gamedusa blog

Terrain updates (II)

2011-12-29T05:19:00.000-08:00

This is a new screenshot of my 3d planet simulation.

There are a lot of improvements since the last blog update, but I'll try to explain it in the next blog entries...

Terrain updates

2011-02-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

After at least one year without any entry, finaly I decided to post my evolution on terrain rendering.

The planet has geometry and texture streaming of whole earth at 1km resolution (for now). And as a bonus, a little galaxy :D

Pack normal and height data in one float texture

2010-03-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

Wow, hard coding night. But in the end I can code two routines that allows me to store normal mapping data and terrain height in one float texture. Remember that in order to perform vertex texture fetch in the vertex shader we need to access to the topology with one float texture.

I coded this in C++ but it's easy portable to GLSL or HLSL.

In this example I store only 2 normal components: X and Y in range 0 to 255. Remember that you must extract third component as follows: sqrt( 1.0 - nx*nx + ny*ny );

Heightmap has custom precision values, due big imprecision of floating point conversion. With 11 bits of precision we can store heights from 0 to 2043. This happened because we loose 4 numbers with this precision. The formula is:

unsigned char hPrecisionBits = 11; // (1<<11) = 2048
unsigned char expectedError = 1 << (hPrecisionBits - 9); // 4
unsigned short maxHeight = (1 << hPrecisionBits) - expectedError; // 2044


//! Gives fractional number
inline float frac( float _value ) {
    return _value - floorf( _value );
}

// NX | NY | HEIGHT -> float32
//  8 |  8 |   16
inline float packNormalAndHeight( unsigned char _nx, unsigned char _ny, unsigned short _height, char _hPrecisionBits )
{
 return 
  (_nx / 256.0) + 
  ((_ny / 256.0) / 256.0) + 
  (_height / ((float)(1<<_hPrecisionBits)) / 65536.0);
}

// float32 -> NX | NY | HEIGHT 
//             8 |  8 |   16
inline void unpackNormalAndHeight( float _value, char _hPrecisionBits, float* nx_, float* ny_, float* height_ )
{
 *nx_ = floorf( frac( _value ) * 256.0 );
 *ny_ = floorf( frac( _value * 256.0 ) * 256.0 );
 *height_ = frac( _value * 65536.0 ) * ((float)(1<<_hPrecisionBits));
}

Usage example:

unsigned char hPrecisionBits = 11; // (1<<11) = 2048
unsigned char expectedError = 1 << (hPrecisionBits - 9); // 4
unsigned short maxHeight = (1 << hPrecisionBits) - expectedError; // 2044

// Pack as 8 | 8 | 16
float packedValue = packNormalAndHeight( 231, 137, 2043, hPrecisionBits );

// Unpack from single float
float x,y,h;
unpackNormalAndHeight( packedValue, hPrecisionBits, &x, &y, &h );

Notice that 'expectedError' brings us the amount of error values returned in height function. For example, if our precision bits are 9, expected error will be 1 (135 when we store 136 number). For 10, error will be 2, for 11, will be 4, for 12 will be 8, etc...

I hope it will be useful.

A message to the world

2010-01-06T06:22:00.000-08:00

...or when the human beings became adults.

Codelite

2009-12-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

Surfing through the xubuntu repository I found this new fantastic c++ multiplatform ide:
In Windows it uses gcc 4.4 and has an integrated Subversion plugin!!!
http://www.codelite.org/

Currently I'm trying it with my home projects. OhYesYesYesYes

Campanas por la gripe A

2009-10-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

Una de vacunas:

TERESA FORCADES, doctora en Salut Pública, hace una reflexión sobre la historia de la GRIPE A, aportando datos científicos, y enumerando las irregularidades relacionadas con el tema.

Explica las consecuencias de la declaracion de PANDEMIA, las implicaciones políticas que de ello se derivan y hace una propuesta para mantener la calma, así como un llamamiento urgente para activar los mecanismos legales y de participación ciudadana en relación a este tema.

Lucera Project

2009-09-18T04:51:00.000-07:00

"Lucera Project is a small videogame company that wants to realize some basic libraries to help other ‘indie’ programmers to make games easily. Performing all difficult and cumbersome stuff to allow developers to implement their games without worrying about details like load sounds and textures, render on screen, capture inputs, and so on.

In addition, Lucera Project libraries are cross platform and can compile the same code for different platforms such as Windows or iPhoneOS.

We hope to help many people to achieve their dreams of creating video games."

Blog:
http://lucera-project.blogspot.com/

2D engine:
http://mindshake-lucera.blogspot.com/

Sound engine:
http://brainwave-lucera.blogspot.com/

Good luck!

