper city buildings.. full with windows... make them 100% destructible

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Benjamin
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Posted: 16th Jul 2008 21:29
Looks pretty cool so far. I'll do you a favour and refrain from entering, so that you have a better chance of winning.

LeeBamber
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Posted: 19th Jul 2008 02:34
Very cool indeed. Get the scaling keys in, maybe use the template as a guide for on-screen prompts, logo, etc and check out the judging criteria for other points you want to score well on. I like the active simulation as you drop stuff onto the island! Also check out U70 BETA which has a new SET CAMERA TO IMAGE parameter if you want to take your shader code further (not for the light hearted)

"Small, smart and running around the legs of dinosaurs to find enough food to survive, bedroom coders aren't extinct after all "
dark coder
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Posted: 20th Jul 2008 19:10
Thanks for the comments;

Quote: "The pyramids remind me of goa'uld motherships"


Indeed, though they are actually DarkBASIC pyramids, haven't you ever seen the box art? :p.

Quote: "Winning idea: make skyscraper city buildings.. full with windows... make them 100% destructible"


I could try, though making a realistic-ish skyscraper that's fully destructible won't be easy.

Quote: "Very cool indeed. Get the scaling keys in"


The templates' 'scaling' is merely how many objects get spawned, as this is a sandbox you are in control of this, so beyond the spawned effect(explosion debris etc) amount multiplier I can't really scale too much via code.

Quote: "Also check out U70 BETA which has a new SET CAMERA TO IMAGE parameter if you want to take your shader code further (not for the light hearted)"


I did, and it works fine on its own, however multiple-cameras don't work correctly with clipping planes(same with 6.9) when rendering objects with shaders, for me to implement shadow mapping, or normal mapping or anything on my main props it will render incorrectly with my current setup, the only viable way to work around this would be to create two objects per... object, one with a shader applied and one without. However this seems a bit excessive in terms of overhead(I already do this with my terrain), or I could just disable such objects from the refraction/reflection pass but that rather makes their use pointless as almost nothing would be visible on/through the water.

Anyway, I've added some more cool stuff: palm trees using cloth! Though they currently only have 4 leaves(two cloths in a cross) they aren't exactly fast enough to populate the whole island with an amount that would look realistic so I'll keep it as is for now, the palm trees themselves can be knocked over too.

Allied units and aliens now target and shoot each other, they can also destroy their targets and blow up, the motherships have shields which protects them from hits, the shield uses a soft-body sphere, however due to the limited soft-body commands I had to fake the way the shields work, i.e. you can actually shoot the shield off the ship with enough guns and still appear to hit the shield(I coded my own shield-sphere hit-detection for this), the issue is that there is no way to find the average position of all the soft-bodies' verts(aka the position of it), without its position I can't tell if it's still atttached to the ship or has been shot off. Though the shield does look cool(at least I think so), and it uses a fresnel shading with specular highlight shader.

Anyway here's the video showing it all off:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gPBUULfeLXw

I hope to add more features to the mothership, currently it's a bit of a bullet bag and needs some special weapons .

Chewy
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Posted: 20th Jul 2008 19:16
Dude that is absolute 'uber' I was like yeah okay this is pretty cool, then saw the use of soft body on the pyramid and I was like oooo just got browny points lol.

Really nice mate, *Thumbs up*

MjMAC
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Roxas
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Posted: 21st Jul 2008 12:42
Wow. Amazing!

Your signature has been erased by a mod because it was too big
HowDo
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Posted: 21st Jul 2008 13:36
Nice one dark coder. also proving you don't need to go out and get alot of extra models and not what to make a game.

Plus you worked out how to do a shield effect I was looking to do, hope they release all of the good ones, so we can see how writers did there tricks.

