Piko3D

Hey everyone,

Bitmap font label

Here’s a new progress update of what we did on Piko3D in the last few months!  For starters, I implemented a simple GUI system which now consists of a simple panel and a label. Both elements support margin and padding, and can be parented to another GUI component for easy navigation. The Label is used for rendering text and uses fonts based on Angelcode’s BMFont Bitmap font generator!  You can see the label being rendered in the screen shot.

For now it only supports BMFonts Binary format, and Piko3D still only supports PNG textures.

In other news:
We’re still working on a number of other things. Micron is working on improving and optimizing frustum culling, and intersections between basic shapes, like cubes, spheres and of course, the frustum, which is just about done really!

In the mean time, Paramike is working on our awesome dynamic octree for our space partitioning, in which every cell is autonomous. Together they produce a dynamically relocating, growing and shrinking octree that will adjust itself as it is required, to provide an easy and quick way to query objects in our scene.

Seriva is also still helping out (although he’s on a holiday right now) and I’m glad to tell you that he started on the loading/parsing of Shader programs! So perhaps we will be showing you some screenshots of a new renderer soon 😉

Well! Piko3D is still a thing we do for fun, and although we still spend a lot of time in Starcraft 2, Dragon age, Mass Effect 2 and what not, I’m glad to see things get done 🙂 On that note: I’ll be on holiday too for the next 2 weeks, so no Piko3D news/development from me during that time.

Untill next time!

Wracky.

Hey peeps!

Got some pikoding done again! Finished my second DragonAge: Origins run! No I’m still not done, I’m playing the Awakenings expansion now 😛 BUT The last few days, I’ve been giving Piko3D some love and I’ll be uploading a new VIDEO soon 😀

In other news: Another friend, Micron, is helping out with Piko3D! It seems people like to have a little project to which they can contribute a little from time to time 🙂 We’re still doing this just for fun.

So stay tuned! o_O

Regards,
Wracky

So I’ve been working on getting Piko3D ported to Maemo5 for the Nokia N900, and one thing I need for that is a proper build script. So far, I’ve done everything for Piko3D in Visual Studio 2008 express edition.

I don’t want to maintain all changes to piko3d in a dozen different build scripts for different platforms, so I thought I’d look into build script generators, like Automake, Cmake, and Premake.

Everyone told me how Automake was old and tends to get messy, so at first I turned to CMake. I have to admit, I didn’t look far into CMake.. I looked into it, but it seems cumbersome to me somehow.

Warning: Next part expresses my personal views on the subject and should not be used for reference 😛

With CMake, you make CMakeLists.txt files for whatever you want to build. They suggest to put one of these files in every subdirectory you have in your source, and put the build rules in there. If you don’t want to create a lib from every source directory you have, Cmake quickly turns into a mess. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but if I am, the interface and documentation could be clearer 😉 And then, I found Premake! and I would have sworn to have heard angels sing 😛

Compared to whatever I read on how to do stuff in Cmake, Premake is a complete fresh spring breeze! (at least for what I was trying to do ;-)) Premake’s documentation is a bit scattered around… and It could be better… maybe I’ll do a tutorial about it… but what I did find was very pleasing to me.

First of all: Premake uses lua script for its config files. This means that yes, you can do loops, ifs, whatever floats your boat, in order to generate your buildscripts. Lua is widely used and well documented.

Second: Premake lets you put your files wherever you like. You can also put everything in one big file, or add separate premake scripts into the mix for parts you want. It’s very easy to just use a bunch-o-files to make your project, or split it up in libs and link them together.

I guess that people who are used to visual studio like myself, might find premake easier to use than others. It seems like they used a lot of terms from visual studio, like solutions, projects, configurations etc… I personally think this is a plus since I think it’s a clear structure, but I might be biased 🙂

Anywayz, there you have it. I’ve finished my premake script for piko3d, and it now generates nice and cleanly structured project files for visual studio 2k5 and 2k8. I will continue on with it and see if I can make an ubunto and maemo5 makefile next 🙂

Keep ya posted!
Regards,

Wracky.