Indian Hopi message

2009-09-12T06:12:00.000-07:00

Roy LittleSun's message:

ShaderX7 contribution

2009-08-29T03:05:00.000-07:00

Finaly, my article doesn't appears in the ShaderX7 book :(
But, hey! I appear inside as contributor. My fifteen minutes of fame :D

Light shafts

2009-08-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

In my holidays I'm trying new techniques for my terrain engine. Unfortunately, in my screen space terrain implementations, the well-known artifact of "vertex swimming" appears and it's very noticiable :|

I think that I can reuse the technique in order to code a cool screen space water effect in the near future.

For now, I'd been added the "Game Programming Gems 6" terrain technique (very simple, pretty fast, and without any pre-calculation), light shafts (but the effect needs a radial blur), and particle billboards for cloud rendering.

Goodbye :(

2009-06-26T05:58:00.000-07:00

Busyyyyy

2009-03-05T17:27:00.000-08:00

Screen space terrain

2008-11-22T05:26:00.000-08:00

Lastest days I've been busy coding a demo of a "screen space terrain". There isn't geometry here, only heightmaps. A grid is projected over a plane by a projector camera (in red). At now I'm trying to fix vertex interpolation and making a more better projector. Frame rate is constant because the projected grid has the same size along the scene.
When I finish it, I'll upload a demo with full source code.

How to configure SMC EZ-Connect usb wifi stick into Ubuntu

2008-11-03T00:28:00.000-08:00

My current distro is xubuntu 8.10, but it could be apply to
an older xubuntu 8.04, kubuntu, and ubuntu distributions:

1. Install ubuntu
2. Install ndiswrapper from cd instalation folder. Click over this two files:
"/pool/main/n/ndiswrapper-common_1.50-1ubuntu1_all.deb" and
"/pool/main/n/ndiswrapper-utils-1.9_1.50-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb"
3. Copy your ".inf" file from SMC driver CD to a local folder.
4. Type this into console (changing your name and driver name, of course):
ndiswrapper -i /home/user_name/xxxxx.inf
ndiswrapper -mi
5. NOTE: You could be use ndisgtk also, and remember that if your ubuntu
runs at 64bit you need the 64 bit driver (xp64 for example).
6. Type sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces
7. Copy and paste this into file:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up ifconfig wlan0 up
pre-up iwconfig wlan0 essid WLAN_20
pre-up iwconfig wlan0 key s:'C1131DA6BFB21'

8. NOTE: Change 'WLAN_20' to your wireless name and 'C1131DA6BFB21' to your WEP password.
9. Save file changes and reboot
10. Open firefox and type www.google.com :)

3DisplayForum

2008-10-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

This month I've been busy by preparing my conference for the first 3DisplayForum. In the website you'll can download the conferences of the other partners soon.

Hey, that's me :D

My conference was titled "Photo-realistic illumination in real-time" and you can download the PDF of the conference here (sorry, at now only in spanish).

This year was showed in Madrid, I hope that if you live in Spain you can
attend next year if you're interested.

10.000 visits

2008-10-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

Hey, 10.000 visits, but seriously: I'm not worthy.
Anyway, a lot of thanks ^^

Google Chrome

2008-09-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

I've been download google chrome and all that I can say is that it's the fastest web-browser I ever seen. Newer times, newer browser. Wow, but we want the Linux and Mac version too :D

OpenGL 3.0

2008-08-12T16:58:00.000-07:00

Unlike other coders I'm very glad with the new openGL specification, because I hate strong object-oriented design in a low level API. Until now I design my 3d engines using this design paradigm but with the use in some games I learned that the most useful code was the oldest openGL design that avoids classes and pointers (at least at the highest level). With this in mind I built a lite 3d framework that uses index instead pointers ala openGL.

I'm sure that people that has been used the two APIs can remember entire openGL sintax because it uses the same subset for all commands.

I believe that Khronos group follows a smart movement by avoiding API re-design every 2 years like directX does when new GPU features arrives.

Source code

2008-08-12T14:14:00.000-07:00

Until now, I haven't release any code examples because my huge 3d engine size, but in order to write the article for ShaderX7 book I wrote a lite openGL framework and I want to share which they are interested in the near future. In all forms and by contract issues I cannot share things that I'll use in my actual company. But when I wrote any interesting stuff I'll try to share it.

Thanks for reading ^^

Chunked lod tests

2008-08-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

A lot of time without any post, bad, bad, bad.
I've been busy writing the demo for shaderX7 article, thanks to Nico for the 3d mesh for the demo ^^.

Well, I've been testing some terrain implementations: SOARX, Clipmapping but the winner by far is the chunked lod algorithm.

http://tulrich.com/geekstuff/chunklod.html

The image above is how the technique appears in my engine.

