Eden Rebirth [code & executable uploaded for help]

ultramedia · Post by **ultramedia** » Thu Jan 20, 2011 2:50 pm

Hi Everyone,

I've resurrected my old planet project, I'm going to try and get it into some sort of state to submit for an upcoming game competition. The part I'm working on at the moment is the UI for the editor (I believe you should always build an editor side by side with a game). I already had irrlicht going in wxWidgets, but now I've figured out how to get it to play nice with wxRibbon (with custom icons done in blender) and wxAUI (so you can dock panels in different configurations). Here's what I've got so far :

Next step is to bring my fractal coastline texturing in (see example below) and map the polygons in the spherical LOD to it.

Also, over christmas, I managed to scrounge enough time and get Michael 4 from Daz3D rigged (body and face) so that I had a generic character to use as a base (M4 game license is quite reasonable now).

It's a bit of long shot shooting for the competition I'm going for, but if nothing else, it's motivating me to get some stuff done

REDDemon · Post by **REDDemon** » Thu Jan 20, 2011 9:23 pm

It is always nice sees some new world editor especially if it is easy in use and for irrlicht

fritzgryphon · Post by **fritzgryphon** » Fri Jan 21, 2011 4:11 am

I hope this will be massively multiplayer and I can build a house on your earth.

ultramedia · Post by **ultramedia** » Fri Jan 21, 2011 4:33 am

Lol, sorry dude, I was put off multiplayer permanently from playing battlefield heroes (because of all the hacking, the game was brilliant).

Also, single player lets you pass time (i.e. "3 days later") and do uber cool slow motion shots, whereas in multiplayer, you're locked in real time.

But house building... yes very much on the cards

ultramedia · Post by **ultramedia** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 12:37 am

Slight update, got the interlocking between octaves working properly and put in a test heightmap...

fmx · Post by **fmx** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 10:23 am

I think you meant "octrees" not "octaves"?
Although maybe I'm wrong and perhaps you're working on a spiffy harmonic terrain generation algorithm or something...

ultramedia · Post by **ultramedia** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 10:45 am

The spherical LOD is based on an inflated cube, and each of the six faces in the cube is made up of nested sets of mesh patches. The term octaves comes from fractal math speak and refers to the subdivision of a pattern into multiple smaller copies of itself (in this case a 4x4 grid with a few tricks up its sleeve). This shows up quite well in the following screenshot:

ultramedia · Post by **ultramedia** » Wed Jan 26, 2011 1:13 am

YAY!!!

I got the cylindrical mapping coded. The image is a bit blurry because it's only 512x256, but that's ok because it's just a test image anyway.
Next step is to hook up my fractal coastline (above) so that the texture can be razor sharp right down to ground level...

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Wed Jan 26, 2011 9:57 am

that's cool

ultramedia · Post by **ultramedia** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 2:47 pm

Ok, switched in my fractal coastline, and straight away noticed a bunch of noticeable sawtooth type artifacts. Spent most of the night researching GPU simplex noise, but I still like my weird way of doing things so I worked on my fractal code and got it to look a bit more natural (keep in mind the image below is just for creating a mask for the coastlines).

ultramedia · Post by **ultramedia** » Thu Jan 27, 2011 8:41 pm

I also uploaded a short little fraps video of it to youtube last night:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfXee_Y57cU

borges · Post by **borges** » Sat Jan 29, 2011 9:33 am

this is such an awesome project...

ultramedia · Post by **ultramedia** » Sun Jan 30, 2011 8:49 am

Ok, I need a little help

I've figured out how to make custom textures on the fly in memory, but it's going to slow because of (apparently) setPixel. At the moment, every time one of my tiles flicks around to the other side of it's 4x4 set there's a small sub momentary freeze as the system waits for its texture to be rewritten (pixel by pixel).

I found this post: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... t=itexture
Which says you have to use this: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/docu/cl ... 1aaf9bccae
Then this: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/docu/cl ... f8a1e68607

to make an image in a way that sounds like it's lots faster than setPixel, but I can't figure out how to actually use it

Can anyone suggest a code snippet?

P.S. the memory I need to read from is made like this (it's an AGG buffer for rasterizing to) :
unsigned char* agg_buffer = new unsigned char[width * height * 3]
and its contents are a simple sequence of r,g,b,r,g,b,r...

Any help would be HUGELY appreciated, as getting this going should step the system up to the point where it can draw sharp coastlines from orbit to ground level

fmx · Post by **fmx** » Sun Jan 30, 2011 11:47 am

ultramedia wrote:The spherical LOD is based on an inflated cube, and each of the six faces in the cube is made up of nested sets of mesh patches. The term octaves comes from fractal math speak and refers to the subdivision of a pattern into multiple smaller copies of itself (in this case a 4x4 grid with a few tricks up its sleeve). This shows up quite well in the following screenshot:

my bad

Cool project, very interesting

ultramedia · Post by **ultramedia** » Sun Jan 30, 2011 1:03 pm

PooBumFart... looks like createImageFromData is even slower than setPixel

The snag is less noticeable in release builds though so for now I think I'll just cross my fingers and keep going...