Prototype: Orientation-Adapative Grid

"Orientation adaptive Grid" is a concept I drew up earlier this week and I finally turned it into a working prototype yesterday. There really isn't a lot to talk about - It reacts to the orientation of the camera and shows/hides the three available grids. The video below demonstrates this in a few seconds...



(watch is high-quality to see the lines)

I'm not quite sure if I will be using this in the later stages of my editor - so far it goes look kinda cool and doesn't seem too distracting - it will require some more tuning (of the alpha values) and once the ViewCube (seen in the top-right corner) is complete I will revisit this concept as they play pretty well together.

Editor Tool: ViewCube (Camera Orientation helper)

Got to work on a new tool today and to users of 3D Studio Max or Maya it may look very familiar. It's called the ViewCube and it helps you orientate your camera in the scene. The video below demonstrates the basic system, Right now it's still only a prototype I made earlier this evening and I will finish it at a later time. The final tool will interpolate to the new position/orientation and the tool itself will be available in the top-right corner of the screen (and will have greatly improved visuals of course ;)).

Since I only have one viewport available in my editor, this can theoratically be a replacement for the standard dedicated Top/Side/Front-viewports. I might add an easy toggle for perspective-to-orthographic so you would not longer need/have 4 viewports on your screen at the same time...

Engine Restructuring

So I have actually had the time to work on the engine again and been experimenting with some design patterns. Since the deadline of our latest project (Project Sunburn) has passed a while ago I have been doing some experimental stuff, mostly to try and fix issues and concerns that were bugging me for a while. Since there are currently no new projects/games scheduled to use the engine I am basically free to experiment and try out new things.

A pretty major annoyance is 'one-frame-lag', it's fairly common and can easily happen when you don't own full control over the optimal update-order of your components. This type of lag most commonly occurs when object-A affects object-B, but B has already updated himself that frame. It will then take another frame for the full-effect to be applied. The same thing can happen when different objects query information from a object that itself gets affected several times during a frame, this ends up being messy and will have unexpected results and one-frame-lag.

However, I believe to have found a pretty solid solution, since it a bit experimental I will first test it against more complex components. More on that later...

The latest version of Core Engine was also lacking a proper Game-State management framework, which wasn't a problem for a long time since we generally didn't use 2D menus for our prototypes, but I am currently figuring out a good way to re-integrate this into the engine (from scratch) The 'standard' frameworks really don't work for me as they easily make your framework very complex and put a lot of extra strain on iteration speed, it should be a lot simpler and that's exactly what I'll be trying to accomplish.

A small note on the Gizmo for those of you who may be using it - I might release an update soon fixing some of the integration issues people might experience when they don't have a similar framework set-up. I will try to completely decouple the component which makes it a lot easier to integrate  into your own editor. (If you experienced any other issues, let me know and I will see if I can fix is along with the rest)

With all the other stuff going on I did not spend a single minute on V-script (Except for a presentation I did, I might talk about it some other time) So there is not much news on that I'm afraid.

Starting my Internship (at Trinigy, Germany)

Some of you may know I was recently accepted as Intern Software Engineer at Trinigy, Germany. I arrived in Engingen (near Stuttgart) yesterday (on April 2nd) and I will start my internship tomorrow. It lasts 6-months which is quite extensive, but I expect to learn a lot from this experience.

I don't know what effect this will have on my personal (XNA)projects. I might be able to work on them whenever I have some spare time available. One of the projects is V-script which I recently talked about. I'm considering making it open-source, but have not made my decision yet. It all depends on the quality of the end-result. If you're interested in seeing the V-script (or 'Node-graph Framework') as open-source, leave your comment and let me know if you have any specific features you would be interested in... (I will publish a feature-list soon)

I was going to publish a video of the assignment I had to complete in order to get accepted, but I'm not sure if that is allowed. If I'm able to publish it, I will upload a video about it soon.

SgMotion: Rig/Skeleton Visualizer

A couple of days ago I added a new feature to the SgMotion animation library.
It visualizes the animation skeleton to debug animation and rigging issues and helps finding bone/dummy names and indices more easily.

You can grab the latest release for SgMotion over at codeplex.

An example of how to use this new feature is available inside the Sample project.

As an added bonus you can cycle through the skeleton to highlight bones and their children, watch the video to find out exactly what I mean.

Visual Script 2.0

The above image contains the new (WIP) V-Script tool. It's much like the old script tool, working with Nodes similar to many other node-based frameworks out there. However, this new tool is build from the ground up and should end up with a much cleaner structure and higher flexibility. It will include Xbox 360 support, something that the old wasn't designed for.

As you can see above, I have most of the basics worked out. A cool feature that I added today is auto-alignment, this basically structures the connectors automatically and re-sizes the Node if necessary. The old system required you to manually place all connectors, which proved to be a pain for the more complex script-nodes that were added late in development. 

One last thing you can see is the new menu inside the XNA Game Window. There aren't captured by Fraps, so you couldn't see them in my last video while it was already implemented back then. It's still only a small proof of concept, it's a context-based menu that changes depending on what you've selected and/or are working on (particles, scripts, object-placement etc.) note that the gray bottom-bar (that is currently empty) will include info about the editor and gizmo properties etc.

Console Extension - Auto-complete & Suggestions.

I actually finished this last night, but I didn't post about it and decided to get some sleep instead. It's an extension on the console component I integrated a few weeks ago. It adds support for auto-complete and command suggestions. I might add an argument-completer as well in addition to some layout fixes.


(watch in HD 720p + fullscreen to read the text)

I originally got this idea from the UDK console that has a similar feature, it should make browsing and finding commands much faster and easier and doesn't rely on software knowledge as much.

It's based on the GameConsole by Vos which I believe is one of the best console component for XNA.