My own planet (III)

2008-06-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

I just been uploaded a video of the planet:

The unique improvement is the presence of normal mapping.

ShaderX7

2008-06-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

Finally, I wrote an article called "Screen-space approximate local irradiance" for ShaderX7 book that will be released in lastest days of December 2008. yiiiiihaaaa!!! :p

On July I'll try to finish the demo with full source code that will be included in the cd-rom.

For this hot summer: A lot of work, a lot of work!!!!!!!

My own planet (II)

2008-06-22T04:40:00.000-07:00

New improvements has been added to my 3d planet (that suspiciously, looks-like to our earth :p).

* Added cloud layer. It completes one full round each 30 minutes.
* Data (frontier, coast lines, etc) near blending when the camera is near to the planet.
* Stars texture map for not to feel alone in the universe.
* Earth lights map for night texture with automatic blending.
* Ground scattering.

My own planet

2008-06-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

Because I know that I'll never conquer the world, I tried to build my own earth in order to conquer and tyrannize it... muahahhahaha (very, very evil laught)

It uses the planetary scattering algorithm of Sam O'neill, and at now I'll try to find some use to it... [quivers, Google :p]

nedmalloc: fast memory allocator

2008-06-11T13:48:00.000-07:00

from nedmalloc website:

"nedmalloc is a VERY fast, VERY scalable, multithreaded memory allocator with little memory fragmentation...

It is more than 125 times faster than the standard Win32 memory allocator, 4-10 times faster than the standard FreeBSD memory allocator and up to twice as fast as ptmalloc2, the standard Linux memory allocator. It can sustain a minimum of between 7.3m and 8.2m malloc & free pair operations per second on a 3400 (2.20Ghz) AMD Athlon64 machine"

I've made some changes to allow compilation in gcc (4.3) for Windows using code::blocks

You can download zip file here.

Beautiful

2008-03-18T19:05:00.000-07:00

After tuning a lot of parameters, I got decent results that has been increased by adding an horizontal and vertical blur filter.
sweeeeet.

The real-time re-projection cache

2008-03-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

I've added real-time reprojection cache to the engine. For SSAO looks like a winner technique because it uses expensive shader. Red pixels aren't re-computed because they are stored in an auxiliar buffer to be reprojected.

When camera moves slowly or it's stopped the FPS reaches to infinite and beyond... :p

New code::blocks release

2008-03-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

Code::Blocks 8.02 has been released!

http://www.codeblocks.org

From codeblocks page:

"Thursday, 28 February 2008 18:34

Our long awaited release is finally here! Representing the hard work of 14+ developers for more 2+ years since our last official release (and many changes in the roadmap in between), it is finally made available to the general public.

For your convenience, we provide binaries for all platforms Code::Blocks supports:

* Windows 2000 / XP / Vista
* Linux (Ubuntu & Debian, 32 & 64 bits)
* Mac OS X 10.4+

Binaries for other Linux distros will be made available in the following days. So, without further ado, head over to the downloads section and get it while it's hot!

The Code::Blocks Team"

Added shadow maps

2008-02-21T21:16:00.000-08:00

Quick and dirty uniform shadow maps

ains

Realtime irradiance

2008-02-21T10:35:00.000-08:00

...and (almost) free! :)

Je,je Simple ideas are the best. By only adding to the SSAO shader 2 lines of code we can get local irradiance by free (taking count the color too).

This is the realtime radiance calculation:

albedo:

Ambient occlusion + irradiance + shadows = Global ilumination?? :)

SSAO Revolutions

2008-02-20T10:27:00.000-08:00

More ambient occlusion screenshots, now with materials and textures.

ains

SSAO Reloaded

2008-02-18T14:37:00.000-08:00

The lastest bugs were catched... so... there are new screenshots of chelvis SSAO :D
I think it looks-like better, no?

[Also, notice the higher frame rate after minor optimizations]

SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion)

2008-02-18T11:40:00.000-08:00

This weekend I'd been trying to implement ssao in my engine by giving the excelent tutorial of Iñigo Quilez and reading the gamedev forum. At now the effect has some glitches (maybe some projection bug), but for the moment I feel happy with results.

Happy coding :D

Simply best comercial... ever!

2007-12-04T17:14:00.000-08:00

No comment.

I need a hero...

2007-11-12T16:43:00.000-08:00

The amazing Italian spiderman :)

ains

New job

2007-08-17T17:08:00.001-07:00

Too many days without any new post :S
The reason is that since 1st August I began to work in a new job in Madrid.
The company is Indra, and all is awesome, 1000 person in the building, food tickets, plenty of coffe-machines, nice fellow workers, with pretty girls also (don't kick-me, Rachel :>), and very interesting project (but top secret, of course).

