Project Wish  
Project Wish
Project Wish
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Aug 28 2008, 09:36 PM
Well I got back from vacation and have almost worked my first 40-hour week this month. It's been a busy month, so I haven't gotten anything done for PW. I'm still interviewing for a game dev job. Hopefully I'll know by next week if I got it or not. I told my current boss that I was interviewing elsewhere, and I was going to ask him for a reference, but he looked so depressed that I couldn't do it. Maybe I'll be able to do it on Tuesday. He's trying to get me more money or more vacation where I currently am, so it works out well for me.

On an unrelated note, a new Metallica song, "The Day That Never Comes", was released. I have mixed feelings about the song. I love the first 4 minutes of the song. It reminds me of the Metallica from the 90's, except for the vocals, which are similare to their last album. If you play guitar, the rhythm guitar is really fun to play, and not too hard to learn. After the 4 minute mark I start to dislike the song. The vocals for the bridge suck and the solo feel uninspired. Yeah, the rhythm guitar feels more like the 80's Metallica, but the remainder of the song is just not up to par. The rhythm guitar is the only part I like throughout the song, except for maybe the bass. To me it feels like they tried to mix all their styles into one song and really came out with two songs tied together. Overall, not a bad song, but they can do better. I'm looking forward to hearing "Unforgiven III".
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Jun 25 2008, 08:54 PM
It's about damn time we start working with Ogre stuff again. No we haven't started the game or Dwarf yet, but we're another step closer. PWOgreBox is another toolbox, this time containing Ogre-specific libraries. As of now, the only thing in PWOgreBox is a custom wxWidgets control. I don't yet know everything that will go into this library, but as the game and Dwarf develops, I'm sure there will be more to put in here.

For now I split PWOgreBox into two projects. The main project, titled PWOgreBox contains almost no code at the moment. In fact, it's just some helpers for exporting the API. Another project in the solution is called wxOgreControl. Although officially part of PWOgreBox, indeed it is in the same namespace and it shares code with the main project, I've decided to keep this as a separate project for now so people who just want to use a lightweight control to embed Ogre in wxWidgets don't need the whole PWOgreBox library. Likewise, people wanting to use the PWOgreBox library won't need wxWidgets installed. We'll see how this evolves. Merging the two later is trivial.

So without further ado, here's a working example of the wxOgreControl in PWOgreBox.

IPB Image

As you can see, the control is pretty much complete. I just have to document it and clean up some dead code. Then we can release it back to the Ogre community. Perhaps it will make a bigger splash than PWToolBox did.

I guess I should mention some features. wxOgreControl creates a new render window using the external window handle of the wxFrame. You don't have to worry about any of this. It's handled automatically for you. All you have to do is create a scene manager, which will be used by the control. The control will create a camera and a viewport for you, which you can access for full customizability.

The control also automatically handles the common events of resizing, cleaning up when closing the control, and intercepting mouse motion and calculating relative mouse motion. These events can be customized through a listener interface. Since you're working with wxWidgets, there's nothing stopping you from connecting to other events that are generated by the control and handling those yourself, outside of the listener interface.

Finally, each render window is updated separately. That means they can be paused/unpaused, and even render at different intervals, the default being 30 fps.

Hopefully I can get the documentation up to par, build and test this on Linux, and we can release it in a week or two.

Updated
Well it took me a while, but I finally got it working in Linux. It took longer to get it to work in linux than it did to write it in Windows. There's a block of code to get the window handle in a way that is suitable for Ogre that is 2 lines long in Windows, and 16 lines in Linux. That was the major source of my problems, as there were many snippets of code that tried, but failed, to get that handle.

Working on this I realize just how much GTK sucks. There's so many little things you get for free in Windows that GTK doesn't give you. For example, having the control fill the entire frame is free on Windows. It doesn't matter what size you give the control, it will fill the frame. In GTK the control does not fill the frame. And because the size of the frame is not known by the frame itself yet, you have to pass in the desired size. I've just defaulted to automatically using the size of the parent window.