Dark Physics makes any hot drink go cold.
dark coder
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Posted: 1st Aug 2008 13:29
Small update, I added shadow mapping so now objects don't look so flat, the mapping uses two orthographic projections(one for close objects, one for far) and runs quite well, however as I'm only taking 4 samples per pixel I had to resort to slightly dissolved sampling, but if I add bloom then smoothing it out will be free. Because of the addition of shadow mapping and an ongoing issue with multiple cameras, shaders and clipping planes I had to make all my objects use shaders and write clipping plane code into the shaders which is a bit of an annoyance. I will eventually add a no-shader fall-back for the objects and maybe the water(can't have both, realistically), but the fluids require PS3.0 anyway so I guess it's not too much of an issue for my entry.

I also added the ability to pause the physics which you can see in the video below:





zzz
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Posted: 1st Aug 2008 14:22
Wow, it looks really good! The DB pyramid UFO with the shield was a nice touch.

Morcilla
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Posted: 2nd Aug 2008 11:38
Excellent, and looks funny too.
Ideas just in case you want some, hmmm what about dropping some 'pre-built' structures made of destructable blocks or whatever, like a bridge or some big buildings.
Also, perhaps the DBPro pyramid isn't understandable by other people that doesn't know about this. Maybe nvidia would like to see the nvidia pyramid lol, oh well, I guess TGC has the best advice about this.
HowDo
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Posted: 2nd Aug 2008 13:04
@Morcilla

The DBPro pyramid is like the Amiga ball, you put it in hoping no will see it straight away, only those that know, know what to look for, like babylon 5 series in some shots there's the Amiga ball as a building in the revolving garden.

Dark Physics makes any hot drink go cold.
CoffeeGrunt
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Posted: 4th Aug 2008 12:50
This is awesome!!

A cool effect you could try is giving the pyramid disintegrator beams.....

It fires a stream of particles at a target, then the target disappears and spawns a bunch of tiny particles that disappear after a while......

It's still be awesome without it though.....

dark coder
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Posted: 28th Aug 2008 23:33
Quote: "hmmm what about dropping some 'pre-built' structures made of destructable blocks or whatever, like a bridge or some big buildings."


I could, but the main issue is that dynamic meshes in DP are rather poor, so I wouldn't be able to make a bridge split convincingly, i.e. I'd have to make it from boxes or something and that'd look rather poor, and I lack time to really try :p.

Quote: "Also, perhaps the DBPro pyramid isn't understandable by other people that doesn't know about this."


Indeed, but it's quite a simple shape to make and I needed some models in there :p.

Quote: "A cool effect you could try is giving the pyramid disintegrator beams.....

It fires a stream of particles at a target, then the target disappears and spawns a bunch of tiny particles that disappear after a while......"


You've been watching a bit too much War Of The Worlds? :-p, I could give the mothership more weapons but it already has 2, as I added the no-grav bomb that disables gravity on anything it hits for a few secs, and the amount of fire it spams anyway makes it quite good at destroying packs of things. Also it has a lot of strength and shields so I don't want to make it too powerful .

Anyway, update time! I spent the last 2 days working on the graphics, and I'm quite happy with my sea now, and my terrain looks much better. I just need to make more foliage models and stuff, here's a pic of that:

Random stuff:


Nuke!:


The nuke sends out an initial shockwave that does damage based on distance, it can take out a pyramid mothership in 1 hit if close enough, and it sends non-breakable objects flying away.

I also added the ion cannon weapon, this just sends a bolt of lighting to the ground and damages nearby stuff and makes it fly away. In addition to this I added another anti-aircraft weapon to the human side, a flak box, which is just a fancy fireworks machine that turns on when an UFO flies over it and hopefully destroys it.

Tomorrow I'll finish off the front-end, i.e. allow the user to switch between hardware/software, window/fullscreen modes, do all the icons etc, and if I have time left add more random weapons or props.

Hoozer
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Posted: 29th Aug 2008 00:29 Edited at: 29th Aug 2008 00:31
@ dark coder: As I said before, your entry seems to me like a "winning" entry!
How did you make the nuke-effect? (It looks like particles in some way.)

I doubt I can send you my final-entry in time for testing (cause I need the time to finish it as far as I can and you seem to have other things to do)! (I hope I can get my brothers notebook with a GeFo-8600m GT 512MB for an other test instead.)

