date_range 22/11/2012 22:54

Well, they’re just command prompt pictures, but hey it’s better than nothing right? I’ve continued to develop my binary packaging system, awkwardly titled the ‘Binpressor’. It has now come fairly far into a stable release. Files can be packaged, and the utility can also unpackage files. Lets step through that. Here I have a folder that contains all the images I use as part of a Uni project. 84 textures, some of which are high resolution hence the folder size of 54.6MB. Let’s give the utility a test drive by packaging the contents of this folder! Files are recursively added...

date_range 21/11/2012 00:09

With just over a week left at Uni, I’ve been finishing off items left over before I’m completely done (assuming I don’t fail of course). Meanwhile I’ve already began developing some theories based on some projects I can work on. I’ve recently began designing a modularised hybrid 3D game engine, developed by me with the exception of physics and sound libraries. Over the past few months I’ve been developing mainly with the Ogre3D graphics library, and although it’s flexible, matured and powerful, I’d like to start my own process, partially as a great educational experience – a convenient bonus on...

date_range 07/11/2012 15:14

Over the past 21 weeks at Uni I’ve been in the process of developing a completely functional 3D game, resembling a third-person, stealth-based ninja game. With three weeks of development left until the final hand-over there’s a fair bit left to do. A major issue that arose somewhat midway through the project was performance due to the complex outdoor environments. The main issue was the fixed-function pipeline lighting system which was causing batches in the scene to be redrawn, resulting in both huge batch counts (thousands) and huge triangle counts (over four million). The way scene optimisation is set up...

date_range 19/10/2012 21:27

While posts with pictures are naturally more interesting, I decided to post a little experience post, since it’ll unfortunately be a while before I can show anything interesting that isn’t held under an NDA of some sort. While I’ve (hopefully) only got around 6 weeks of study left, I think it’s save to say it’s actually taught me a thing or two. I chose to talk about optimisations since it’s been rather crucial in my latest escapade, particularly so with a PC project, but I blame the other programmer. It’s only natural for programmers to do so, besides our badly maintained...

date_range 07/10/2012 17:42

date_range 11/09/2012 19:15

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything due to my absence. The website is now running from the ‘.com’ domain primarily, and has had several upgrades, both hardware and software based to make this a pleasant browsing experience for everyone. The site now uses CloudFire for decent content delivery and site protection, yay! I’m still working on the same project as my last post from several months ago, and fortunately that has advanced quite a bit. While graphically there isn’t much to look at yet it’s nearing its final stages, and I will attempt to post some proper...

date_range 19/05/2012 02:20

Having another trimester of QANTM behind me, I’m now beginning work on a 24-week group project. There’s a fair amount of work to be done, and after some brainstorming we’ve decided to use Ogre. As 2/3 of the dev team aren’t programmers, I’m tasking myself with giving them easy access to adding to the game. This is where Unity comes in. Unity is flexible and it’s very easy to use to come up with something within its editor. The editor itself is also very flexible and allows for a lot of access to the tools and the C# Mono framework....

date_range 29/04/2012 23:10

date_range 20/04/2012 17:15

Development Using the previous bot from the first assessment as base, I began to expand on it by developing a separate navigation class that handled the path-finding. The bot provides a start and end position consisting of the bot position as well as the bot found via the sensor data and the navigation class calculates this class, providing an array of nodes to travel to which form the final path that the bot takes. The navigation system performs three steps to initialise the node network. The Path-Finding Upon initialisation, the first step to creating the path is performed by the...

date_range 29/03/2012 19:14

The past few weeks have been quite interesting. My Uni has moved  the campus to a different building, and at some point I did some actual work on assessment items. Primarily a networking item. The goal – produce a networked chat client that uses a 3D engine. Not much is asked, but as someone with no experience whatsoever in networking it was an interesting learning process. Nevertheless I came up with a reasonably stylish chat-client that had an interesting combination of features. A simple smokey particle engine puffs in the background as the server list greets you at start up....