I can't remember how many companies I've worked for (I think it could be more than 7), but I hope that this company will be the last. I've become so tired of having changed my employer and city so many times. :S

ains.

Thanks for translation David!

MoneyCube!!

2007-07-12T17:19:00.001-07:00

This is a demo reel made when I worked in a gambling related company.
Graphics are made by Laurent Samani.

The game uses my old directX7 engine, that calculates all geometry in CPU,
and only rasterize 2d hardware accelerated triangles.

The game itselfs was pretty simple, 4 themes in the main game, and simple coin
physics for the 2nd game (double or nothing).

ains.

Gran doradium it's not a game

2007-06-17T04:33:00.001-07:00

Four years ago I worked in Málaga based company that develops 2d gambling machines.
This was our first game called "Gran doradium". My tasks were implement openGL and openAL native bindings and some game logic.

The game itself doesn't have any technical wonder, but for a previsted development of one month, the game releases one year later.

Our team was only 5 people that grows to a 20 in the last development stages.

With this little entry I want to vindicate that the game development process isn't is a child's play.

Safari (beta) for windows has been released

2007-06-12T08:26:00.001-07:00

You can download latest version for windows XP and Vista here

ains

My game in the wikipedia

2007-06-09T17:54:00.001-07:00

Wow, I just been made a search in google of my 3d racing game 'Kar Racing' (yes, the name is well written) and I found that the second entry is THE WIKIPEDIA.

I don't know who uploads it, but I suppose that is a marketing strategy of publisher. Anyway... thanks!!

'Kar racing' in the wikipedia

YARG!!!! (Yet another racing game)

2007-06-09T07:51:00.000-07:00

Kar racing is a game that I developed some years ago (2003) on demand for an US company "Webfoot games". Nice hours debating game related stuff with game producers...

The develop process was hard and I can remember that I didn't sleep too many hours per day (3 or 4 in the better case).

Well, the game uses directX7 but only for 2d triangle rasterization, the engine was full developed from scratch by me and the CPU managed all 3d transformations. Of course in this time I was a terrible MicroSoft corrupted programmer XD and I loved to use DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput and DirectAnything :S

Now, open source development opened my eyes. (haaaaaallelujahh)

A friend of mine Jorge Gómez was the graphic artist.

ains

Drawing circle primitives using GL_POINTS in GLSL

2007-05-25T19:25:00.001-07:00

One of the best things that I love in openGL due to performance is to draw using GL_POINTS instead standard triangles or lines, because it's an ideal primitive for debug purposes or 3d geometry editor (I think that it's more easy than GL_POINT_SPRITES to show all vertices in our geometry, for example).

But the lack is that you're only allowed to paint ugly scaled quads :S. Using the programmable pipeline you can paint any shape that you want. I upload 2 shaders for paint circles in GLSL using GL_POINTS.

circles_with_gl_points.vert
circles_with_gl_points.frag

Realtime 3d hair physics simulation

2007-05-17T15:40:00.000-07:00

My first program to show to the world :) This demo was a bit old, but I always remember with wet eyes :>

You can download the video and other programming stuff in my website
I use verlet integration for physics, where each spring matches to any edge in the face patch (I import the hair as a single model from a modeling program). Before simulation starts I must sort faces by distance to the head center for allow a more realistic simulation.

The algorithm is too fast, and I use sphere-triangle collision instead sphere-point for more accurate results (and avoid interpenetration).

Questions? :)

ains

Code::Blocks for Slax 5.1.8, or my 2 cents to open-source cause

2007-05-17T15:30:00.000-07:00

Another cool program that I use in my job is codeblocks

"Code::Blocks is a free C++ IDE built to meet the most demanding needs of its users. It is designed to be very extensible and fully configurable..."

...ok, ok. Until here nothing awesome... but... the power of this IDE is the multiplatform concept. Like java says: "program once, runs everywhere". With only one project file, you can compile and run your application in Windows, Linux and MacOSX.

This is my little contribution to open-source cause:

Codeblocks for Slax

ains.

Open Source++;

2007-05-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

Hi to all :)

I want to dedicate my first post to the very first "open source" program concept: "linux"... and probably the best distro that I've discovered: slax.

This Slackware based distribution have the ability to allow users load modules 'on the fly'. And this feature was perfect for my modest project: a-minimalist-game-with-auto-loader-os-unix-based-with-less-than-100mb :)

After one week I've been done a custom optimized distro with automatic hardware acceleration graphics card detection (and was my first kernel recompilation too).

Despite the perfect match for my "world domination" project, I truly think that is the best linux distro by far (obviully I've been tested at least 15 other distros).

ains.