I finally moved the whole web server from the engine to the editor plugin and added a screenshot function. This enables a “live” image stream where the 3D engine back buffer is captured and send over to the web client as PNG image. It’s not real time, but it works pretty well. As seen on the screenshot here I had my engine running Uber Zombie 2 (still work in progress) with a screenshot shown in the browser.

This also gave me the idea of some new options: web-based editor. Currently it’s a feature we will probably never use, but still a nice-to-have. Think of just clicking the screenshot and have the event executed in the 3D engine.

Also I managed to make some simple styles like coloring the links to something beter than blue and purple. Here is a screenie of the log which shows it better. The (link) behind the Get File is click-able and makes the engine sent the file over the browser. Maybe in the future it would be need to have a small (text) editor to edit text files… But as for now I’m only working locally I can access all files via explorer.

Was there a part 1? YES! The web server was working, but now I made some changes so it can be pretty useful.

First I added some extra data and colors to the actor detail view, changed and added a filter option to the scene list. This list shows all actors in the current active scene. Furthermore I added a page to view most of the loaded assets (resources) and a page the take a peek at the log… can be pretty useful sometimes :).

I also managed to unroll lists. I do not yet feature a collapse button or something. Next I also manged to catch exceptions. If there are some fields that are pointing to the NULL value it will just show the exception text.

There is still some work to but for now I can manage. I still have the debugger running on in the background :). Also it would be nice to see materials and textures directly in the webpage… (possibilities are endless!)

Anyway here are the screens captured in FireFox.

So as some of you guys may know I created a spline track a while ago use in the racing game FUR. Now I created a new version and so far it’s working because we switched programming language and I was not happy with FUR. Now FUR is working, yes, but still has lack of content and gameplay features, it has a crappy menu, only useful in an arcade cabinet and you need to close it with Alt-F4. Al with all: not finished.

Anyway I will explain a bit on how I implemented my spline track. At first I define the points the track needs to travel trough.  For example we have 4 points, creating a round track, 2 red, 2 blue. The red is where we will draw the curved road (green arrow). First I define 2 imaginary points named p1 and p2. From red point 1 we interpolate to p1 and call this result A, from p2 we interpolate to red point 2 and call this result B. Now the final part: interpolate between A and B and you have your curved points.

Vector3 A = Vector3.Lerp(Red1, p1, t);
Vector3 B = Vector3.Lerp(p2, Red2, t);
Vector3 result = Vector3.Lerp(A, B, t);
PointList.Add(result); // add result to some kind of list

Now we have the curved points, we can determine the direction simply by current point – next point, normalize this and extrude it with triangles which is a fairly simple process as you already have the direction. For further use it’s also very easy to implement a banked curve simply by linear interpolating the bank for each point. This way it’s very easy to create a spline based road or race track. Procedural for the win!!

ps. Hometown GP which is nowhere to be found anymore also has a similar track system.

A while ago I wrote something about a new terrain engine. A few days ago I fixed some bugs like the gaps in the quadtree chunked level of detail terrain.

Also my friend Peter wrote a small program that generates a procedural height map and added roads via A* path finding algorithm. Here are some results so far.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I created a web based debug server (read only). I created mine within 2 evenings and it currently only displays a full actor list with clickable actors. Info displayed so far is the meta data for an actor (entity) and public variables. See the screenshots!!