Just one more question:
Do you get a FPS-increase with Hardware-Mode on?
Cause I get only the same FPS-value, BUT less CPU-load when I run my entry (and the old AGEIA-SDK-C++-demos) in Hardware-Mode! There seems to be no FPS-increase at all! (Maybe the GeFo-8600 is to weak or something else!?)


Good luck with your entry!

Hoozer

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DP-Sw-Mode-Comp-Entry (updated to V. 1.4):
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=109846&b=5&p=0
dark coder
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Posted: 29th Aug 2008 00:53
Quote: "How did you make the nuke-effect? (It looks like particles in some way.)"


Using 200 lines of fun to write code, it initially starts out by spawning 60 particles in an almost perfect circle that has some noise to add variance. This is the shockwave, and soon fades out after about 500M. I then spawn another 60 particles in a random radial pattern that comprises the smoke-cloud you can see at the bottom of the mushroom, this starts off slowly and drag eventually brings them to a halt so they just singer at the bottom. I then spawn my mushroom cap, this spawns 10 smoke and 10 fire particles every .25 secs for 3 secs, the fire particles here are the main fireball that launches the mushroom cap. This slowly rises at 20M/s constantly, all the while every .25 secs I spawn a smoke particle that acts as a trail from the mushroom cap, as well as a fire particle to show there's still some heat in the cap to keep it rising. This goes on for 28 secs I think then the flames stop spawning and during the last 4 secs all the smoke particles fade away.

This isn't the most realistic approach, but I didn't initially decide how I'd handle this so my particle system doesn't easily allow me to do really advanced particles moves(such as getting the cap particles to loop around in a torus-like shape) so I had to settle for this. I don't really have time to make any better fire sprites either so I had to make the most of the mushroom cloud smoke, even though realistically it's almost all fire or just very hot at the start and turns into black soot, but oh well, it still looks cool.(and totally kills the FPS if you spawn ~4 of them)

Quote: "Do you get a FPS-increase with Hardware-Mode on?"


For some things it does, like fluids but they are slow either way so it's doesn't really matter. I'll test it more when I add the ability to switch between the two without restarting the app.

And thanks .

Hoozer
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Posted: 29th Aug 2008 02:44
@ dark coder: That was very explicit described and sounds like an evil hack!

Can't wait so see it delivered together with the new drivers!

Hoozer

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Benjamin
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Posted: 29th Aug 2008 05:54
It's looking pretty awesome now.

The ARRAYinator
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Posted: 31st Aug 2008 04:29
Wow this looks really awesome! I must ask though how what are you using for the shadows and is that advanced terrain? trying to get shadow mapping working correctly on advanced terrain has been a problem for me lately.


Gamescape Is not dead!
dark coder
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Posted: 31st Aug 2008 07:03
Quote: "That was very explicit described and sounds like an evil hack!"


Well not really, it's just the way I do it, using non-animated planes there's only so much you can do .

Quote: "Wow this looks really awesome! I must ask though how what are you using for the shadows and is that advanced terrain?"


Thanks, the shadows use 2 orthographic cameras that render to 1024^2 maps, the first camera renders a map size of 128m and the 2nd, 256m. I use my own shaders to draw the shadow maps to my objects, I posted one basic one(diffuse + shadow mapping) on the 'Learning To Write Shaders' thread in the DBPro board. However in my game, as I have terrains and all sorts I had to customize many of my shaders to use shadow mapping in a 2nd pass(as the calcs used almost all instruction space for a single technique in PS2.0!).

Quote: "trying to get shadow mapping working correctly on advanced terrain has been a problem for me lately."


My terrain is very similar to Advanced Terrain, i.e. it's made from many patches or slices, in this case 200x200 quads per patch and 4x4 patches. However it doesn't have a colour map like Advanced Terrains, it's actually a mix of my vertex and texture blend shaders that I posted in the DBPro boards somewhere.

As for the Advanced Terrains with shadow shaders it's not the simplest thing to explain, you're probably better off asking on the Learning To Write Shaders thread as I don't really use Advanced Terrains and have forgotten their nuances, besides I need to finish this entry!

