Wireframe Challenge

Not had much time to work on this challenge, so my entry isnt going to be what I wanted and probably not much of a demo, but I did atleast model something in blender for it and learnt abit about texture mapping at the same time.

Here's a small pic of the ship styled on Tron.

Object Loading, Multi Texturing

Well I have finally got .obj model loading going for single mesh objects in my opengl engine, works with normals and textures, so I took a look at adding multi texturing to the engine, useful for lots of things like adding a second texture over a terrain to add extra detail. It appears to be working but I am not all that happy with it at the moment, I have little control on the way the textures are combined so I need to add more into that side of things, which then means I can look to setup different modes for how they work with each other, but I need to also figure out how the parameters need to be set as my first hard coded tests did not seem to yield all that useful a result.
Still it's a step in the right direction and hopefully I can give the system more options for how the textures tile and blend.

WoT no game!

Well no there is not any game yet. I got side tracked and ended up making some changes to my gl framework in bmax and decided I should actually use it for something, so I made a small cracktro style intro and put it up on the DBF forum so I could get some feedback, seems my code works well on various setups so thats good to hear.

Quick Piccy

I have also been messing about with my old opengl engine code, it now runs on top of the tiny gl framework and I spent some time improving it abit. It can now load .obj models exported from blender as long as I set a couple export options, it expects UV's and Normals and uses them both so I need to export as a single mesh with normals, uv's and triangulate turned on but if i do that I can load and display the meshs fine, I even seem to have got hard edges working to a good extent. Working on Multi Texturing, going for 2 layers only at this time, cant see me needing more and by that time I will likely be using shaders.

So now I need to start messing about with blender and see if I can make some useful models, to that end I have been watching some tutorials and messing about with some of the features. Made a very simple mini hexscape thing and made a rather nice render, so here it is.

DBF are currently running a demo coding challenge, with a theme of wireframe, will see if I can come up with something for that before the deadline. Hopefully something cool as well.

Going Retro

Having gone over lots of my old code and effects looking for a project to work on and get finished, I struggled to find anything I felt inspired to code. So after spending more time going over my old code archives, I came to the games I wrote back in 2002/3 and while some were pretty good, others were never finished. The code for almost all of them is by my current standard very poor, there's no OOP at all but then the language they were in didn't support it, but there's no proper structure, no functions its all a mess of gosubs which while they work are not very well thought out at all. At the time I hadn't long come back to coding from a long gap stretching back to the Amiga days, so I can forgive the bad code style a bit. Anyway to get to the point, I have decided to recode some of the games in bmax taking advantage of a lot of the new things I have learned over the years and hopefully I can create so cool retro inspired games worth playing.

I still plan to put some of my recent opengl experiments to use in a demo related effort but it can take a backseat while I attempt to get a game done first.

Time to Code again

Well I have finally cancelled my WoW account, havent actually been playing for well over a month due to RL issues but was totally bored of all the content having killed 99% of it with in the first few weeks of the expansion. Dont know at this time if I will ever go back.

So now I have lots of free time I think its about time I got back into coding and to start with I think I shall finish learning OpenGL, move onto GLSL shaders and maybe take another look at Directx stuff once I have one that.

Will continue most of my coding in bmax since its a great little language, can always use c/c++ if I feel the need but for most things bmax is just nicer for me to tinker about in.

Going to try and get a little demo scene style intro coded, been a while since anything came out of the TTD stable since myself and zawran been busy with other stuff. Probably do some cheap retro thing since I like retro effects :P

A New Year

Well its a new year, a new WoW expansion and I already have 4 max level characters, been raiding for a few weeks and killed half the raid bosses. Dont think its going to hold my interest everyday anymore so I guess I will be trying out some more F2P mmorpgs.

On the coding and OpenGL front I have done nothing for months and months, tho I still check the forums and look what everyone else is up to.

Found a new interest in reading comic's and graphic novels, always read the odd one here and there but both DC and Marvel were hard to find were I live so I have been buying there black & white reprint collections of 60's/70's stuff. Enjoying it alot, wish I had full color versions but no way I could afford that, these collections are over 500pages worht for very little money.

More F2P MMO's and God Of War 3

Have played a few more free2play mmo's and overall they have mostly been good and enjoyable but the last week I have spent more time playing God of War 3 which I finished and enjoyed alot and I also decided it would be a good time to finish the second game on PS2 since i was near the end anyway. There great games and I hope to see more from the developers along these lines, maybe set in some other mythical era or age :)