YakYak

Inspired by the Virus thread I've decided that rather than trying to make a specific game, what'd be more interesting is making some sort of "game engine" and then seeing what games I can build around it.

And I quite like the Virus look so I think I'll have a play in OpenGL again...

I have been thinking of doing a virus a like for ages. I don't have enough free time unfortunately - my current projects are taking long enough!

I was thinking that if I did do something like that then this might be promising for terrain rendering:

http://www.tbgsoftware.com/

Ooh, sounds good. Saves me the effort of writing a 3d engine

Funny you should say that... Last weekend I had a go at diamond-square terrain generation, and this weekend I had a go at getting to grips with the ODE heightfield geom, and... well, came up with a little demo that sprinkles cubes over a brightly-coloured landscape.



Though in actual fact that piece of terrain is about quarter of a kilometer on a side, and the cubes are two metres on a side and dropped from random points 180m above sea level. So it's more like bombing an island with safes.

How do you decide on scale? I never understood that part since OpenGL works in things called "units" that don't mean anything...

It's entirely up to you
As long as you're consistent in scale throughout it can represent any size you want.

Also remember the way formulas work! Don't go mixing up mass and density, etc.

Well, you can, but you'll end up with some bizarre physics. Which may be desirable. And sometimes more realistic than the real values would be. Ah well.

I hope you mean "realistic" in the "not realistic" sense :)

Absolutely, it doesn't matter at all to OpenGL. You have to tell ODE how strong gravity is, how big and how heavy things are, how much time passes per simulation step and so on, though. I prefer to stick to SI units for that - much easier to hold onto your marbles that way!

physics is funny, it always looks more realistic if you turn gravity up to something completely silly in my experience - I think it's a bit like animators having to exaggerate character animation to look real.

So is this one of those times where you make the player, and then scale the rest of the world around him so things look consistent? I've made landscapes before and they've looked huge, but when flown over seem about the size of a football pitch.

I'm going to play with Demeter and see if I can get some sort of landscape rendered. I want something huge with hills and valleys and stuff to explore - kind of early Flight Sim quality landscape that is massive, rather than highly detailed small stuff like in Crackdown. I'm going for the 16bit look as I quite like it (and it's less effort for my laptop's weedy Geforce 2 graphics card )

Dunno, this is the first time I've done any landscape generation.

Storage shouldn't really be a problem on modern systems unless you have *really* big (complex) landscapes. I imagine you'd have to be a bit more intelligent about rendering the terrain for larger maps; for the 257x257 grid in the picture I just draw it once and put it in an OpenGL display list and it's fine. I imagine for bigger maps it'd be a good idea to divide the ground into chunks and only draw the ones the player can see...

ODE has hash and quadtree spaces built in, so that simplifies collision detection.


Good call! It'd be really cool to see games that looked like they were running on a seriously souped up Atari/Amiga/Arch.

Saves on drawing all those textures too.

To go all design-wankery for a moment...

I've read a fair number of scifi books that go on about Cyberspace or whatever the writer calls it. I've got some sort of image in my head of what I think they're trying to describe.

Mostly, because they're books written in the early 90's, or the 80's these landscapes involve lots of geometric shapes and low polygon counts.

And if I can do low-rez graphics that don't look shit, they won't require too much processing power. And that means more per frame for doing the rest of the game's code.



That's the one Geometric shapes and patterns I can do. Realistic looking artwork? Not really. It's a computer game, it's not supposed to be realistic

If I can render a landscape and fly around it, I'll be happy.

The trick, as always, is to avoid drawing too much. You could take the virus look and only draw a small patch, or do clever clipping and draw wide areas, or use a landscape engine that does it for you, but keeping the amount you draw under control is fundamental.

The trouble with landscapes is that if you aren't careful you can end up with an immense amount of stuff being rendered. That is going to hurt however many (or few) textures you use.

I find that no matter what hardware you give me I can find a way to bring it to its knees in short order :)

Awesome, I'm doing something similar myself, although not flight-sim-y (there is an old image earlier in this thread somewhere of my work in progress.)
I love the old flat shaded poly look, but it's very easy to get caught up with wanting some textures and then wasting loads of time mucking about with them only to decide you'd be better off without textures ... which explains my lack of progress lately

Edit: bloody hell back on page 5 of this thread, 8 months ago or so I posted my WIP pic.