Alucard94
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Posted: 31st Aug 2008 16:07
Wow, this is looking great!


White Fang 12
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Posted: 31st Aug 2008 21:30
Dude i'm really excited about this can't wait for a demo

I'm a noob help will be accepted
CoffeeGrunt
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Posted: 31st Aug 2008 22:03
Awwww...No disintegrator beams...Nukes make up for that though.....

Awesome, truly awesome, shame about the stupendous system requirements, or I'd be biting the hands off you to have a go....

dark coder
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Posted: 1st Sep 2008 10:08 Edited at: 1st Sep 2008 10:23
Quote: "shame about the stupendous system requirements"


Well they aren't that bad, besides after entering I made a version 1.1 that allows you to disable shadows and set the resolution of the reflection+refraction cameras, however this shouldn't matter for the entry as I assume people who have CUDA support(NV8 series and up) can run it well.

Anyway here's some pics from the entered version:

Scenic views! - (there's 2298 props here, and I get around 100 FPS depending where I look which is pretty good for 5 scene passes and everything has a shader! <3 optimizations)





Fluids and forcefields


A fluid stream




Pew pew!




Also - In the entered version I added the ability to save/load scenes, and it comes with the 2 main scenes in the above pics. I also added sound effects to all weapons and impacts and the sea makes shore-like sounds. You can switch between hardware/software and windowed/fullscreen, and at the start there's a mini tutorial tooltip guide thing that no one will read, but gives me an excuse to call them stupid if they don't know the controls! Once the results are out I'll release the latest(as per usual).

Hoozer
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Posted: 1st Sep 2008 14:51 Edited at: 1st Sep 2008 14:53
@ dark coder: I see you use lots of (PhysX-)things in your entry, have you seen any FPS-increase or only the "less CPU-load"-effect?

I'm sure your entry will end in one of the winning Über-entries! (Somehow I'm relieved that I didn't entered that category, even though I doubt I have any chance against the other rigid-body/force-fields-entrants!)


Hoozer

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DP-Sw-Mode-Comp-Entry (updated to V. 1.4):
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=109846&b=5&p=0
White Fang 12
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Posted: 1st Sep 2008 20:09
I think you should make a game mode in which you defend something from endless waves of aliens

I'm a noob help will be accepted
sindore
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Joined: 2nd Jul 2004
Location: Bedfordshire, UK
Posted: 1st Sep 2008 20:58
I love the your video you made, I wish I could code like that I`v bin working on something like what your video shows, but I can`t get my mouse control to work like your.

is there any way you could give me some help, or a small snipit to help me out?

soul sucking devils, twisted body of the damed, slivering slim drips from every poor, sin licking at your ears, and the smell stinging your eyes, and if you don't like it, get out of my kitchen!
ico
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Joined: 17th Jun 2006
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posted: 2nd Sep 2008 04:34
Wow that's very nice! Good job.


dark coder
23
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Joined: 6th Oct 2002
Location: Japan
Posted: 3rd Sep 2008 08:56 Edited at: 3rd Sep 2008 08:57
Quote: "I see you use lots of (PhysX-)things in your entry, have you seen any FPS-increase or only the "less CPU-load"-effect?"


Only with cloth and fluids really, I get around 20~% speed boost then but it really depends. I didn't include too many cloth items in my game because they behave terribly with forcefields, it's like cloths have 0 mass so as soon as they go near an explosion or something in my game they fly off the map or expand to the size of 500M and spin around like mad which is most annoying.

The fluids are better I guess, but they are very slow, I'm pretty sure the slowness is more to do with their rendering as the PhysX example on the Nvidia site tells me there's 300k fluid balls in the scene or something and I get higher FPS there than in the DP demo 'Flowing Fluids'(which uses far less).

So the only really stable things in the wrapper are (non-mesh)rigid bodies and forcefields which is a shame, but oh well.

Quote: "is there any way you could give me some help, or a small snipit to help me out?"


