Presentation didnt work on my system.
Nice 3D view you got there Silver. Are you going to bumpmap any of those textures? Also above your doorway is the main triangle shape sticking out a bit from the blocked portion or is that a graphical glitch?
Presentation didnt work on my system.
Nice 3D view you got there Silver. Are you going to bumpmap any of those textures? Also above your doorway is the main triangle shape sticking out a bit from the blocked portion or is that a graphical glitch?
I haven't implemented any advanced rendering techniques such as fragment shaders or stencil shadows, so no I'm not going to do any bump mapping. In a way im not really happy with it because I haven't done any of the advanced rendering stuff, and at this point I don't really have the motivation to do so because it doesn't really seem cool to me anymore.
The skybox is just a box
The triangle thing is just the way the door is built, it's not a glitch.
EDIT:
Umm, not really anything new. I have been thinking about implementing quake3 shaders, but at the same time it seems like *everybody* has implemented quake3 shaders, and again I don't know if I'd really be motivated to go through with doing it.What is the list of current features of your engine?
At this point I don't know if there's really anything I can do that would make my engine seem cool. Maybe you guys have some ideas? I was thinking about actually building up a game with the current technology I've got programmed. If I did, it would be similar to quake2 graphics and gameplay. I think I would actually seriously consider doing that, and I would only have to add alpha blending and dynamic lightmaps to be right on par with quake2 graphics.
Last edited by Silvercord; 03-13-2004 at 11:40 AM.
very nice screenie
Don't worry about not doing anything new yet. Just like writing music, you have to play a lot of music that other people have written before you can even think about writing it. Just keep making engines and demos, and eventually you'll come up with a new idea. Most companies are not looking for people with fresh ideas, they are looking for people that can get a job done (which is why there is little innovation in gaming these days). I don't plan on getting into the industry, but I will always code games.
same here, in fact I'm going into engineering, not computer science next year, so I'm not even goign to be with the group of people that would appreciate the programming effort
I... wouldnt say that...so I'm not even goign to be with the group of people that would appreciate the programming effort
Basically, you can apply quite a bit of what you have learned in programming games to your career choice. You will be working alot on physics, and what a better way to present a new design to the big wig suits than a graphics/physics demo of your design.
I dunno, I haven't done anything really in the past few months, I've just kind of lost the overall motivation...I don't know if it's working too hard on it or what, but sometimes it just seems that no matter how hard you work the results won't ever quite be as cool as they could be.
I honestly believe that if I had continued pushing myself the past few months I could've written a doom3 renderer AND a quake3 shader system, but the motivation just seems to be exponentially decreasing. Another thing is that all of the doom3 and quake3 stuff that I have seen done by amateur projects don't ultimately get all that much notoriety beyond people honoring them on chat boards (quake fusion and all of the doom3 side projects have all but passed by with nobody noticing them). It seems the only way you can do anything worthwhile is to be working at valve programming the latest physics and rendering systems, and everything else is crap.
And I'm totally honest about the doom3 and quake shader system thing, I've got more than enough resources for those and when I get motivated I work harder than anybody I know.
EDIT:
I like it when I first started out because I got excited over accomplishing small and trivial things, i.e getting the camera to work, getting stuff in the math library to work, getting BSP rendering and collision detection to work. Those things don't interest me anymore and I don't get excited as easily...someone tell me how to get excited over this stuff again seriously...maybe someone should work on a project with me, make some maps, give me some ideas for stuff to put into the project...would anybody want to do that with/for me?
Last edited by Silvercord; 03-16-2004 at 11:52 AM.
I started feeling just like you about 7 weeks ago. Since I started working on code for our robot for our robotics team, I started to miss OpenGL. Just take a break from it for a while and do another type of programming. Maybe start some networking apps; maybe you could make a server of some sort.
Game programming is like anything else. If you do just game programming and nothing else for a while, you get burned out. I'm starting to work on a new 3D engine now, and I love OpenGL again.
Another tip: it is much funner to make games in a team. I started Bludstayne Software, and I'm having a heck of a lot more fun. It's just me and an artist, but it's a lot funner to sit and plan and develop with somebody else. I prefer to see another face than look at a cold computer screen.
Wow, that's exactly what I'm interested in. I'm going into Electrical or Computer Engineering next year (I haven't claimed which one yet, and I don't need to for a semester) so I would be very interested to gain some knowledge about what goes into robotics building/programming. Ideally I'd like to have a job that involves fabricating machinery (whether it be bulldozers or factory machines or airplanes at lockheed martin).
I would love to have a team but it never seems to work out! The other people are either too unmotivated, or I'm not satisfied with their skill level, or both
i dunno how old you are, but (if you're at college) consider forming a very specific club at school for game programming. probably you can reserve a computer lab and have some interesting things, like weekly meetings and such. bounce ideas around. personally i've learned more from hearing/reading about implementation than actually viewing code or the end product. if you're really interested in game physics PM me and i can dig up a great link at school tommorow. it's this 4 part physics engine tutorial (written several years ago :/ ). it covers all the basics and all the way up to the kinds of things they are doing in the hl2 engine, if i had a better grasp of opengl and the matrix stacks (god those confuse me) i'd love to implement some of the things from the article into an engine.
