Piko3D

Hey people!

Here’s a small development update!
So the holidays gave us some good time to work on Piko3D, and we thoroughly enjoyed it 😀 Even though Star Wars: The Old Republic is out now, and I absolutely love the game, we managed to make some good progress 🙂

Paramike is working on threading. Piko3D already supports some multi-threading. We have a thread pool, and the scene and physics are done multi-threaded, but there is more to be done! The threadpool with which we limit the amount of threads started on a PC, is now LOCK FREE! and runs a LOT faster. Alongside that, Paramike is working on a thread-safe memory pool, which should improve Piko3D’s performance quite a bit (not that it’s slow now, just saying).

I have started restructuring part of the engine to make a basis for our new OpenGL 4.1/4.2 Renderer, and I’m making good progress! Window and camera updates are now properly taken care of, and as per SDL 1.3, we support MULTIPLE WINDOWS! We’ll probably never use it, but hey 😉
This also means that script determines what events are handled at what window, and that every window is updated separately.

Here’s a little screenshot for your enjoyment 😉

Till next time!

Wracky.

bindpose

So, after some time I finally got an MD5 model loader and a skeleton 🙂  Currently it’s only a

bindpose, there is no vertex blending or animation for that matter. Up next, animation!! Which is actually what I started out doing 😉

enjoy!

Micron

[Don’t look at that model or the lighting… we’re still working on the renderer 😛 – Wracky]

Hey everyone!

Yep! we’ve been out of it for a couple of weeks.. I just bought a new house and such! lots to do!
Well progress is kinda slow in general I guess 🙂 But we’re still having fun working on Piko3D so when we get the chance,
we get together have a good time coding!

Last week, Paramike fixed some script bindings and tried get the old screen and camera classes going in script. We’re switching most of the control structure to angel script now, and some of the bindings are still a bit wonky/experimental!

This week, Micron and me had a few beers and did some coding on input handling and bone animation. There are some architectural issues that Micron is tackling now, and I added about 250 key-code enums to script! Soon we’ll be able to register and handle key bindings and mouse movements etc. Piko3D uses most of the messages from SDL 1.3 so far (Kudos to the guys from SDL for their continued work on SDL 1.3!)

I promised you guys a little guide on Angelscript right? Well I’m still up to my ass in boxes right now, and working on the couch on my laptop… I’ll get to it once I got my computer set up again 😀 We’re working on the house, and I can tell you, since yesterday there IS light and electricity in the “office”! I still have to get a LAN-cable up there, and the floor needs to be put in, but hey! We’re getting somewhere! 😉

Well that’s it for now!

Talk to ya later!
Wracky.

Hey everyone!

The Revision demo party has proven to be a great opportunity to get some coding done!
I’ve basically finished the script bindings for the existing classes!

Aside from that I worked on delegates and a timer class for script.
It is now possible to create timers in angelscript, and attach delegates to them that call script functions when the timer fires.
The timers can be set to loop, or can be stopped, paused or resumed. This makes the timers very useful for timing periodic or occasional events!

The delegates are used to attach event handlers to the timers, but can be used to attach event handlers to anything that is observable, like objects, resources, or entities. This means that an object can be monitored for instance, and a script function can be called either when it moves, or when it is destroyed.
Delegates can store arguments that can be passed to a script function when it fires for easy customization   Delegates will also play a major part in the input handling/notification system, as they can be used by the control class internally to bind script functions to key presses etc.

Neat! 😀

Well that’s it for now.
I think I’ve made some good progress.
Going to sleep now 😉

Till next time !

Wracky.

Hey everyone!

Here’s another little heads up on Piko3D development and what we’re doing with our spare time 😉
I’m currently still working on the angelscript bindings for the classes we we have so far.  That’s physics, Basic rendering, and resource management, and scene management. Angelscript lets you register your application’s String type, which I recently finished. It works really well! After I’m done with this, I’ll do a little tutorial section about things to look at when you want to implement Angelscript in your engine, so stay tuned for that.

Yesterday, Seriva and I sat together to make a design for Piko3D ‘s rendering system. We had some basic classes that are going to be used for vertex buffers, textures, render targets, and what not, but not a decent structure yet for glueing it all together.  The design is now roughly finished, and we can start implementing it. Hope we can show you some neat renders soon! (it’ll probably take some time still though ;-)) also, since games are already coming out with DirectX 11 and tesselation, we’ve decided to up the spec from OpenGL 3.2 to OpenGL 4.1. This does not mean Piko3D will only be OpenGL 4.1 compatible, but it will be our top priority to get that to work first.

Paramike has made great progress with mulithreading the ODE physics engine. I hope we get the chance to submit our patch to the ODE repository so mulithreading will become easier for all people interested in using ODE for their project.
Collision testing is already multithreaded in piko3d, and paramike was now working on threading the simulation steps and its going really well so far.

Well! That’s it for now!

Hope we can make a new video or have some cool screenshots for you soon.
Till next time!

Wracky.

Hello everyone!

First of all, happy new year to everybody! The Piko3D team have been partying ofcourse 😉 but we also did some Pikoding!

Wracky is busy writing scriptbindings for AngelScript. We chose to write the bindings ourselves instead of creating or using a bindingscreator for maximum control. It may be tedious work, but adding functionality after creating the initial bindings is trivial.

I implemented a threadpool with job scheduling and started distributing scene queries and physics collisions over multiple cores. Next up is the multithreading of physics simulations, but this requires some changes in ODE which may take some time. Since I’ve bought an i7 laptop recently, it’s fun to see 8 cores at work 😀

Expect more progress and perhaps a tutorial soon!

Paramike

Hey everyone!

Been a while since I posted anything up here, but rest assured, we’re still at work!
In the last few weeks we’ve been busy with some of the more basic functionality for Piko3D.
Problem with such things is that it does not give us nice pictures or movies to show you 😛
So here’s a list of what we’ve done lately

• Basic scene graph was made (more advanced graph in the making)
• Basic frustum culling works
• Wrote my own little INI parser for use with config files.
• Added extra ODE physics joints
• Started with Shader resource management for the renderer
• Objects now have bounding volumes.
• Basic math for intersecting AAboxes, spheres and pyramids.
• Been poking around in SDL 1.3 to see if I could get the mouse to behave!
  (our gateway to OpenGL 3.2 and ES 2.0!)

Aside from that, the team’s struggling with the worldly temptations like Mass Effect 2 and currently Heroes of Might and magic 5 for me 😛
So we take our time, but still have great fun doing this 🙂

Keep you posted!

Wracky.