Hello again! The volumetric cloud project has achieved the status of complete for now. I was finally able to get decent volumetric clouds rendering using openGL, cg and shaders…influenced heavily by an example from nVidia of rendering to 3d textures. The only thing missing to make them very convincing is self-shadowing…someday 
. Check it out!
Terrain following is a pretty important part of almost any 3D application. It’s the process of figuring out what the geometry of the ground looks like, and how to go about interacting with it. For most applications, this can be a pretty search intensive process, but for a psuedo-randomly generated terrain, it’s just a brief regeneration of the ground.
I recently posted on my personal blog about the current status of my volumetric cloud project. It is far from complete, but I briefly go over a few techniques that I have found interesting, provide some links, and a handful of images that I’ve saved along the journey. Enjoy!
My little side project of a terrain generator has now once again stepped into being a school project. This is a good thing though, because now I don’t feel guilty about asking for help from teachers, and will have to spend more time on it. But, let’s not talk about the grand plans for the future, let’s talk about what’s been accomplished so far.
Hello everyone! My name is Christopher Hays, and I too am a student at Full Sail University. There are few things I like more than programming (and tech in general). I feel that one of the best parts of being a software engineer is an ever changing and expanding world, meaning there is no shortage of things to learn. I have tried expanding into different languages, APIs, and even entirely different platforms. One platform in particular should be on everyone’s mind: the mobile platform.
I hope many of you have played World of Goo, and thusly know of it’s developer, 2D Boy. If not, it’s one of the better indie 2D puzzle titles out on the market right now and definitely worth a shot. But I’m not here to review World of Goo. You see, recently, 2D Boy has done something fabulous. They took World of Goo, stripped it down to it’s basic framework (state machine, input, sound, graphics, math helpers, etc) and released the source code.
In this code is some insight of how to build a simple game, some tricks for optimizing code, and even a bit of Wii support. But the code is unsupported by 2D Boy themselves, their sole intent was to allow you to build new ideas quickly. So prototype away, and let them know how happy they’ve made you (on their forums).
Now comes the tricky part, what if you need to select a tile, or a character on a tile? Or more technically–how can you determine which tile your mouse is currently over? I should also mention that this process may sometimes be referred to as a “screen-to-map” conversion, taking the mouse’s screen coordinates, and converting them to map coordinates. In a regular map with rectangular tiles it’s easy, just take the x and y, divide them by tileWidth and tileHeight, then do the conversion formula: tileID = y * numCols + x (unless you use a 2D array).
Read more…
Hello all! My name is Ray..and today I want to talk about creating isometric things…like engines, editors, and maps. Mostly maps, but these concepts apply to all three. OK, here goes!
This is a new blogroll, obviously, but what we’re going for here is a community site geared towards programmers, gamers, and technophiles. Or just those curious about that sort of thing. We’ll generally cover a lot of different topics, from a lot of different people… but it’s all opinion, and open for discussion. We’d love to hear from you, so don’t hesitate to comment or shoot any of us an email.
So, let’s start things off with a bang, shall we?