While we are still busy with our next game and engine, I started on terrain rendering.

For now the terrain is brute force rendered, creating a new vertex buffer every frame with no optimizations what so ever. The terrain is infinite, but for now I can only look 200 meters ahead to keep the frame rate up…

Next step is to apply some optimizations so the view distance is 5km+. The technique is still something to dive into and do some experiments.

As for now also we have a basic vegetation engine in place that can place objects (currently a car model from FUR) on the terrain. For now the “cars” are also rendered brute force with frustum culling, we are planning on making some impostor-based approach. Simply said, objects far away, say 100 meters, will be rendered as simple sprites. This reduces render time and thus can we display more tree’s on screen.

Screenshots come soon… stay tuned!

What!? Again!! YES! We started porting the “old” engine from Delphi to C#. The reason is that we’re porting the engine is to cut down development time. Also with the whole .NET framework and CLR less work is needed to achieve more. The architecture of the engine remains basically the same.  Apart from some changes at least I’m quiet happy with the design.

Why .NET and not C++ or brainfuck? Well… C++ would take a lot more development time for me as we are more experienced in C# that C++. Speed is not really an issue with simple games as you have a shit load of processing power under your fingertips. And it that’s not enough, you still have the GPU!

Also an other thing that pulled me over the line is Mono. With mono you can run .NET CLR applications (written in C#, managed C++, VB.NET, etc) cross platform. The supported that took my interest are Sony PS3 and the Nintendo Wii. Also I tested it on Suse 11.2 (Linux) with a demo application and it runs with without a problem. The only thing we need to do is keep the engine mono-compatible.

For Windows I want to use the .NET framework and DirectX 9 and 11 (soon). For the other platforms I need to make a new renderer in OpenTK or something similair. Also I need to switch to a mono-compatible physics engine. I’m thinking on BulletX (Bullet for C#) as it’s open source.

The current status of the engine is that I setup DirectX 9 and can render models and a simple GUI all with shader model 3.0 which is also the minimum I want to use. Also I modified the material system to be more easy to use and has less overhead. Further more the editor will be less advanced and used for basic operations like adding and moving objects on the screen. Also the editor is now in-game so we have only 1 executable. (apart from 32 bit and 64 bit).

Stay tuned as more updates will follow!

Long time no blog, so here it goes. This has nothing to do with games.

I was installing Open Suse 11.2 and as expected I needed to enter a password. So I enter a simple to remind password as it’s just a virtual machine image that I’m not planning to use for a long period of time. So the password is “1234″. Now the trouble starts. The first question:
- Your password is to short, really use this password? – YES
Second question:
- your password contains only didigts, this is not safe. you really want to use this password. – YES
Third question:
- Your password is shorter that 5 characters, you really want to use this shorter password- YES (GOD DAMNED)!

3 question if I’m really really really sure that I have entered a password that fits my needs. And I entered it twice! One question should be enough I would think.

A while ago we participated in the PGD compo “Arcadia”. After a long wait with an extended deadline finally we have the results.  And guess what: we are 3rd out of 4. Actually we hoped on something better because we put a lot of effort in this game.

Why we came in 3rd: you can all read it here.

The main reason is that we are 3rd, is that our entry suffered from input lag  due to the high system requirements. With this we really  missed some points.

You can see the results here at the Pascal Game Development website.

NecroSOFT wishes all a joyful 2010!!

As we made a nice game for the competition we also have some future plans for FUR. First thing is that we want FUR to be BIG. This means:
- More cars
- More tracks in different settings
- 1 or 2  extra game modes
- Last but not least: Multiplayer!!

We already did some work to make it BIG! Last week I started to rewrite the GUI system to be more dynamic. It features very basic scripting engine. Also it might be useful for other games we release in the future.

Next thing is that the physics library is out dated and the car physics are too heavy. This also requires a migration to a new version of the physics library we use: Newton Game Dynamics 2.0. Some new features of this library that can come handy in the future is procedural destruction and multi threaded physics calculations which will speed-up things a lot.

As we want to migrate to a new physics engine, we also require some internal changes on the vehicles code.  In this case we require a rewrite of the vehicle physics and vehicle system. For the eye it should remain the same, but the code should be more efficient and creation of vehicles more flexible.

Stay tuned!

The final wait is over! After some sweat and tears we completed FUR for the PGD Annual Arcadia competition! You can grab a copy and start racing here! We left out some features like multi player and an online high score table, but we still have some future plans for this game! Stay tuned and us know what you think of this game!

The PGD compo deadline is near. Only one week left and still much to do.

We’ve done a lot the last couple of days like adding light flares, tuning car physics, track testing, adding sounds, made a game over sequence, score counting  and of course fixed a lot of bugs.

Things we still need to do include online and local score table, enter name and game over menu, skid marks, sparks and multi player support.

Anyway here are some random images I took while developing: enjoy!

Today we where working on tire smoke. Here is a movie that shows the smoke as we have it implemented. The thick smoke was just for fun. Enjoy!

Created a new track again. While playing I thought I give it a shot and started recording it. Enjoy!