Working on a game...

[FrostyCoolSlug]

Hi mirv (been a while since i posted here O_o),

I've been following your progress with great anticipation, just thought i'd log into my old account to voice my support, keep up the great work

[mirv]

Thanks for the support!
I'm still poking away at my tree structure. It's nice to have a static environment of 50,000 boxes, but a dynamic one is a whole different story. As expected, some slow downs occur when moving 5000 of the boxes around, however I haven't as yet optimised any of the "update" code (at the moment, I simply remove then reinsert each updated box from the root node). I could spit out some framerates, but they probably don't give much indication of what's under the hood considering I always try to get a high end computer. I suppose I should give out a little test app soon for other people to look at.

[mirv]

I haven't been idle - simply been reworking the editor to comply with a change in idea on how to handle terrain. Blending layers is slow compared to using one large texture, so I'm going with the large texture. Several ideas came to me on getting it to fit nicely into video ram - unfortunately the best one I came up with I think happens to be what Megatextures are all about. I'll probably get around to that one day - but for now, a 4096x4096 texture compressed to about 8MB + appropriate mip map levels is where I'm headed. Maybe combine it with a random noise detail texture...hmm...
Anyway, if anybody wants I hope to have a (very) basic, undocumented terrain editor in a usable state on monday. Just for fun.

[mirv]

http://garry.rank.googlepages.com/test.zip
No loading or saving yet. No smoothing or shifting of terrain. Many of those things did work, but then I changed some stuff and broke it all. It will load and save again when I put in the ability to load and save compressed textures (give me a few days). The editor is not meant to be superb or anything - just something to give me levels to load into the engine! Texture packages are best saved into the "textures" folder - no jpeg support at the moment, sorry!
Comments welcome.

[FrostyCoolSlug]

Looking good there, nice work

[mirv]

Things are on hold a little bit to see what ageia does - they're supposed to be releasing linux software soon, and I'd prefer to use a mature physics library rather than write my own. Bullet is a good alternative, but it's still very much a work in progress and changes quite regularly.

[FrostyCoolSlug]

Agreed, you have to be careful when choosing something which will be wrapped around in a large portion of the engine, however, just to be on the safe side, i'd recommend creating a 'wrapper' library which sits between the main code, and the engine you use. That way, if at some point you change your mind, just re-implement your custom (classes/)methods.

Also means that if an update to the physics engine does become avaliable and changes something, you can transparently alter your wrapper.

I did this recently with a small C++ linux project i was working on, given the different OSs, the socket engine varied (i could have stuck with the basics, but Linux 2.6+ and FreeBSD have optimised socket engines). During the configuration stage, a single include is added for the socket engine it's going to use, and it becomes built in with no changes to the core code

Something to concider.

[mirv]

You're right - a wrapper is most definitely the way to go. Sadly I'm getting twitchy about a few things with various physics libraries - either the way things are done, or stuff not being released, so I'll just write my own (basic) one soon, and change it as required. When I get back in a couple of months anyway.

-- back, working on it again!

[mirv]

Thought I might post a quick update where I'm at. I've got most of the core physics functions done, though there's still a fair bit to be built on top of that. At the moment I'm optimising my sphere/triangle collision code. And running a large number of tests on the same data to see where things do actually slow down.

[FrostyCoolSlug]

Nice