JoshJers' Ramblings

It is now highly apparent that there is no chance of me finishing this project by the end of this month. It was an impressively unrealistic goal in the first place. Oh well. It did its intended job: To light a fire under me and make me get to work on it.

And I’m still working. I don’t really have any pretty screenshots of anything new, but I’ve just finished planning some extensions to the gameplay (a totally different method of doing the collision detection that’ll be faster, as well as different track cross-sections, like driving inside of a tube). Then I’ll start beefing up the actual graphics engine proper. It’ll be nice to get some actual environments around those tracks!

Modeling will go as follows:

1. Use track editor to create track
2. Export completed track to a mesh format
3. Load mesh into standard 3D Modeling program
4. Create background
5. Save/export to some format that I can read in
6. Replace the temp materials assigned in the modeling program with the actual in-game materials
7. Run it through the lightmap-generating radiosity dealy
8. Save as level format
9. Profit!

Or something like that.

Sound complicated? It is! But it’s easier than me coding my own 3D modeller. I tried that once, it didn’t work out so well.

Anyway, the AI is coming along…slowly. I’ve stopped developing it until after the collision detection rewrite.

Anyway, I guess the release date has changed a bit. It’s now “When It’s Done.” Except I plan on that not becoming the Duke Nukem Forever version of “When It’s Done.”

This is still the most progress I’ve made on a game in my spare-time programming efforts. Ever. I’m happy with it!

Finally! It took longer than expected (I had some issues with the collision detection), but I finally have the driving code working. That means, I can finally drive around these crazy tracks. As expected, because the tracks that I have were created before I even knew how the cars would handle or anything, not all of the turns/curves/loops are as forgiving as I’d like.

Some screenshots (note that the car is not actually going to be a sphere, but I needed something quick to represent the car):

Click to enlarge

Because the car is eventually going to be hovering, the driving control doesn’t have to be as accurate to real life as it would if the car had wheels. So I added some dampening to the sideways motion (Essentially lateral friction to keep the car from moving sideways, unless it’s skidding), but didn’t have to do a full-on friction model. Plus, the car has a force-field (or whatever they will call those things in the future), so the walls actually bounce the car more like a pinball bumper than in a realistic fashion (the force field applies some bounce force).

Anyway, now that I have the cars driving, it’s time for the next huge step: Driver AI.

Note that I have absolutely no idea at all how to write an AI to drive around my loopy sorts of courses. Time to do some research!

Another week-plus break in journal entries. That’s starting to become a bad habit, but I don’t like updating when I don’t have anything to show.

Which brings us to today’s entry: I have something to show.

I created a new track editor. You may remember seeing screenshots of my previous track editor, way earlier in the journal. Those people who DO remember this are thinking to themselves, “That bonehead said that he would keep the existing editor because it works.” This is true. But, I decided that it was slightly hard (and by “slightly hard” I mean “nigh impossible”) to do some of the things that I really wanted to do fairly frequently (like spiral curves and full loops, to name a few). Plus, as the previous system was written using bezier patches , it took many patches to do any one feature (a loop generally took about 16-20 patches). This was lame.
>Since I am no longer using beziers as my basis for all terrain rendering, it’s no longer advantageous to use them exclusively in track creation. So I started over.

Click to Enlarge

Each track segment gets the following attributes (which are relative to the track segment’s initial orientation):

• Length – This represents the angle of the track relative to the in-game representation of the north star. That, or just the length of the track down the middle. I can never remember which is which.
• Width – Determines what the width will be by the end of the section of track (the previous section determines the initial width).
• Curve – The amount of curvature of the track. A negative curve is to the left, positive is to the right. A 360 degree curve is, as expected, a full rotation.
• Horizontal Skew – This is how much the track strafes to the side (along a sinusoidal sort of path) across its length. It’s like a lane-change. Only the pavement is changing lanes, not the car.
• Incline Curve – This is the circular incline of the track. A 360 degree value of this would be a full loop. Positive is up, negative is down.
• Vertical Skew – Similar to the horizontal skew, only vertical. How’s THAT for descriptive?
• Twist – This is how much the track rolls to one side or the other along its length, which modifies the orientation for the next segment
• Bank – This is similar to twist, except it raises one side instead of twisting around the middle, and the orientation remains unchanged in the next segment of track (this is to allow for banked curves, which I wouldn’t want to curve upwards because of the bank or something stupid like that).

