Piko3D

Hey everyone!

As some of you may know, I want to make piko3d a modern, simple game engine for the latest PC hardware and mobile devices.  As it happens, my new Nokia n900 came in last week! This means I will be able to start porting piko3d to Maemo5 and start on the OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer!

I’ve been working to install the Maemo SDK and get myself familiar with the environment and today i’ve managed to get my first little program compiled and running on the N900! I’m now looking into setting up the project, and getting Piko to compile. It will be some work to get the dependencies on there, like libpng, ode, and SDL. A lot of people have already worked with SDL under Maemo so it should be possible.

I hope the new SDL version supporting OpenGL 3 will be released soon enough, so we can use the same system for OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL 3.2.

Keep you posted!
Kind regards,

Wracky

Bishan Model by Bobby Kwakkernaat

Hey everyone!

A good month has passed since my last post! But I can assure you that I’m still alive and kicking, and so is Piko3D! I have been working on Angelscript for a bit as I explained in my last post. Witchlord had already committed some of my changes to the WIP version of angelscript, which you can find here. There’s still some work to do on that front, but I thought it was important to give my readers at Piko3D.com something nice to look at 😀

As some of you know, I wrote a tutorial on LibPNG and how I used it in Piko3D. Well I thought it was time to put  these images to use, and write support for texture loading! Loading a texture is not much work in itself, but I didn’t want a quick and dirty fix. I wanted something worthy of the dynamic lill 3D engine Piko3D is going to be. So I wrote a little setup for dynamically loading and unloading, as well as caching of textures, with a bit of management structure behind it that I can use to manage other GPU bound resources as well. Like shader programs, vertex array  buffers etc, in the future.

Piko3D doesn’t have much of a renderer yet… Everything you see in the screen shots is actually debug visualisation.  Piko3D will have at least an OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL 3.0 (or 3.2) shader based render pipeline that I will start on later. It would sure be visually interesting,  but I think a solid base for it is important, and a 3D game engine is more then just the renderer 🙂  Because of this, the textured model renders are unlit.  I did get my hands on a nice 3D model named “Bishan”, created by Bobby Kwakkernaat from http://www.decentdesign.nl . This is at least a very nice piece of geometry you guys can feast your eyes on.

Well, I think I’ll be going back to working some more on Angelscript for now. I want to use that in Piko3D so I want to help to extend it a bit further to suit my own selfish desires ;P Oh and I have to feed my game addiction from time to time too…(Like with Brutal Legend and Uncharted at the moment :P)

Talk to you later!

Wracky.

Hey everyone,

Just a small update to let you know where my development time is going 😀

While working on bindings for Angelscript, I noticed that by default, AS doesn’t support binding of classes without default constructors.  I’ve posted this on the Angelcode forums at Gamedev, (you can find the post here) and WitchLord (The angelscript developer) told me that it should be entirely possible to write support for classes without the default constructor! SO i’ll be looking into that now!

I think Angelscript is an awesome script language to write in, so I really want to use this in Piko3D 😀 It’s light weight, extremely easy to implement, and offers great functionality in scripting, like static types, and script classes, which I really like. So I’ll see what I can do, and I hope I can get it to work with all the classes in Piko3D soon!

Keep ya posted!

Wracky.

Hey Everyone,

Just a status update on what I’m doing with Piko3D at the moment. I’ve been over at the gamedev forums to talk to people about the pro’s and cons for implementing angelscript. By the looks of it, Angelscript seems to be a very clean, and technically interesting way to implement the scripting. The interface has it’s own quirks here and there, but every scripting engine has some specifics that you’ll have to deal with anyway.

As some of you may know, I work at www.kalydo.com during the day, and we use LUA at work for our games, so obviously I’ve looked into LUA aswel. LUA is also a bit cumbersome in some area’s but pretty straight forward in others. It seems to be less sophisticated then angelscript, which is a good and a bad thing at the same time. It’s probably easier to implement, but I figure a bit less safe to use. On the other hand, this also greatly depends on how you make the bindings.

Long story short: I can’t really decide! So i’ll probably do them both… My technical director over at www.kalydo.com gave me the source to our lua script bindings generator, and told me how to adapt it so that it can work for angelscript too! This would mean that I can make 1 simple generic way of specifying function bindings in my code, and generate glue-code/function registrations for Angelscript and Lua at the same time!

All that’s left than is to implement a Lua script engine, and an Angelscript script engine. As for now, I’ve started on the Angelscript sctriptengine implementation. I’ll set this up first, and then do a few tryouts to familiarize myself a bit more with angelscript and registering classes/functions.

After that I’ll be able to adapt our bindings creator so that it can also generate angelscipt and things should take of from there! 😀

Thanks for reading and I’ll keep you posted 🙂

Kind regards,
Wracky.

P.S. Kalydo is an online 3D games platform. If you are interested in writing your own games in lua using our kalydo engine and publish them online? Pop over to www.dreamcreateplay.com , download the free Game Development Kit and get right to it!

Update (30th August 2009) : Implementing Angelscript script engine was a breeze! Turns out however, that our BindingsGenerator has a lot more engine-specific code than I hoped for… so that’s gonna take some time to fix 😉