A Very Long Time

Well, this blog has been up for about a year now, and I have made a couple of posts on it displaying my progress. I took about a 2-month break from programming, and all game-related things, but now I am back. I have been working on my code the last couple of weeks, and learned a few new things too!

I have gotten my octree rendering system to work, but the collision detection system is still in the works. I have drawn up some diagrams to help me figure out how to manage my resources for our game, and it has brought up the question on how exactly to handle the scripting system...

The scripting system I am working on is pretty neat. I made a simple cut-scene of my soldier model I have been experimenting on playing its death animation in slow motion while the camera zooms around in a cut-scene. This was built back in October with older engine code though. I will update it when I have the time, and then go as to enable user input after the cut-scene to allow the player to move the camera around in 3D space and observe the scene later on.

I have gotten a bunch of other things done in the design end for our game, Forsaken Realm. I have been solidifying the plot, working on gameplay mechanics, and working on concepts for item/equipment generation. The plot has gotten a lot more interesting, and it has gotten longer.

Over my winter break from college, I have done a little bit of research on OpenGL ES 2.0. It is heavily shader-oriented, and I have been trying to stay away from them since I believed it would be an overwhelming process to learn how to use them. In the long-run, I decided to start learning OpenGL ES 2.0, and I have got to tell you, shaders make life much easier. I thought at first a couple years ago when I did not understand the basics of any 3D rendering pipelines, that it would be hard to write shaders, and I was right --at least at the time I was.

However, I have been pretty comfortable with how the rendering pipeline for DirectX and OpenGL for about 3 years now. I'm not saying I am an expert, but I understand more than the novice, and I understand many intermediate aspects of 3D rendering pipelines. If there is anything I specialize in, it would probably not be using blending equations and lighting, but instead, matrix and vertex transformations.

Anyway, I have decided to change around my model loading and rendering code substantially (and for the better) so that all my vertex skinning code would be executed within the vertex shader. This has actually made handling vertex data a long easier, and cut my code down by about 600 lines or so. I hope to support vertex lighting, normal (bump) mapping, reflections, etc... The question of whether I can support all of this or not will be a matter of time.

I hope to post some interesting content later on to show some realization of my work from these past couple of months.