Category Lemma
Quick update - Alpha inbound soon!
This week was a lot of under the hood improvements. The voxel engine got a TON of performance optimizations, which allow my Nvidia GTX 260 to render my test scene at 100-200 FPS.
Screenshots:
New features:
- Rough-draft tutorial level with instructions and whatnot.
- Fullscreen toggling on-the-fly by hitting F11
- Rudimentary fog effect
Performance optimizations:
- Voxels are now rendered as surfaces, rather than complete cubes. This lets me cull a lot of unnecessary geometry.
- Voxels are now split into chunks. This lets me easily implement frustum culling and view distance, which helps tremendously with shadow map rendering as well.
- I fixed some bugs in the voxel modification code, making voxel modifications of up to 100-150 cells practically instantaneous.
- Shadow maps and reflections are now rendered every other frame. It's a hack, but the important thing is that the gameplay is responsive.
My biggest development challenge was my battle with fullscreen toggling and graphics resource management. Switching from fullscreen to windowed mode, the entire XNA GraphicsDevice is invalidated, along with every vertex buffer, texture, shader, everything. So that was interesting.
Digital art, Facebook 3D Graph Explorer, and more Project Lemma
My last two posts focused on general game development topics, but no longer. It's the end of the year, time to look back and review before looking forward to the new year!
Digital Art
First off, some fun diversions. In my pursuit of an art minor at Ohio State, I took a digital art class autumn quarter. The instructor let me use software I was already familiar with, so I didn't learn much. But the class gave me the motivation to plonck my butt down and make some art, which is all I really wanted.
Tools are everything
You've probably heard the whole "don't make engines, make games" shtick. As I progress I am learning another important lesson: tools are the most important aspect of any project, game or engine. Whether you're rolling a custom engine or shopping around for middleware, tools should be absolutely top priority. Seriously.
The question should not be "how many shiny graphics techniques can I incorporate?". It should be "how easy is it to create content for this game?". Content is the center of every game, whether that content is an AI algorithm, a map layout, or an art asset. If the content pipeline is even a little inefficient, it will prevent you from making the game you want to, whether you realize it or not. If you have to jump through hoops to create a new level or script a story sequence, you're going to put it off and focus instead on adding another feature that provides tangible results, like a new lighting technique. Problem is, those features don't make the game. Content does.
Physics and lighting fun
Sorry to post two videos in quick succession, but this was too fun not to record!
Parkour Ninja update: first-person camera, physics, deferred rendering
Parkour Ninja is still alive! And it's looking more like Mirror's Edge now, complete with first-person camera. The old direction of the game just had too much frustration and not enough fun. Hopefully things will change now.
I re-integrated a physics engine, this time BEPU physics, which is a screaming fast open-source XNA physics engine with unbelievable support. I was able to get my existing block simplification/rendering code to work with BEPU, so now you can add/remove blocks to/from existing objects on the fly. One cool side-effect of this ability is that I can also blast objects into smaller chunks... full-blown destruction is #1 on my list right now.
Parkour Ninja Alpha 1
It's here, and it needs lots of play-testing! Please help me out and play it. You'll need a Windows machine with a Shader Model 3.0 graphics card.
I'm anticipating some technical issues with this release (it is an alpha after all), so if you run the game and no window appears and the process dies, please do the following:
- Run the game in administrator mode.
- In the game installation folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Parkour Ninja\) open the file "Lemma.log" in Notepad, copy the contents, and send it to me! I need bug reports :)
Back on track
I finished refactoring with components, added a reflection-enabled editor and XML serialization, finally got real PCF shadow filtering, and started experimenting with a somewhat cel-shaded visual style. I've been busy.
The refactoring had a lot of positive side effects. Serialization is now relatively easy, as the state of each component is determined by its properties, which are usually simple, easily serializable value types. One interesting side effect of serialization is that object creation is now split into two parts: initialization, and binding. When creating a new object at runtime, a factory performs the initialization. When loading objects from XML, the XmlSerializer performs initialization. In both cases, the factory creates the necessary bindings between properties afterward.
Refactoring with components
Update: check this article for more in-depth details on Component Binding!
I've been refactoring my engine with the component-entity model, and things are turning out quite nicely. The one problem I always had with components was the way inter-component dependencies were handled. In the article I linked (one of the classics on the subject), the author says his components originally referenced each other through a component manager, but eventually they allowed components to store pointers to each other for performance reasons. In my mind, that's way too many concrete dependencies.
Prepping for alpha release
[These posts are now being mirrored on my GameDev.net developer journal. Check out their new revamped site, it's pretty sweet.]
I am getting ready for an alpha release soon, very basic, with one tutorial level and a level editor. So looking at installer options for XNA games, this WiX XNA installer appears to be the best choice. It's designed for SharpDevelop, and it creates an installer that checks for all the required libraries and even the required shader model. Unfortunately it's kind of a pain to set up. There's a massive XML file that needs a reference to every single file in your release.
Parkour Ninja animations
I'm going to poke my head in here to reassure everyone that the game is making steady progress. The environment now turns transparent when it gets in the way of the camera, and the player has some nifty new moves and mechanics, plus a very shnazzy looking power bar to indicate how much "juice" you have to perform special moves. The latest addition here is the skill roll, which prevents you from slowing down or dying when falling long distances. Take a gander!