News « Piko3D

Switched to VS2013 and 64bit

January 8th, 2015

Hey everyone!

Nothing big yet! We’re still gaming too much it seems 😛
Anyway, Paramike took the time to convert Piko3D and all it’s dependencies to Visual Studio 2013!
We’re using Visual Studio 2013 Community edition right now! It’s free an pretty awesome 😀

I was hard at work on a map/dictionary addon for Angelscript. I was making good progress, but when I asked Andreas (The man behind angelscript) for some tips, he pointed me to Sami Vuorela’s “Angelscript Addon: Template Containers“, or AATC! It’s a set of angel script addons that provides implementation and bindings for the most familiar C++ stl container types! Seems like he beat me to it 😉 Since it nicely shares code between the different containers, we decided use AATC instead of building our own.

Meanwhile, Micron has been working on his character controller class from time to time, and it’s shaping up to be a really nice thing.
Hopefully we can show you more of that, in the form of a new video, soon.

Alas peeps! Progress is slow, but we’re making nice stuff, and we’re enjoying ourselves 😉
Talk to you later!

Regards,

Wracky

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At it again!

September 11th, 2014

Hey Peepz!

A lot of gaming (Wildstar!) has been going on lately, but tonight, we’re coding Piko3d again!

Knights of the Laptop Table

Hope to have something new to show you soon. 😉

Regards,
Wracky

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Pixel Perfect Picking in OpenGL 4.2

May 25th, 2014

Hey everyone!

[youtube_sc url=S3f4oy-EFUQ width=240]

This video is long overdue 😉 I implemented picking in the fall of last year 😉 But for the video to look nice, I wanted to show that we could pick through transparent objects.
So I had to implement those first, since we didn’t support alpha rendering yet 😛 We still don’t support translucency btw. More on that later 😉

Aside from transparency, we now also support additive blending on object level, and emissive rendering on object level. This allows for more visual effects, which our scripters love 😉

But back to picking! We first cast a 3D ray through the scene to see which objects we potentially hit. We then render the objects that intersect with the ray, to an offscreen frame buffer object, using some very basic shaders. In this buffer object, we encode an identifier for the object, so that if 2 objects are hit by the ray, we can later figure out which one was rendered in front of the other. We also render the distance from the pixel we render, to the camera, in the frame buffer, so we can calculate the exact world coordinate of the point where we “hit” the object.

We also use a scissor technique to only render the single pixel we hit on the screen. This makes the picking “query” very efficient.
We then read the pixel value back from our frame buffer, to see if the object was hit, and where it was hit. The system does support multiple cameras, view ports and scenes overlapping without issue.

Hope you like the video!

Regards,
Wracky

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Revision 2014

April 19th, 2014

Hi everyone!

So! We’re at Revision demo party right now!
We were planning on participating in the Game compo this year, but the night before we needed to submit our entry, everything went wrong, and we were left with not enough time to put the demo together the way we wanted. A shame! It would have been our first entry 😉 That said, the game compo was crazy good this year, and a lot of fun to watch.

We might release our little game demo later through this page 😉
Aside from that, so far it’s been a really productive weekend as well! We may not have a demo this time, but we’re coding like mad, and working on all the other stuff that we still need to get done. We have now completed our switch to Bullet physics, and Micron is working hard to extend our physics capabilities further. Meanwhile Paramike is doing a big overhaul to make Piko3D much more multi-threaded, so we can make better use of all those extra cores in all your machines 😀 I’m currently working on a lot of different stuff. We now support additive blending and emissive objects (objects that are unaffected by lighting) and I’ve been making a lot of small improvements that make the lives of our game developers a lot easier.

Anywayz! We’re having a blast.

Talk to you later 😉
Regards,

Wracky

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So.. eehmm… Yeah! Progress report!

March 10th, 2014

Hi everyone!

Thank you for still reading this after we haven’t updated for almost half a year 😛
We’ve been doing a lot of boring stuff lately! A lot has changed and we have nothing to show for it -_-
Hence the lack of updates.

Here’s what we did:

We’ve switched over from ODE physics to Bullet physics. Simply because we were looking for a physics engine which is better maintained, and is more mature in many ways.
We’ve implemented FreeImage. Piko3D is growing, from something small into a full fletched game engine. The renderer is getting better, we have positional 3D sounds, and ragdoll physics. We found that it was time to support more than just png files, and picked FreeImage for the job.
We’ve refactored part of the render and resource handling to make future features easier to maintain and implement. Font rendering was broken since deferred lighting was implemented, so we fixed that 🙂
We’ve moved from SVN over to Mercurial for our version control

Meanwhile, the game folks have given us a lot of feedback on how they are using Piko3D for surprise surprise, their little game prototype! We’ve been working with them in optimizing/fixing Piko3D’s script interface too, but HAH! We’re not showing you the game yet. We want to polish it a bit further before we put it out there.