"uh uh uh, you didn't say the magic word"
-Jurassic Park
Again...graphics and engines is not what gaming is all about. Over 70% of the 3D engines out there suck. Look at the one for Battlefield 1942 - it's great but only at very short distances. The rest is fogged out because the engine just cant take it. Look at the Sims. Terrible engine, even for 2D - choppy and slower than crap scrolling even on fast machines. I could write a better scrolling engine than that. But the game has made oodles and oodles of cash. It's not only about the engine...its about the design too.
I've been gaming hard since 1981 and some of my favs have the worst graphics but are a blast to play. Some of my all time favs are XCOM UFO defense, Crusader: No Regret, Crusader: No Remorse, and Dynamix's WW2 dogfighting sims - Aces over the Pacific and Aces over Europe. All time favorite driving sim is definitely the old Indy 500 sim from Papyrus games. Solid shaded polies but a heck of a lot of fun.
You guys are missing the point of games. Don't let the commercialized aspects of it ruin the genre for you. There will always be indie developers and some of the recent ones have put out some sleeper hits. Heck the Sims almost never made it to the shelves because they thought it wouldn't work. But man did it. But then look at Daikatanna - all hype but all crap. A game is so much more than the graphics, physics, etc. Making a game more life-like does not necessarily mean it will be more fun - rather I find the opposite is true. Sit down with the old asteroids or space invaders or pac-man. Addictive, simple, but a helluva lot of fun.
I agree with Bubba and his points. For me, the greatest aspect about a game is the storyline (but i'm an RPG addict). One thing I absolutely hate is people who judge a game SOLELY by its graphics, and if the gfx are bad, they won't even play it. Just like Bubba and thousands of other people say, some of the greatest games were made years ago and are still idol'ed (spelling) today.
Notice how nowadays, every game that comes out basically has a shelf-life of maybe a year, 2 if the game is lucky? I bet if you were to put some of the classics from the 80's back up on the shelves, you'd have people rushing to buy them, and people still do! I agree that nowadays, games try and put way too much of an emphasis on art, and all games are just turning in to movies that you can interact with.
the thing is its the engine that is the difficult work. I don't care about people who think they can design a game because any old joe can design a game that is fun, but very few people have the dedication and mathematical and programming knowledge to implement realistic physics and fast rendering algorithms, and actually understand everything they've utlized at a very intuitive level. That's what impresses me the most, but I'm just not getting those same vibes anymore.
EDIT:
I don't know what engine battlefield 1942 uses, but there's no rendering engine that actually can render outdoor scenes like that and run at a high fps, no matter what form of spatial partitioning it uses. It runs fast enough, they did something risky by trying to do fast first person shooter in outdoor environments, and it's a brutally popular game. Likewise with the silverback engine written by s2games and used to build the game Savage, everything is rendered outdoors and it runs no higher than 40fps, but it's getting more and more popular since its release. Jverkoey and I actually met one of their programmers in california, it was sweet (remember that Jeff?) [/brag]
EDIT1: i guess the point I'm trying to make is that I don't really care about the actual game content that much because programming the engine is harder. the most *amount* of work goes into making the game content, so the quantity of work goes into that, but the quality of the work that goes into writing a robust game engine is more difficult.
Last edited by Silvercord; 03-17-2004 at 09:50 AM.
not true... Think honestly about how many games that have come out in the past few years can even approach the enjoyability of old games like Fallout, Wing Commander,etc. .... there aren't much at all. Design is an important skill, and a very very hard one at that. If anything, it is the opposite, there is an overflow of highly skilled engine developers, and very few game designers worth anything at all.I don't care about people who think they can design a game because any old joe can design a game that is fun, but very few people have the dedication and mathematical and programming knowledge to implement realistic physics and fast rendering algorithms,
I have taken interest in researching a bit about embedded systems development, and it seems very interesting, you would probably really enjoy it, but get ready to fully learn assembly(unless you are using some sort of *nix based embedded system, in which case C can be used).
just because you didn't enjoy them doesn't mean others didn't. The reason that there are fewer people that can actually program game engines is because people like you can't stick with it when it gets really difficult. I have yet to see you follow through with a very large project. I have, and it's a pain in the ass. Anybody can design a game and come up with a fantastic game idea that could be enjoyable to potentially thousands of people. Implementing it is a $$$$$.
EDIT:
defense and the helicopter game on this site are extremely addicting games (I enjoyed them) but didn't relatively require a ton of technical knowledge to implement (to cover my own ass I'm not saying that those programmers don't know how to do more complex things, i'm just saying those particular games didn't). A lot more people can make those types of games than full blown 3D renderers. There's nothing wrong with it but it's just not what I'm into, I'd prefer to be a bit more specialized, which is what I did.
EDIT1:
and yes, there are a lot of people that can make full blown 3D renderers, but as the level of complexity increases the number of people able to understand and implement it decreases. And there *is* a large market for people that are amazed by awesome graphics, realistic physics, and all of that cool technical $$$$.
Last edited by Silvercord; 03-17-2004 at 10:44 AM.
