["The Zone" Blog 07: Milestones and Vertex Colors]

The vertex coloring trick is pretty cool, and it adds remarkable dynamics to the model.

[Wipers and material updates]

I think to play this game you need a 3 month professional training in military helicopters

[Bug fixes for today...]

I don't like the dots in the GUI background. I prefer a clean GUI.

[World clocks now in sync]

Once per hour time-sync is more than enough, even once-per month would do fine, if your PC clock is not deviating more than few secs per month. Once per game start should be done anyway, and that alone might be sufficient too.

[Some hints of 3.0]

However, if the game engine lacks advanced features, you can't do them with an easy-to-use Editor either You can do some of those with coding, but many of them need to be part of the engine.

[Some hints of 3.0]

Newbies don't make games, no matter how good the Editor is. I want more game engine features to the engine itself. Today I saw also a PhysX demo where the player model was a ragdoll and it combined bone animations and ragdolls seamlessly, even including joint stiffnesses:

[Some hints of 3.0]

It makes sense to have physics features available for entities, although I think they are really models then. Most objects you work with in game development are models; meshes are only used for programmatically animated or additionally constructed with physics elements (in ragdoll fashion), and entities are more like internal 3D objects like pivots and sources.

 

The high level 3D objects should be always called models, not entities. Else you confuse everyone without any logical reason, unless you find a good new name for the core entities.

[My Computer Story]

I use only brands which I know to fail the least, and I never got any problems with my self-built PCs.

 

MB must be Asus, HDs can be Western Digital or Samsung, RAM must be Kingston, CD/DVD/BR drive must be Samsung or LG, Sound Card must be Creative Labs, NIC must be Intel, CPU must be Intel, Mouse must be Logitech, Keyboard must be IBM, PSU must be Zalman, Case must be Akasa, GPU must be NVidia or year 2010+ ATI.

[GEOWEPS - Gratuitous end-of-week post of screen-shots]

The tent would look much better with:

AFilter(16);

TFilter(1);

[Everything in its place]

Oh I see a few newbie mistakes there:

Firefox -> Seamonkey

WinAMP -> Foobar

Avast -> ClamWin

Adobe -> Foxit

Ubuntu -> Debian

But yeah, no point to argue, one day you will find that my choices are the only right ones (I have studied all of their aspects from their deepest grounds on, nobody else does that)

[Sunrise, sunset]

HDR is an essential effect with daytime rendering. It makes the sun appear yellow in tree leaves instead of plain white (the sun must be yellow in color though, even if it is in fullbright mode).

HDR also doesn't lower FPS.

[Crytek Planning a Free CryEngine Release? ...]

No OpenGL, no Linux. I want more from a game engine than just being able to make Windows games.

["The Zone" Blog 04: A Bridge Over Troubled Waters]

I like the dense tree in pic 3 middle right, and stone texture in picture 4 lower left. The indiviudual barricade models looks also good, but the house behind it is missing some light/shadow dynamics. I think overall the ambient light is a bit too bright, or then the colors are too equal. I think reality is a combination of matching colors plus a few completely unmatching colors. Also important is a completely unreasonable highlight of bright spots, and vice versa dark spots. Those are things which make CGI look more real, just stepping out of the box and doing some wild things.

[Vegetation nation]

The current anti-aliasing is horrible, but that will be soon fixed with OpenGL 4.0.

[Playing with physics...]

I found Lua very effective for placing joints on models, because you see everything in realtime what you are coding. I even wrote a blog about this when I was making joints in my experimental airplane simulator.

["The Zone" Blog 01: Getting My Feet Wet]

The shore in the picture with the water looks amazingly realistic, better than in Crysis!

Finally I see some texture which has some good dynamics in light and shadows.

[Fresh Blood]

Welcome Dave!

I personally never got the visual kick from STALKER as I got from Crysis. But when you put your arts into LE, I'm sure it will look more like Crysis.

[Siggraph Contest]

We could make a SigGraph community project, which will use LE to the extreme with thousands of colored lights and shadows, 3D sounds and emitters, custom shaders, high poly 3D models, etc...

 

It could run standalone as a rolling demo, or it could be manually played also.

[Why LE paid updates are a good thing.]

The upgrade could indeed be a bit cheaper than the price of the new version minus the price of the previous version.

 

Thay way, more people would buy the engine now, and not wait for the new version, since they would get it cheaper.

 

I don't think there will be a payed upgrade anytime soon, as it would need some essential new features. The 2.3 upgrade was already such an essential new feature set.

 

Maybe when the engine supports OpenGL 3.2, realtime GI and colored shadowmaps, I would find it worth to pay for those features.

[Double-buffered shadow maps]

Realtime baked shadowmaps?

[OnLive Lives?]

The only real benefit in technology I see is that you can make games which use realtime raytracing, since they could put up a supercomputer to calculate the frames.

[Design Problem]

I would just make an checkbox in Model Editor, which says: "Run Model Script when Loading Model", which the user can click on/off before loading a model. It should be possible to disable scripts in the engine anyway with a function like SetModelScripts(0), instead of having to rename the lua file for example to luax before the model is loaded.

[Easy language]

Yeah, I've been thinking about that also, because if you want to use a loop variable which has been defined earlier, it looks even more ugly: For( , i, 1, 10 ).

 

I think the strict usage of the Define() command could be applied here, so it would then be like:

For( Define( Int, i ), 1, 10 )

and when i was defined earlier:

For( i, 1, 10 )

[Easy language]

Thanks

Anyway when a lot of programmers don't agree, it may mean that I'm on the right path, since it's hard to convince them to change their habits. When additionally then non-programmers agree, then I know it for sure.

[Easy language]

That may be well true if the macro language is not implemented in a strict and clean way. I'm trying to keep things clean, and rather project the C++ language than to redefine it. A simple projection can do no harm, as it's just a shorter way to write the same thing.

 

It will of course make the proposed high end language not as simple as it could be, but that cost is well covered by the fact that the underlying C++ language is not broken, but only shortened.

 

Easy is not harder to follow than C++ in error situations, since it's very clear what each command does. There are no complex preconditions, invariants and postconditions, but each command is directly projected from C++. That's what makes debugging just as easy as in C++.