Update On Work

Hello,

I thought I'll write to my blog detailing what I've been up to over summer. As some of you may know I am making a business, which I am naming Pickering Game Development for my placement year at university. I have designed several games, however I am unable to comment on these, as they are still in initial development phases, so I shall write in more detail about them when they are further on in their development. Instead, I shall detail some of the work which I have done for my business from a musical point of view throughout this blog entry. I have composed and recorded/mixed several songs which I plan on using within different game projects for my business. A list of links should be displayed below leading to the youtube videos of said songs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwZA6FHxwwQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz3H1gCteyg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbOnzSSJgF4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fZ7iZ-Nzew
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ1PDLYB9SA

Please feel free to leave comments on the videos, as I appreciate any feedback which is provided. The music has been created with the assistance of Apple's Garageband music creation software. Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy the music :D.

Richard

What I've Been Up To, + Plans For The Future

Hello everybody,

I know it's been a long time since my last post, so I just thought I'd give everyone an update as to what I'm currently doing at the moment, and what I plan on doing over the next year. As some of you may know, it is my placement year at the moment on my degree. This means that I should have gone and found a placement with a business of some description, doing an IT role of some description. I, however, was unable to do this due to the lack of interest from companies, due to the economic climate at the moment. Instead I have decided to work for myself, and create games and applications, which people can download digitally. I am doing this using a number of services. I am writing games in XNA Game Studio 3.1 at the moment, which I am presenting to the public using the Creators' Club and Xbox Live Arcade. I am also developing iPhone applications and games, to present to the community using the App Store.

I am currently developing a game which has an in-house title of Project Nerd. This game will be an indie RPG game, and will be a long time coming, as this game will be the fruits of roughly eight months of work. I am also developing a title called "Fighterspace Racers" which should be released in approximately two months. This will be released via XBLA, and if successful on that platform, will also be released on iPhone.

In terms of iPhone development, I am currently searching for contracts to develop iPhone applications for businesses. I have not currently made any commercially available iPhone applications, however I should have one or two on the market (on the app store) in approximately one to two months. I am also learning several other software languages in between doing all this, making me a bit of a busy bee at the moment.

Project Nerd will have a trailer, marketing related materials and demo version available to the community before the year is up, so keep an eye out! :D. Fighterspace Racers should be available from 30th September, 2010, so if you play games on the XBox and have an XBox Live account, please feel free to download it, and play :D. If anyone wants to contact me on any of the information I have presented in this article, email me at richard.pickering@hotmail.co.uk. Thanks for reading,

Richard

Teaser of things to follow!

This week the second year of University has finished, leaving my time free to create all kinds of weird and wonderful applications. Here is a small teaser of what is to come on this blog:

B2D- Borealis 2-Dimensions is a 2-Dimensional game engine that I will develop over summer for both iPhone and PC. This does mean that the engine will be written firstly in C++ and then in Objective-C, however I believe that this is an achievable game engine, and will be used in games which I release of the next fifteen months. I will also make aspects of this engine available for the community upon its release.

Borealis- 3D Game engine that I have already begun development on. This engine will be used to provide decent 3D Graphics to any 3D PC games which I may decide to write. The logo is provided above.

Iphone Games- I shall be making iPhone games for the next fifteen months, and detailed descriptions of these games shall be featured on this blog. Some code may even be posted :D.

PC Games- I shall be working on making different game engines and using these I shall develop different PC games. I shall release these games using a file server and setting up my own website. Watch out for the post on here when I set it up, as the address will be included within the post. Detailed descriptions of these games will be posted, as well as development notation, and possibly code :D.

Thanks for reading, :D.

P.S. The white areas in the attached picture are actually supposed to be transparent, as they will appear when used within the engine.

Borealis- Game Engine

Hi all,

It has been a long time since my last post, and I just thought I would fill you in on what I have been up to. I have been working on a lot of projects lately, but the one which has taken the majority of my time up has consistently been one for Interactive3D Graphics. I am making a game engine, which I have affectionately named "Borealis". That is also the reason for this post today, as I have made quite a lot of progress with this engine lately.

The game engine itself uses DirectX 9.0c for rendering and makes use of the Win32 API for the application side of this engine. Due to this it is compatible only with Windows OS installed computers with the DirectX 9.0c drivers or later.

