Going to Austria with UM2

Underwater Mayhem 2 have received a nomination for  EUROPRIX Multimedia Awards 09. We have therefor been invited to the EUROPRIX Multimedia Festival at Austria in November.

This is great news indeed and we are happy that our project is appreciated. When we started this project we had no intention to go commercial but this might be enough to have us reconsider.

Freeze!

The lake have frozen so the hobby projects are on ice. There is simply no time for anything on the side since the focus has to be on the real job.
Its all good though!

A fair estimation would be that we get something rolling again in several months from now. And then I would use my new experience to start building something pretty impressive I believe.

Playing games…

Is both lots of fun and necessary to become a better game developer, could it become better? There have been lots of gaming lately as the gamer I am.

As for the project it is still going forward and I really enjoyed the session today.
There is now GUI for loading and saving animations to the animation bank. I just need to connect it more properly. After that we need some GUI for connecting animations to the model, some code for animation blending / events and GUI for that.

The last thing is connecting and modifying materials and we are set.
Then the tool could be tested and tuned for creating content.

UM3 meshdata finished

We have concluded that it is a good approach for us to separate different parts of the models that we will work with and use in the upcoming game. My first vision was simply to keep everything related to the model in a UM3 standalone file. Everything that is needed for the model would be in this particular UM3 file.

But when we discussed how the tools should work with good efficiency we noticed that we should split the data in a few categories. I will call this group of files as members of the UM3 model family.

The meshdata contains all triangles, indices, skinning info and a nodetree. It could hold several meshes if necessary but it should almost never be more than one anyway. It is fairly fast slightly faster than UM2 despite being a more flexible format and there is room for improvements regarding speed.

The conversion between Collada and UM3 is the biggest improvement. Parsing xml take most of the time, a second or two for a high poly model and the conversion is almost instant, just like UM3 loading.

Slow but steady progress, this format thing wasn’t as fun as I hoped for.

Skinned!

So with some extra energy and time I made the effort to fix that skinning bitch. Well it wasn’t really a bitch but things did not work as I first thought.
The skinning is entirely on GPU and is working pretty well.

What happen?

Someone set up us the games. Well lots of things going on but the spare time have been dedicated for games lately.
I am completely rewriting the graphics engine now with support for the new format. I made a few mistakes in the previous engine that I will try to not do this time. For instance, native support for threads (not just something you ugly fix a month before deadline).

The collada converter is also much faster now, looking at the old code, I couldn’t believe how stupid I was but thats what happens when I have no clue about the format, uglyfix it and hurry to the next task. It did work well except that is slower than necessary. The skinning is not fixed yet, until now I had to fix the d3d renderer.

EZ!

With help from the Collada schema and just looking at the xml file I managed to parse and use the animation data from Collada files. I didn’t expect it to be this straight forward and easy cuz at the first glimpse of the Collada it looks rather complex. Since I figured out what to do with all the numbers we are one step closer to our new format which we will call UM3 just for the sake of it.

The next step is to wrap this up and maybe read more about skinning and how weights and stuff works. This is to get more information how everything works which will help the UM3 format to become robust and support all of our feature needs without ugly modifications and fixes.

Another code session during a friday evening

Since a year ago, the days where I find my self to be coding is like… 95%.
It is fun and productive! What else is there to be needed?
I throw in a game or motocross session now and then (everyday) also.

I am currently working on a tool for our projects in the future and a new format for our graphics with support for animations and other necessary features.
We used COLLADA as an interchange format and we intend to keep it that way.

Software Astroido

I needed a small “cooldown” project to smoothen the transition between a big project and having none (well I do have one). Anyway, I am / was planning for texturing and stuffs in the renderer just for fun but I do need to update my UM2 engine for future projects and that’s what I will do.

Software Renderer

It is time to move on, bring all the experience and good memories and take a few steps forward. The UM2 project has been successful in my eyes. Despite that the game did not reach the finals in SGA2009 we learned a lot and ofc we had lots of fun on the road. The game is fully functional and my primary interest is after all programming and not designing, yet.

Anyway! A software renderer is on the G and if things turn out well I will make a little game out of it.