Given those properties (And a semi-complicated way to combine them which I won’t detail here), I can still generate a track in segments. But I can use less segments to do the job.

Click to Enlarge

Once I got it generating, then I decided to make it considerably more adaptive. So it divides up the curves according to an error metric, which is why, in the last screenshot, some of the bits of track have fewer polygons (the straight bits only have one big one), and others have more.

The last thing to do is be able to export it to an actual mesh, so that I can load it up in a 3D modelling program and build the landscape around it.

But, for now, I can work on actually getting a car to drive on the track. Because now that I have a few levels, I want to find out what it’s like to drive on them!

I promise that one day this journal will have something more entertaining than my I’m-Planning-On-Making-This-Cool-Game ramblings. In the interim, I present to you my general (and likely highly incomplete) plan of action (not including creation of art/level/music/sound assets, which will sort of happen as necessary):

1. Get the graphics engine to the point where it can display a level, though without the greatest of visual quality (probably simple directional lighting, crap texturing, nothing that will make a pretty screenshot. It won’t look pretty, but it’ll work).
2. Implement the driving-on-track code (i.e. keeping the vehicle on the track, bouncing/sliding against walls, controlling the vehicle)
3. Implement some form of AI for the opponent cars. At this point, the game will be “playable” in a weak sense
4. Begin implementation on the sound/music code. Get basic engine sounds, collisions, etc working.
5. Begin to improve the graphics engine, by implementing the lightmap generator, getting new shaders written, particle systems, etc. Add some polish
6. Begin work on the menuing system. Get a title screen/etc.
7. Work on enemy AI. Make it drive better, make it tuneable (i.e. difficulty levels).
8. If I’m going to do network code, I’ll probably want to start work on it right around here
9. Start polishing the sound engine a bit (Add ability to have ambient sounds in the levels, doppler effect, all sorts of other audible cues)
10. Get the graphics engine to the point that no more code changes will be necessary
11. Begin fleshing out levels, start chaining them together into circuits
12. More polish. Make the menus look cooler, tweak performance, all of that jazz
13. At this point, the game will be highly playable, so anything past this is pure candy. HDR rendering? motion blur? If there’s time.

There are also some considerations that I will be attempting to make over the course of the whole development:

• The game needs to be, above all else, fun. If I’m not having fun playing it, then why should I even be making it?
• I am going to try my hardest to minimize load times. That is a very big priority for me. I hate waiting for games to load.
• The driving control will be simple and easy. I have a great idea for mouse-driven steering (which may or may not be original, but I haven’t seen it personally) that I prototyped a while back…It’s definitely fun, but it needs tweaking. Probably in the form of a control options screen, with a good default setting.
• The graphics code should be easily extendable. I’d like to be able to add higher-quality versions of the existing effects in the future (i.e. add some PS3.0 support for full-scale displacement mapping or such).

Hm. For the three of you out there that happen to keep tabs on this journal, if you see something (rather, fail to see something) important that I’m missing, please let me know. I’m new to this whole actually-trying-to-FINISH-a-game-in-this-lifetime thing.

Well, my home computer’s hooked up, my Internet was just turned on, and the slate is clean.

Today’s mystery ingredient: Triangles!
Let’s see what the Iron Dev can dish out.

One Point Five Years Ago

Early last year, I was playing around with a simple terrain engine. It was your basic height-field based terrain engine. It was also crap-tastic. But hey, you’ve gotta start somewhere. Thus, I started with this:

(Click To Enlarge)

Kinda lame, but it was a good test. Each chunk was LODified by using a Binary Triangle Tree, which was a great simplification method, though I did eventually switch to using progressive meshing (though leaving the edges in-tact…not the greatest LOD scheme ever). It was then that I had a vision. Well, not so much a vision, but an idea. Well, not even an idea. More of a thought. Cliffs! That’s right, cliffs. And caves. Those were two things that I would love to have, but they’re impossible with a straight-up heightfield renderer. So I set my tired code aside, and began my next crazy scheme.

