News « Piko3D

About Blight and Premake

November 16th, 2019

Never got around to posting about this! But we DID have another entry in the Revision 2019 Game Compo, and won 3rd place! It is called “Blight” and you can watch it here, and download it here!!

Initially our plans for a demo fell through, and we weren’t able to get anything good done. BUT we did come up with a new idea, and went into “crunch mode” for a month, to make “Blight” and win 3rd price at Revision! We had a lot of fun, and even though we only had time left for 10 levels, I think it turned out pretty sweet 🙂

And now for something completely different. We’ve been using Premake for piko’s build script generation for almost a decade now, and I think it doesn’t get the love it deserves! It is a great tool for managing source projects, and build configurations, and has served us REALLY all this time. It is powerful enough to the point that if I’m struggling with a project’s build config, I’ll often turn to premake and add my own premake file to the project and generate my solutions with it, because it is JUST… EASIER! It gives you full control on how you structure your project, and how you arrange your files.

So if you ever need to maintain projects for a small, or a large source repository, or want an easy way to convert your projects to other build environments, or upgrade them (Easier than CMake or whatever you’re used to :P), maybe give Premake a chance! (And I mean not just for hobby projects! We’re using Premake at work too!)

Well that’s it for now! We’ve started working on something new again, perhaps more on that later!

– Wracky

Comments (0)

Development update: Render to texture

March 13th, 2019

Hi Peeps!

[youtube_sc url=veGsW-dqOK8 width=320]

So a little while back, I got inspiration to do another feature: Render to Texture. A RenderTexture is basically a window, but instead of it being a window, it renders to a texture of a specified resolution!

I made a little monitor to demonstrate the effect, and we used camera layers, to add the scan-lines 😉 I had a lot of fun making it.

Oh right!

[youtube_sc url=jn92MYB2iZE width=320]

A while ago, we also uploaded another video that demonstrates our character controller, but I forgot to make a post for it! It isn’t perfect, but none the less, it is basically what we used to make our demo “KillVector”!

We’re working on another game/demo, but sadly, it won’t be done in time for this years Revision Demo party We’ll still be there! I do hope we have something again next year!

Hope you like the videos!

Regards,
Wracky

Comments (0)

Work in Progress: Inverse Kinematics

April 19th, 2018

Hi Peeps!

[youtube_sc url=1UAsFYpRoyw width=320]

We’re back at it! It’s not that we haven’t been working on anything. Its just that we haven’t posted about it 🙂
Time to make up for it! We’ve created another video about some work Micron has been doing on Inverse Kinematics. It’s not completely done yet, but it’s a nice bit of progress to show you.

This video shows how our character tries to reach for the red cube while observing the limits of his left arm, and the joints-limits in his wrists and elbows.

We’ll try to be a bit more active over here! We already have another video planned 😉
Hope you like the video!

Regards,
Wracky

Comments (0)

Piko3D at Revision 2018 Demo party!

March 30th, 2018

Another post! Why not 😉

We’re currently enjoying the Revision demo party again!
No demo this year 🙁 We had some trouble getting our creative juices flowing again,
But not to worry. New stuff is in the works!

I’m currently using the time here to improve culling on cascading shadow maps, and wrapping them up.
I’ll see if I can post another screen shot about it soon-ish.
Micron is working on joint limits for IK which is pretty complex, but a lot of fun to look at 😉
Paramike is looking to improve our renderer further, while Furos and Cisst are working on game art and game ideas.

So yes! We’re not dead! But it’s always difficult for us to start a new project and get everything going again!

Keep ya posted!
Wracky

Comments (0)

“KillVector” made 4th place at Revision 2017 game compo

April 22nd, 2017

So! We made 4th place with our demo “KillVector” at the Revision 2017 game competition.

[youtube_sc url=hVUS05cnHBc width=240]

The game compo was really close! And even though we didn’t make it into the top three, we did have a lot of fun (and stress) getting our demo out in time. We’ve learned a lot in the process, and our Piko3D engine has been improved a lot over the last couple of months.
I’ll try to update a bit more frequently this year, and keep you posted on our progress.

I would like to give special thanks to Dascon who provided us with menu and gameplay music for our demo.

You can download our demo release at the following sites:
pouet.net: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=…
demozoo: https://demozoo.org/productions/170870/

or directly from scene.org:
https://files.scene.org/view/parties/…

We know the game still has some issues, but it’s still fun to play. If it crashes on you while switching resolutions, just restart. It will have saved your settings 😉

You can watch the full competition here.

Regards,
Wracky

Comments (0)

Another Demo! @ Revision 2017

April 16th, 2017

“This gonna be an annual thing with you Manny?”- Velasco – Grim Fandango

Well I hope I can update a bit more often in the upcoming year, but I’m here to tell you now:
WE HAVE ANOTHER DEMO ENTRY!

We’re entering into the game compo at Revision 2017 this year, with your game called “KillVector”.
It’s a gravity-twisting FPS for up to 8 players, and it will feature on the revision live stream today at the end of the compo-block between 18:30 and 20:00.

You can watch the livestream here!: https://2017.revision-party.net/live

I’ll see if I can provide a download link here later.

See ya!
Wracky

Comments (0)

Piko3D @ Revision 2016 Demo party

March 25th, 2016

Hey hey!

We’re currently at Revision demo party !!
In the last few months we worked hard on a demo, but alas, it is just not finished.
Even if we got everything to work, we just can’t get it at the level of polish that we want it to be.

Perhaps next year eh?! Well as always, lots of time to build cool new stuff,
and admire other people’s work 😉

Regards,
Wracky

Comments (0)

Progress report! FBX Support, Particle emitters, physics picking and Character controllers.

January 15th, 2016

Hey Everyone!

A lot of stuff happened since the last update I guess!
Let’s talk about the things we added since the last update! (which was ages ago!)

Micron has been especially hard at work!
He has used Autodesk’s FBX SDK to add support for FBX files to piko3D.
We can now models and animations from FBX files, which can be used to export models from 3DSMax and Maya, as well as Blender, to name a few. He also added support for specific prefixes, similar to those used with Unreal SDK, that enables artists to specify physics proxies directly in the model.

I’ve been working on a particle emitter, that can help scripters deal with particles in an efficient way.
It doesn’t provide any functionality that couldn’t also be made entirely in script, however the native implementation will make it a lot easier and faster to handle large amounts of objects in this way.
I’ve also been working on sprite particles, which I will finish at a later time. This will offer a nice way to do things like smoke, fire, or rain without too much hassle!

Picking! We already had pixel based picking, but we’ve added physics based ray-picking as well, which is a powerful tool for our game developers. Nice for building guns, or for use as a type of sensor via script.

In all that “Excitement” Paramike also optimized our renderer and is working hard on improving threading and memory management, and a preliminary test with a couple of thousand objects has already resulted in a speed improvement of around 40% on rendering! Woohoo!

So even though there were things like, DragonAge Inquisition… The Witcher 3 (Go and play that if you haven’t yet!) and Fallout 4, we still managed to make some things happen 😉
I’ll try update a bit more often 😀

Alright! That’s it for now.
Thanks for reading!

Wracky

Comments (0)

We made a thing! (Revision 2015 Game compo entry)

April 4th, 2015

So yes, we fixed a LOT of bugs in the last couple of hours, and we turned a strange spaceship and some bullets that couldn’t hit anything into a small game! Sadly, we didn’t have time to finish the sound effects, but HELL we wanted to finally release something 🙂 Besides, it’s in space. There’s no sound in space 😛