So there! A whole lot of stuff we did, in the few hours of spare time that are not consumed by gaming 😉 and nothing to show for it!! How disappointing! This is kinda how we feel as well, but soon it will be time to show off some of the new features we’re planning in Piko3D.

So stay tuned! and thanks for reading.

Regards,
Wracky.

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Our game programmers are finally gaining some momentum!

October 10th, 2013

Hello all!

Still hard at work here! Cisst and Furos, our game programmers (slash artists, we still have a small team 😉 ) are finally using our script interface how it’s meant to be used: to create a game! Obviously, this is the reason why we are doing this, so we’re very excited! Cisst has created an awesome first version of a side scrolling game. Furos is creating a platform game. Both are just prototypes, meant to familiarize our game programmers with Piko3D and AngelScript.

Of course, this means that finally all missing features and existing bugs will need to be fixed 😉 To motivate us, Furos has even created a meme for one of their biggest peeves while creating their prototypes:

So, uh, coming up: Arrays in AngelScript in Piko3D! 😀

Cheers!

Paramike

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Piko3D on next-gen hardware!

August 15th, 2013

Hi all,

We have ported Piko3D to the newest hardware. The results can be seen here:

Next-gen hardware!

Just a bit of fun ofcourse 😉 We are working on GUI functionality: Wracky is working on raypicking, I (Paramike) am working on support for more image types and support for non-power of two images.

Micron is finishing up our animation/physics blend, and is almost finished. It’s pretty awesome, if we say so ourselves 😉

Stay tuned!

– Paramike

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Advanced features in Visual Studio 2010 Express

August 8th, 2013

Hey everyone,

We mostly use Visual Studio 2010 express edition for Piko3D development. We’ve been using this version of visual studio for a couple of years now, and we were always annoyed by what we perceived to be, limited functionality of the program.

With a default installation, a lot of the standard features you find in the full version of Visual studio are disabled.
For instance, amongst others, the following features are disabled:

Attaching the debugger to running processes
Memory windows, for viewing program memory,
Cancel build steps
Pause a running program
Restart a running program
The entire “Build” menu in the main menu bar.

We always thought this was pretty annoying! Turns out, each one of these features IS available!
And I only noticed it yesterday. I’ve been cursing at Microsoft time and time again for the what I thought “absence” of these features, and it turns out they are there all along! We all installed visual studio 2012 with “Basic Settings” … Turns out you need “Expert Settings” for all of this to be available!

I’ve seen a lot of people online looking for these options in the Express editions of Visual studio, so I thought I’d make a post.
You can find the “Expert mode” in the Tools menu, under “Settings”

Regards,
Wracky.

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Physics: Animation and Ragdoll

July 1st, 2013

Hey everyone!

[youtube_sc url=5vVAh_t3P2Q width=240]

We have another video for you to watch. Micron worked his ass off to get animation and physics to work together! We’re still improving, but we now have support for Bone animations with Physics, and Ragdoll support! And it looks awesome 🙂

Currently, this is all done with ODE, but we’re thinking about switching to Bullet physics, since ODE seems a bit dead in the water.

If you paid attention, you can see that the video also shows the real time spotlight shadows I implemented. They’re very simple at the moment, but they look good already. I’m currently working on Directional lights and I hope we can have a new lighting video up soon 🙂

Keep ya posted!

Regards,
Wracky

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Basic OpenAL Implementation

January 3rd, 2013

Hey everyone!

[youtube_sc url=Lsy1VztJLBI width=240]

No we’re not dead. Just didn’t have a lot to show you 😉
But here’s some new stuff! And more is on the way!

I’ve been doing some debugging recently, started working on our own file format, but most of all,
debugging is a lot better now! I wrote a logger, and a better exception handler, and error messages.
Piko3D now writes logs, and it no longer crashes upon error 😛

In the mean time, Paramike finished the first part of our OpenAL implementation! And it’s awesome 😉
Everything you see in the video is done in Angelscript. We added things like a camera “Look at” option, and “join”, which
syncs 2 object positions 🙂 Useful for attaching sound sources to objects 🙂

In the mean time! Micron has been working on a debug renderer, so that he could actually see what he was doing while implementing bone animation, and I have to say it is coming along nicely! We’ll show you more next time!

Sorry for the delays guys. I hope we can do more updates soon. If I can keep myself away from star/mine craft for long enough 😛
But things are looking good!

For now! Enjoy our OpenAL: Doppler effect video!

Talk to you later!

Wracky

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