There are a great many features of this engine which I have added in, and the first one that you may notice is that I have the ability to load meshes from file, which in itself is quite a simple task. The truth is that I am loading the mesh into a data structure of my own, the BMesh, which contains a DirectX mesh, but also has several other data members. The first is a shader, which is a small program that can be run on the graphics card. It also has a large number of textures and materials, which are stored in dynamic arrays. It has a position too.

The interesting part about the shader I previously mentioned is that I have made my own data container for that too, BEffect. In fact, quite a lot of the areas that my game engine uses DirectX functions from are covered in my own, so that I can make the engine multi-platform and more universal.

With the shaders, I have been able to make particle effects, phong shading for meshes, terrain lighting, and more. Some of the results I have been able to achieve are shown in the images displayed above. The first image (the red skull) is actually an error which I received from a badly programmed shader. The reason for it being so badly shaded is that I had incorrectly set the materials and normal vectors, so the entire lighting and shading of the object was incorrect for the Phong model. The reason I have included it here is because I thought it had a certain visual aesthetic to it, which made it interesting.

The particle effects that can be seen within the above images are entirely processed on the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) instead of the CPU (Central Processing Unit), leavint the CPU to perform other tasks. This is the reason that the frame counter sticks at a constant 60 FPS throughout the imagery, even though thousands of particles are being processed.

There are many areas of this engine which I am not displaying in this post, as they are not yet entirely complete, however I hope this gives an insight into the development of a game engine. I will update with another post containing more feature demos soon. Expect to see bump mapping, environment mapping and much more next time. Thanks for reading,

Richard

XNA Terrain Generator

Hello all,

I know I've not posted in quite a while, so I thought I'd make up for it by posting information about a terrain generator which I'm making for an assignment at University. This is just an XNA rapidly created prototype, so all of the kinks aren't quite worked out yet. It's fairly high-res with approximately 1 million verts being displayed in the most advanced outputs which it creates.

The way that it does this in the most advanced version is that it fires "rays" around and then modifies the terrain height map using the distance from interpolated points along these rays which is then attenuated by a random value. After this the verts are "smoothed" out using an averaging algorithm. I know that it's fairly basic, but this is a basic prototype, I am planning to create a new prototype fairly soon using the quite fast, high detail Diamond-Square algorithm. Thanks for reading,

Richard

Life Sim Game by Me

Hi,

Just thought I'd talk this week about a life simulator game that I've made. It simulates the conditions in which cells must survive. It is basically a toy, as it has no end goals or conditions, you just get to play with it, however it is quite interesting, as the cells can be created at will by pressing the "C" key and then you watch them flourish. Their size is directly related to how many times that they have mated, however, if they are too sparsely spread they will die of loneliness. They also cannot survive a single tool which I added, called "Fire". At the moment the purpose of this application was an experiment into some AI type areas to be honest, however, it is quite impressive to watch it in action, due to the sheer speed of the mating of these cells.

Fire can be spread to different cells, which makes this tool a chain reaction weapon, which can be used to test the hardiness of the cells which you have created. It is surprising how fast that the cells actually recover their lost numbers after a wave of fire through their numbers. Anyways, the images posted will show the rest. This application only took me a few hours to be honest, but it is quite interesting in terms of the "Psychology" of the AI of the Cells. Thanks for reading, I should have another post up quite soon about any other applications which I have been developing over Christmas and New Year.

Renderer- Intro to 3d- Scanline rasterization

I finally have scan-line rasterization working, which is, by far, the most complex mathematical thing I have EVER had to do. It involves interpolating between the vertices which make up the triangle, in order to get a number of points on its surface. These points are then used as pixels and the areas in between the extents of the pixels are filled with colour. This is a kind of per-poly rasterization at the moment, but it is easy to make it a per-pixel rasterization technique, by simply interpolating colour across the surface of an object.

At the moment I simple have scan-line flat shading, which I also have in Gdiplus. However, scan line drawing does work significantly slower than using gdiplus. However scan line, due to it's per-pixel nature does have a significant advantage over gdiplus, which is by nature shape and vector based. I am looking forward to getting gouraud and some kind of phong shading working within this renderer too, since I already have scan line rasterization finished (which I only began implementing yesterday, not bad to say it's my birthday as of half an hour ago lol).

The screenshots are shown above this text. Thanks for reading,

Richard