wergerw

Filed under: Uncategorized

wegewgwegwe

Aziel Update

Filed under: Uncategorized

A few people told me they want to hear more about Aziel and that we should update more often. Fair point. I hope WildTiger will contribute soon too.
I’m about to leave on a week-long holiday so this’ll be very brief.

We went back to using XNA because of the previously mentioned issues with OpenGL. I knew it was over when I got confirmation on the official OpenGL forums that its not to be used for the consumer desktop (its only really useful for higher end gaming and engineering applications).

We’ve been putting a lot of work into a framework for defining and using resources, the design goal is as stated before, to allow user extensions to define new full featured resource types. More on this later. The current challenge is reading/writing resource data without each resource explicitly defining a save/load mechanism. Serialization in .net 2.0 falls short of this.

Once that’s finished, I hope to create some rough resource definitions for things like scripts and images, a rough compiler, and have a runnable build online so we can reopen discussion.

Tags: Aziel

OpenGL sucks

Filed under: Uncategorized

So over the last 2 days I took a deep dive into the world of OpenGL and cross-platform development. At first it was bliss with a 600kb exe file that ran on linux and windows alike with no other dependencies, but then I smashed head-first into the iceberg of OpenGL fail.

1: Its a screaming mess. A zillion extensions only a tiny percentage of which have been formalised by the ARB while the rest remain basically unusable as cards may choose to not support them or implement them in strange ways that don’t do what they should.
2: Tried to run shaders on my netbook (its sm2 compatable). Got a crash, something about lacking opengl 2. Well, it is a netbook and an early one at that, so its a nonissue on any half decent computer, right? Wrong.

Turns out that Intel, the guys whose video cards are in nearly 50% of all computers out there, don’t give a fuck about OpenGL and simply don’t write drivers beyond supporting GL 1.4. This is so bad that I can’t even use surfaces/rendertargets/FBOs on my netbook; a feature that’s nearly 10 years old. Needless to say, I’m rethinking about using XNA again.

It all boils down to this:
XNA:
+Xbox and Zune depoloyment paths
+Lots of plug-and-play code on CodePlex
+Decent framework included on top of low level stuff
-Users must download and install a ‘redistributable’ before playing a game. Size varies. Less of an issue on vista and win7 mahines as they auto meet most prereqs.

GL:
+Awesomely cross platform. At least by itself.
+Tiny footprint, exe will work without any extra downloads
-Tings like shaders and surfaces don’t work on nearly 50% of all computers even though the hardware and DX drivers support it
-Workload to rewrite things already provided by XNA

Tags: Aziel

Aziel Happenings

Filed under: Uncategorized

Hi all. Just a quick update on Aziel:
I’ve locked down the forum for now due to the massive amounts of spam going through it. I will bring it back up once I figure out how to block it all. If someone knows how to block spam on SMF, please let me know.

As for Aziel itself, a few things have happened
Firstly, I’m in touch with the maker of game creator (http://code.google.com/p/game-creator/) and we think we’ll be working together.

Secondly, I have chosen to drop XNA because the dev team has indicated that they’re not going to do much about the current deployment issues with the framework. This was always a big turnoff for me. The worst case scenario for setting up XNA redistributable is more than 50 megs of downloads. Instead we’re going to go with OpenTK which I’m happy to say is also cross-platform. The same .exe file will run on windows, linux, mac, and anything else that has Mono.

This does mean a new learning curve for me though. I’ve never worked with OpenGL before and I had fairly little experience at working at this low level. Its going to take some time to recreate the features that we’ve been relying on from XNA.

Once we roll out something that can run and do stuff, I will set up our svn server to automatically compile stable code and update it so that testers will have access to the most up to date builds. Its probably at this point that I will put effort into fixing the forum spam issue if its not trivial.

Tags: Aziel

Deferred shading

Filed under: Uncategorized

I’ve been working on a game together with WT and my current task is to figure out how to light the levels. Since the game mechanics will rely on lights heavily, I’ve decided to go with a deferred shading approach. I took some screenshots as my work progressed and looking back on them, I think they’re worth sharing.

This is when I finished implementing the basics. Normal mapping, point lights, spec highlights.


(more…)