SSAO!

After some fights...here comes the SSAO!


This is the beauty of the 'waterfall effect' of the deferred/lightprepass/z-based rendering: one you have coherence between different spaces (world, view, projection, texture...) and you switch between them rather easily, you can begin working on many interesting effects :)
This is a real basic implementation, based on various post on gamedev (thanks guys!!!)

Finally a new connection!

Long time no see guys!
This is the first day I have an internet connection in my new house. After 3 months actually!
I was really busy at work, but I continued programming.
My new challange is the Deferred Rendering...a real cute rendering architecture!
After many reads (mainly gamedev) I moved to my first implementation: I found really useful to do all the calculations in view space, the view space pixel position reconstruction became really simple.
Also, the G-Buffer is actually composed of only 2 render target, rendered with a MRT: normal and linear depth. The result is a Light-Pre-Pass-Like renderer...I'll show a little result:

10 pointlights on the screen with the known rockwall normal map.
I'm also working on the ScreenSpaceAmbientOcclusion so I can move to create a little demo.
Stay tuned!

Actual State; Near future; Future;

Some changes have happened in the last month.
I changed city, company, life.
I moved 700km away from my home, in a more prolific environment and with cool guys.
This is the main reason of the slowdown of the blog!

I'm actually coding hard, because I want to study some topics in which I'm weak, and then I want to merge all of them in the new Hydra!
During these days I'm creating some really small demos that covers different aspects of game programming:

- GUI and Font handling;
- Animation;
- Collada import;
- New graphic pipeline;
- Lightmapping;

These different topics are really interesting, and I'm quite happy of the results.
GUI and Font handling it is something simple, but can give you satisfaction and OUTPUT.
Animation is a really tricky topic, I've done a small exporter in maxscript and all sounds good,
but then I've read this article (link) and found that an importing pipeline is a good choice, even if more difficult for some aspects! Then I began using Collada...really good and FREE.

New graphic pipeline. I wanted something more shader-oriented than before, so I switched to Cg...really COOL! The rendering is organized in pipelines...each one has its own stages. Every stages can specify one or more render target and all the textures produced are specified in a common pool of texture of the pipeline. The next step will be involving a node-based editor for the creation of the rendering phase...I found it very easy and powerful, something that can istantaneously change the appearence of the game to see different pipelines and render, to study the feel of the game and tune it up!
With that in mind I begun my lightmapper. Through I started only some days ago, now it output a simple lightmap with a really simple phong shading: actually I'm spending time in creating a good unwrap and to create the radiosity normal mapping brick that I need to complete this step!

Until september I've no connection at home...so updates will be randomic! :(

But...stay tuned!

Secret of Mana

Yes...I want to know the Secret of Mana.
Long time ago...there was two special games. One was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and another one was Secret of Mana (I don't want to mention Chrono Trigger...I'll do it in another post).
What's about SoM? I really enjoyed it, playing with my best friend and sometimes with my sister...all in realtime? What?
Great story, great ambientation...and great gameplay. The weapons you found and the spell you learn grow with the usage. The fights are in realtime, the AI can control the other in the party or you can play together.
One of my greatest dream is to create a game like that for some console one day...with the beautiful music and all the magic that Secret of Mana has.





But now the mana is weak...and later games fail in public reception.
One day, I'll forge a new Mana and all will be good for the Universe...

Updates, ideas, thoughts

Finally I'm finishing the animation demo I've scheduled. After some research I found a good way to handle animations with blending and transitions. The results are good, the code is simple and I've both CPU and GPU skinning implementations.
Next will be the 2D demo...sure I want to develop something simple yet powerful!

On the other way I'm researching on both toolset development and multithreading. The latter is a difficult and big subject to study, but also so fascinating! I've not found many resources around, I think not so many people use multithreading in a correct way...
On the toolset research, I'm creating an architecture that is both GUI and Engine indipendent.
Why so? Is it possible? Yes yes...it is possible. I wanted to create something that can grow with me: I've always believed the power of toolset, but I know also that much time is needed to create something robust and useful. This little/big idea let me create my own editor and develop it during time...I'm really excited about this software design!

Last but not least...the last guardian (sorry for the repetitions :P). Amazing. Wonderful. I want to make games with such magic...the real state of the art. If you haven't seen it...click here .

Stay tuned!

Plans

The best way to create something is to actually DO it.
Because of this, I began planning some smalls tech-demos for my always-in-development engine Hydra: these demos will give me knowledge about different topics, and incrementally give Hydra more features.
The first, small demo I've done was about culling and the new shader oriented pipeline...I've posted some screens not too much time ago (see this and this) and that debug lines are a giant step towards engine's features development. This is something known to many, but the separation between code and data, and the need of data to be displayed, can be overwhelmed by using debug methods (draw 3d lines, 2d lines, circles, spheres, boxes, cylinders).

Also the use of custom exporter (my case is maxscript) lead to another problem: how to export data in a cross-platform manner and in an efficient way. The solution is simple: Collada. It is the perfect intermediate format that can be translated in platform-dependent code, and that exports almost everything graphical thus physics objects. The use of Collada was suggested by the problem of exporting animation (SRT, biped, skinning) data from 3d studio max...what if I found a model created in Maya? And the old release of 3d studio? Using custom-made scripts it is great, maxscript is very simple yet powerful (creating a custom exporter need a small amount of time, personal experience), but when I was developing the script I had to create something adapted to Hydra...abstracting, introducing a new layer was the answer.

The second demo, as you can imagine, is about animations exported using Collada. I'm thinking of doing first CPU accelerated skinning, I've got a bunch of GPU-accelerated shaders that performs skinning, even if I'm not so confident about the real power of GPU...it becamed too much used, and cores are multiplying!

Third demo will see a simple 2d framework with menus, font management and console.

The fourth and the fifth will be the harder part...radiosity lightmapping and scene management. Lightmapping will be only an algorithmic problem, scene management will be a design problem.
The question about how to describe scene, and let different subsystems (graphic, AI, sound) interacts is way too bit complicated to be explained in this post. Also, there are many design flaws in every different implementation...just Keep It Simple and Stupid.

Hatching love

Some years ago I began cultivating a passion for drawing (now possible only in my sparetime) that evolved in some 3d modeling...one of my favourite technique was "hatching", in which volumes are "described" by simultaneous lines that intersect creating grey-scaled images and giving the idea of volume. Even now I'm not a great modeler/drawer, but I find this fantastic shader to be linked to my vision about drawings (see comics like Berserk or Hokuto no Ken to see it in action).
So based on my first and only semi-serious 3d model, Zoddo from Berserk, I finally came up with this fantastic shader, even if the model has serious normals problem (that affects lightning :( ):


I wander what can be the feeling with a 3d world shaded in this way...