It's just standard mouselook with some smoothing(MMX/MMY = MouseMoveX/Y, FPS is the per-frame FPS as a float):



Quote: "I think you should make a game mode in which you defend something from endless waves of aliens"


Indeed, I thought of adding enemy unit spawners, so each one can spawn x amount of UFOs or motherships and will spawn more when they get destroyed, but I didn't think about it until after I entered, oh well, I could still add it :p.

sindore
21
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Joined: 2nd Jul 2004
Location: Bedfordshire, UK
Posted: 5th Sep 2008 01:42
dark coder cun you help?

I just tryed you code snipet, the camera works well but only if I change for exampale cameraRotCur.x to cameraRotCurx

did you use a type for cameraRotCur.x value for this?
if so can you add a code sipit of how you layed out the type.
if not can you point me in the right driection?

also I positoned an object for the mousemove, but I`m having a problem with it.

example: position object 11,cameraRotDesty,-cameraRotDestx,20

the object 11 moves up and down, but dose not rotate with the camera rotation how would I do this?

here is my/your code, if you have time can you help me understand how this works?


soul sucking devils, twisted body of the damed, slivering slim drips from every poor, sin licking at your ears, and the smell stinging your eyes, and if you don't like it, get out of my kitchen!
dark coder
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Joined: 6th Oct 2002
Location: Japan
Posted: 5th Sep 2008 07:22
It looks fine other than "position object 11,cameraRotDesty#,-cameraRotDestx#,camera position y()" you're positioning that object using the camera rotation, never mix rotation and positions. It's easier to position and rotate this object to the camera so they overlap, then move it away from the camera using freeflight commands, i.e. Move Object.

sindore
21
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Joined: 2nd Jul 2004
Location: Bedfordshire, UK
Posted: 5th Sep 2008 20:49
ok I here is my old code befor I ask if you could help dark coder
the camera is fixed but it will move at some point.
what I wont to know is how you got the mouse pointer to make objects at that exact position?
could you give an exarmple of code to help?

I know Im being a pain, but you could save me an epic amount of time.

here is what I did be for I asked you for help.


as you can see I have removed the mouse cursor, but I plain to add it back in apone this fix for my code.

thanks for the help so fare dark coder.
I know you hard at work for this comp, and relly apreshate the help.

soul sucking devils, twisted body of the damed, slivering slim drips from every poor, sin licking at your ears, and the smell stinging your eyes, and if you don't like it, get out of my kitchen!
dark coder
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Location: Japan
Posted: 5th Sep 2008 21:32 Edited at: 5th Sep 2008 21:33
The method I used in the entry was to 'Pick Screen' with a distance of 1.0, thus a unit vector direction and fed that to the Dark Physics raycasting commands, which also happen to take direction vectors, it then tells me the position it hit, the normal etc.

If you just want the position without using Dark Physics then you can use 'Pick Object', which returns the distance to the pick using 'Get Pick Distance', you then use 'Pick Screen' using this distance, this returns (via 'Get Pick Vector X/Y/Z') the world-space offset from the camera to the picked point, to get the world-space position of this point just add the camera position to it and spawn your object there. If you need more help just search the forums as there's a million threads on it.

sindore
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Location: Bedfordshire, UK
Posted: 5th Sep 2008 21:59 Edited at: 5th Sep 2008 22:00
thanks I`ll give it a go and see if I can get my head around it. onec again thanks, I`ll post what I come up with to see what you think.

good luck in the comp

soul sucking devils, twisted body of the damed, slivering slim drips from every poor, sin licking at your ears, and the smell stinging your eyes, and if you don't like it, get out of my kitchen!
dark coder
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Joined: 6th Oct 2002
Location: Japan
Posted: 8th Sep 2008 13:41
Not really an update but I got around to making anther video:



As you can see I added light shafts, well actually shadow shafts as it's simple to add with my engine setup, and objects entering/exiting water with enough speed make ripples on the water too.

James H
19
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Joined: 21st Apr 2007
Location: St Helens
Posted: 8th Sep 2008 16:46
I`d be surprised if anyone beats that. Good stuff, right there. Don`t suppose you`ll be letting any of your tricks `out of the bag` once you`ve won this?

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