Furthermore, wxwidgets itself is not completely cross-platform. There's a function called OnEraseBackground which exists for wxWindows in Windows, but not when using GTK. They could've at least declared an empty function so I didn't end up with a compile error.

Anyways, here's a screenshot.
IPB Image

I think I'll stick to C#.
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Sep 10 2007, 03:17 PM
This first one is of the night sky. This technique doesn't optimize well, but gives pretty good results.
IPB Image

And this one is of the new sun. Of course I have yet to add a sun glare (probably will do that with HDR).
IPB Image
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Sep 4 2007, 06:00 PM
I got the day/night cycle done in the tech demo yesterday. It turned out pretty well, but could probably use some fine tuning. I need to improve the texture mapping for the stars so they don't get stretched and add a moon or two. No screenshots, but I'll leave you with a video.

http://test.projectwish.com/njpaul/PWTechDemo1DayNight1.mpg
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Aug 26 2007, 10:16 PM
Today I added a proper sun into the tech demo. The screenshots are below. I also have a basic night sky system (no stars or moons yet) implemented, but not yet integrated to work with the daylight system, so there will be no screenshots of that yet.

IPB Image
IPB Image
IPB Image
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Aug 5 2007, 10:56 PM
Today went a lot smoother now that I'm used to RBGui. I was able to get the GUI in place for adjusting sky parameters. Below is a screenshot facing west at around 7pm.

IPB Image
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Jul 1 2007, 11:26 PM
Today I completed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and I feel I can finally give my thoughts on the game. These thoughts won't include the graphics or input, since I can get past all of those.

First off, this game is long. Without spending too much time on the side quests, I completed the game in about 56 hours. Is the game too long though? Not really. The action kept on coming. Not exactly a non-stop thrill ride, but the numerous dungeons will keep you entertained.

On to the dungeons. They started off nice, but I think they got worse as the game progressed. Every one felt less original than the last. Not to say that they weren't unique, because they were, but it seemed like the puzzles got worse. I think the magnets and iron boots puzzles were the best new addition.

Now on to the characters. Overall I found the character depth disappointing. I never became attached to anyone in the game, except maybe Ilia and the village kids. What I liked about the last two Zelda games was the amount of interaction you had with the characters. In Majora's Mask you learned the character's schedules and performed tasks for them. In Windwaker the islands were richly populated with characters you could talk to, and they'd offer sidequests. So where are the characters in this game? For most of the game you'll alone. The provinces start to become pointless after you finished off the dungeons in them. Nothing brings you back to the town and the people. Midna accompanies you along your journey, but she doesn't offer much. In the beginning she'll help you out when you transform into a wolf, allowing you to reach areas you couldn't otherwise get to. Later on she doesn't do much except allow you to transform. Talking to Midna is another pointless exercise. I tend to pick up the game about once a week, and by then I forgot what I was previously doing. Midna doesn't offer too much guidance for the casual player. I think Castle Town disappointed me the most, as you could interact with less than half of the characters.

I didn't do many of the sidequests of the game. I did the stars game, and I'd collect a bug or poe when I saw one, but that was about it. Some of the sidequests sound fun, like yetti sledding, but others are boring. I hate collecting things in games. All those bugs and poes...yuck. How boring. They also added more pieces of heart to the game, which I didn't bother finding. I think those are just there to consume more time. However, I did spend a lot of time fishing. There also didn't seem to be very many mini-games to choose from.

Transforming into a wolf...cool idea, poorly executed. It started off kind of fun, using your senses to trace scents and find secret digging places. It became annoying switching back and forth between forms though, mostly because you never really found anything good as a wolf. Digging would usually just give you a couple of rupees. Following scents was a cool new addition to gameplay, but you don't use it at all in the last 1/3 of the game. Actually, you didn't really switch into wolf form much at all in the last 1/3 of the game, except for warping, which was annoying since often you'd want to be human and you'd come out of the warp as a wolf.

