Project site is online!

The project site is up! Currently you will find several screenshots and videos of our game, 3D assets, information about our game design and of course the two proprietary tools I've been working on! Have a look at let me know what you guys think.

More Polygons "Grim" Homepage

Direct links:

Titan Metrics - Gameplay analyzing tool (Features 3D Visualization of player and match data)
Titan Toolkit - Making life easier for everyday UDK Development

Of course we will update the site on a regular basis, keep an eye out for more!

Graduation UDK Project

Hey guys, It's been a while since I uploaded any videos or blogposts. I've definitely been doing some cool stuff behind closed doors, this time with the Unreal Development Kit. We're about to reach a milestone where we will start showing our development more openly. This means I will soon start recording some videos that will include my development experiments as usual.

This project is for my graduation, I'm working in a team of six to build a proper first person shooter for the PC. As expected I'm the programmer, but do a lot of the design work as well. Aside from the game itself I have been busy building some UDK based tools for the team, this includes a launcher/management tool to launch UDK in every way you can think of and includes more advanced functionality such as bug reporting (automatically sends the reports to our server at Assembla) along with FTP file uploads (screenshots, crash logs) and more. A second tool will remain secret for now. I will reveal details on it later on through some videos and post some info about it here as well.

For now I'll leave you with two (pre-alpha) screenshots of our project.

EditMesh Submode & History Panel

It was about time I posted a new video about my progress, so I decided to create a very early preview of some of the new features. This includes an early version of the history panel and the improved mesh editing feature.

If you're familiar with Neoforce you may recognize it in the video video. If you don't, it's basically a Winforms-like library with tons of features for 2D menus. It has quite an exhaustive feature-list and will replace all my previous Winforms based panels/windows. One big advantage of using Neoforce is alpha support, something not easily accomplished using regular Forms. Another advantage is in its design, instead of using OnPaint events and event handlers, it has regular Update and Draw functions. This is really nice when you're creating transitions and smooth animations for your controls.

There are some other features hidden in this video, one is still in very early development. You might have seen the screen fading from and to black several times, that is part of it ;) The best way to describe it: a method to quickly access your panels, menus, assets etc. through a single hotkey (spacebar by default) As you can see in the video, I 'pinned' the history panel to my game window, keeping it active when leaving the screen overlay. I will talk more in-depth about this video once it's more developed.

Gizmo update coming soon!

Hi guys, just wanted to let every XNA3DGizmo user know that a update is currently being developed. I noticed that the original implementation had some sloppy shortcuts that could make it more difficult to implement if you were unfamiliar with the code. This included references to the Engine class among other things.

So I decided to improve things by removing any reference to outside classes (including InputState which is no longer required) I realized this update is necessary as even I found it difficult to implement the gizmo in a new project and wasn't a simple drag&drop operation as it should be (or as close as possible to it) this made it obvious some improvements were required to the public version.

The last public update was quite a while back and I was using a modified version with already several improvements implemented (such as multiple type of objects you can select as shown in the Vertex Manipulation Video where I select both scene objects and vertices with the same Gizmo component)

So in general the upcoming update should make it much easier for everyone to implement this gizmo into his own code/editor. If you had trouble integrating it, please let me know. There is no current ETA on therelease, but I'll try to do it sooner than later...

Image Collection

I haven't made a lot of progress recently on the engine due to my internship (completed) and the start of the new school year (my last) I did make some screenshots a while back when I was working on flares and terrain texture mapping. Below a small assorted list of the things I did.

With the terrain texturing I tried to minimize stretching on steep surfaces without using the tri-planar technique, there were some difficulties and I don't have a finalized method yet. The red/green colors on the terrain indicate UV coordinates, the lines are the surface normals and the yellow text displays the vertex number in the VertexBuffer. I hope this can at least somewhat fill the major gap in between posts recently, hopefully I can do some cool stuff again soon like working on the mesh editor from my previous post.

Vertex Manipulation [Compound objects]

Just a short update on what I've been working on this time. It started when I was playing CoD:WaW this afternoon and I noticed a lot of debris and broken walls which got me thinking about how they managed these kinds of assets. This intrigued me, so I started drawing up some ideas on how I could potentially add this to the toolset, with little knowledge on mathmatical geometry or destruction calculations I tried to start things simple and look for existing online resources.

I will go into much more detail on this topic at a later time, for now I'd just like to share a few images and give notes on what you see.

ray vs. triangle collision. white lines visualize an array of lines from the camera eye colliding with the geometry.

The box-mesh on the left was used to cut 4 holes into the plane-shape.

The wireframe of the same scene, visualizing the triangles of the triangulated plane.

A hole cut by defining 5 vertices by colliding a ray with the plane, these were defined at runtime from the camera-eye.

I'm also looking into 'bridging' (users of 3D Studio Max may know what I'm talking about) to fill the gap between two planes of a wall (its back and front) after cutting a hole with the triangulator. Some basic box uv-mapping and a noisy texture to simulate broken concrete (or any other material) and you should have the basics to quickly create holes in walls or break chunks of the scene's meshes. The resources I used are listed below. Much more on this at a later time, there is still a lot to do and even more to talk about :)

Resources

App Hub - Triangle Picking Sample

Nick Gravelyn's Triangulator (2D)

Triangulation By Ear Clipping - by David Eberly

Input & Hotkey Management

Input management is one of those things I never really paid a lot of attention to, using simple if-statements inside an Update() or HandleInput() function worked fine is most cases, until recently. Recently I started to notice my input handling got scattered throughout my code-base and a lot of coupling was required to make sure it was handled properly.

To prevent hotkey-clutter (especially when modifiers (ctrl, shift, alt) get involved) I started working on a HotkeyManager that handles groups of Hotkeys in an easily maintanable way. Initially it was supposed to assign a HotkeyGroup to one or more 'editor-states', like 'only-use-this-hotkey-while-in-editmeshmode', I soon realized this wasn't going to be very helpful and I would have to continuously add new states to keep it up to date...so this was scrapped and replaced by a simpler, but more powerful feature - Predicate<T>. Using predicates enables the manager/hotkey to activate only if a predefined condition is met (i.e. if gizmo.IsActive == true -> execute the hotkey-function) it can contain more than one statement such as gizmo.IsActive == true && Camera.IsMoving == false for example...if both conditions are met, the hotkey may execute with the associated Action (the method assigned to the hotkey) The code-snippet below should be able to illustrate its use.

You may have noticed the above code refers to the GizmoComponent class. SetSelectionPool(IEnumerable<ISelectable> selectables) is a new function I've added to more easily support custom collections and to assign new collections at runtime, in my case this is used to switch between vertex- and object-selection more easily. I will add this along with many other improvements to the open-source gizmocomponent at codeplex at some point.

Back to the hotkeys...within InitializeHotkeys() there is a HotkeyGroup class, this class holds a collection of hotkeys that belong to the same component or share similar functionality. These groups are passed to the manager and will be updated automatically.  The Hotkey class is the main class and has several parameters including key (supports all Keys, MouseButtons and GamepadButtons) a KeyPressState (press, release, hold) a KeyModifier (control, shift, alt or a combination - not illustrated in img), the parent  (used by the Predicate to verify the conditions) and the Action to execute after the key is pressed and all conditions are met.

A quick search revealed there are no suitable Input/Hotkey managers (I didn't like any of the libraries available on Codeplex) so I might turn this into an open-source component/library if enough people are interested in such a library.


Actions and Vertex manipulations are also still WIP, I made some progress on both these tasks and should have some something new to blog about soon enough.