Terrain Idea The Second!

So, I thought: what if I could model a level in a manner similar to making a topographical map. Something like this:

(Click To Enlarge)

In this system, each shape could be drawn, and given a height value. The editor would fill in the drawn shapes with polygons, connecting them to the other inner shapes (and outer shapes), adding slopes when asked (or making a given shape a plateau).

Sound crazy? It was. I coded it for about three months, working on logic to triangulate a complex polygon (overlapping not allowed) which contains children (which are holes in the parent polygon). Then I worked on smoothing the polygons by adding curves (see the first two screenshots for a comparison). Each edge was essentially a bezier curve, where the middle two control points were placed based on the angle of the connection to the next/previous line segments.

Now, right about now, you may be thinking to yourself: “How does this solve the problem of caves? How did you handle the LOD switching? Isn’t this a lot of work? What’s the meaning of life?” To answer your questions, in order: It doesn’t, I didn’t, Way too much, and free beer. This particular concoction was way too complex, and not near enough to what I wanted. So it, too, was scrapped.

The Not So Distant Past, Or: How to Totally Copy SSX’s Idea

I started browsing the web for other creative ways to generate terrain. It was then that I came upon THIS article. What a brilliant idea, I thought! Use curved surfaces to model terrain! So I started work on Terrain III: Terrain With a Vengeance. Not too long afterwards, I had a decent curved-surface terrain. The beziers were calculated in a vertex shader, given the matrix representation of the surface as a 4×4 matrix. Each vertex buffer simply contained the u and v coordinates (in the range [0, 1]) for the patch of the given resolution (different vertices in the vertex buffer were used for different tesselations). However, there were two big problems:

• The vertex shader was somewhat slow, with the extra matrix multiplications (three 4×4 multiplications and a dot product for position alone)
• There were cracks between the patches, due to floating-point rounding errors.

So, I thought, what if I calculated the patches in software in a big dynamic vertex buffer, using a better method? I ended up using de Casteljau’s Method on the edges of the patches, because it does not have the same floating-point issues that the matrix representation does. However, I continued using the matrix method on the interior points, for speed reasons. Each patch was cached into the vertex buffer using a cheap LRU cache. This eliminated the “sparkles” caused by the floating-point errors, and significantly improved my framerate. And now, screenshots:

(Click To Enlarge)

This method worked well, but there were issues with locking/unlocking the buffer. Also, 800 patches meant 800 DrawPrimitive calls, which is, how you say, lame. Thus, I rebuilt the cache algorithm (Yes, I have the technology) to cache items into a set of smaller vertex buffers (that I called “slices”), which were each bound to a specific material (i.e. grass, etc). Thus, they could be batched up better. Soon, 800 patches meant only about 30 draw primitive calls. Which was way better, but there was still a problem. With great caching comes great framerate instability. Since the caching algorithm would sometimes not have to do anything, but sometimes it would have to cache a lot of patches, the framerate became very unstable. Even though it was running faster than 100 fps almost the entire time, it was still highly visible stuttering (especially when I fillrate-limited it a bit). Plus, there became the question of how to actually MODEL such a terrain (I was going to have to write a super-complicated terrain editor). So I wavered. It seemed that there were many, many problems with this implementation and that, while it’s definitely cool, I don’t know that I’m going to be able to do what I want within my newly-created timeframe. So I decided to set this method aside as well, and move on.

The Present, But Not the Birthday Kind

And that brings us to now. I’ve decided that I’m going to use a simple mesh format for the terrain, though with LOD data built into it. That way, I can use an existing modeling program (I’m looking at you, Blender) to do the modeling, build some simple texture/material/atmosphere editing utilities (or one texture/material/atmosphere editing utility), and just use that. Break it up into LOD-able chunks, and I think I have a winner!

Also, I’ll probably keep the track editing interface that I already have (though I’ll have to improve on it, obviously, since it’s…clunky, at best). But it provided me with these:

(Click To Enlarge)

Which are fairly representative of the types of tracks I’m aiming to have.

Alright, class, that’s the end of your history lesson for today. Up next: New developments in code!