The weapons in the game were pretty fun. I enjoyed the new additions of the double clawshot, ball and chain, and the spinner (which was awesome). The lantern was a good idea as well. The dominion rod was fun for a while, but became tedious after a while. The bomblings were useless, just like bombchus of the past. The new targeting for the boomerang was also a nice addition. The hawkeye was a nice idea, even though I rarely needed to use it. It was handy in some places, but most of the time your enemies were too close to need it.

I missed some of the classic items, like the lens of truth, magic arrows (hell, magic in general), the feather boots, the mirror shield (my favorite), and the fire tunic. The lack of fire and magic in the game astonished me. The magic armor is a poor replacement for it.

The hidden skills were a great addition to the game, even though it came at the expense of Windwaker's parry move. At least you could do manual parrys and combine them with the hidden skills, so the parry wasn't completely lost.

Music was also sacrificed in this game. I love music, and the lack of being able to play it was a blow to the game, in my opinion. What made OOT great was it combined music and magic, which brought a surreal feeling to the game. Howling like a wolf was annoying (I hate that sound) and unsatisfying.

Boss design was fairly standard and familiar. How many times do I have to hit that damn ball of light that gets thrown at you. Believe it or not, I was actually bored by about half of the boss fights. The final boss (well 4 I guess) was especially so. Both the first and last stages of the fight were lifted straight from OOT. However, stages 2 and 3 were a bit more unique, and relatively fun. There also wasn't a large variety of enemies.

The world itself is rather large, and I'm sure there are still areas of it that I haven't explored, but it is mostly empty.

So in summary, I think the game is good, but only average. The overall game is certainly well-polished and executed, with a great art style and less than immersive gameplay. I think the longest time I could stand playing was about 4 hours. The new additions were great, but I miss some of the charm and character depth of the previous games in the series. The game is definitely worth playing, but probably not replaying. I have a save point before the end that I can use to go back and do the mini-games if the mood strikes me.

Now on a completely unrelated note, I switched browsers from Firefox to Opera, and I couldn't be happier. I still haven't found a replacement for the web developer toobar yet, but at least I'm not using 250k of ram. FU Firefox. If you ever fix your memory leak bug (not likely) and start handling pdf files better maybe I'll come back, but for now I'll stick to Opera and IE7.
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Dec 4 2006, 09:10 PM
Ok. I lied. It's not a real self-shadow. Not yet anyways. This is just a cheap way to avoid artifacts from bump mapping.

No self shadow term: IPB Image

Self shadow term: IPB Image
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Dec 3 2006, 07:00 PM
Parallax mapping is a small modification to bump mapping that tries to take into account the height of the surface. Here are today's results. I went with a different texture today, one with more pronounced grooves to better demonstrate the effect.

Texture: IPB Image

Normals: IPB Image

Height: IPB Image

Bump mapping: IPB Image

Parallax mapping: IPB Image

You can see in the parallax mapped picture that the grooves between the stones are obscured (or partially obscured) at small angles.
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Dec 2 2006, 05:29 PM
Lately I've been switching between learning shaders and working on the game engine. Yesterday on the game engine I got the input plugin to load and initialize, but that was about it. Today I learned how to do bump mapping. Since the game engine doesn't have any screenshots to show off, I'll put up the bump map screenshot. Big deal though, everyone has seen bump mapped stuff before.

Here's the texture and the normal map used. The texture I got from my friend Luke. Where he got it I don't know. The normal map was created with NVidia's plugin.

On a side note, I sure wish there was a way to specify image size so it wouldn't take up the entire page.

Texture: IPB Image

Normal Texture: IPB Image

Result: A normal mapped teapot with Blinn-Phong per-pixel lighting. IPB Image

Now it's time to prepare dinner and watch Hockey Night in Canada. I'm going to miss it once I move away from here.
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