Thursday, November 10, 2011

What have I been doing so far:




The video shows the summary of my progress on my ECMA-based 3d engine called "ThingMaker" (for now).

It is not impressive to look at for some reasons. You're seeing a early-stage, work-in-progress debug-render of a series of tests, so there is no attempt at aesthetic appeal... The screen recorder program slowed the frame-rate down considerably... I had to compress it a lot cos my up-speed is very slow... This site's video up-loader compressed it even more... So, that's why it is so ugly.

The video starts with the engine initialized. Next I run the test script. Everything in the video is dynamically created via the script environment. There are some script-defined geometries(floating shapes), some physics objects drawn in lines(the pool table), and physics shapes with dynamically created geometries(the reddish shapes with lines around them).

The tools used to create what you see: Qt framework, Bullet Physics.

Behind the scenes:

  • Script binding of basics of the Bullet API (no soft-body or constraint support yet, and only basic convex collision shapes supported).
  • Script binding of OpenGL 3.3 geometries and shaders.
  • Script definable collision callbacks.
  • C++ interface for physical controllers, or they can be defined in script. 
...but it is still in its beginning stages. I still require rudimentary audio support in the script environment and some simple GUI elements before I can make a rudimentary game (yeah, rudimentary games with OpenGL 3.3 support, I know it sounds like a joke, but it is part of a "plan"). I left these for last since I know Qt has enough support functions to make this easier than integrating Bullet and getting OpenGL 3.3 core profile to work properly... I hope.

Much work is still needed on expanding Bullet API support and replacing the rudimentary render list with a proper scene-graph... also, only debug builds are currently maintained and the deployment strategy is somewhat flawed. I'll save that for another post entitled : "the ways in which I waste effort"...



2 comments:

  1. Looking awesome so far - really looking forward to seeing more details about the game you plan to build :)

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  2. It really came a long way (visual candy) from what I've seen last time. Impressive, cannot wait to see where this is going.

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