As promised some weeks ago I finally got around capturing a video of the totally new user interface that I decided to put into “Phase 2″. As mentioned earlier it’s not only a visual “upgrade”, making the UI more sleek and futuristic but also adds a lot of information to the default view and also brings in lot more usability. As you can see in the video most parts are already done, though there is still some work to be done before I can call it finished. But it’s already coming along nice and will surely add a lot to the final game.

(Note : The video is available in HD, but sadly only at 30fps, seems like youtube caps videos at that framerate)

And amongst other things I removed the nation backdrops. Yes, I did put a lot of work into them (I’d have to guess, but I think several hundred hours) and they look quiet nice (though I was never really satisfied with all of them), so you may think it’s stupid to thrash so much work (along the countless hours of work I thrashed when doing the new UI), but I wouldn’t have removed them if it wouldn’t have added something to the game. And this “something” is a feature I’ve been getting several requests for, called “better global overview“. Due to the old backdrops the globe was fixed to a single position and was also limited in terms of zooming. But by removing those backdrops (and making the game partly look like one of the old betas) you can now not only freely rotate the globe, but also drag it around freely and zoom in and out by a larger factor. This adds a lot of overview as you can now just drag the globe where you want it and zoom in much closer to get a better look at the regions themselves. Take a look at the video and you’ll notice what I’m talking about.

Amongst these bigger changes you’ll also see the nuke in action in the new video. Nothing really new as I already had videos of the nuke prototype, but along with the nuke you’ll see something new, namely physical values. Something that I recently changed were the regional values that felt too abstract, so instead of having a factor for e.g. of population you’ll now see real population counts, that should make it easier to relate those values.

So you see it’s progressing. Although at times I feel like I do a lot of work for nothing (like recently when spending my rare free time for fixing stuff that I broke at some point), even small steps add, and hopefully I’ll have this game done at some point or at least a beta release I can build upon (which is actually my current plan).

Although it took me longer than expected I recently got a first prototype of a dungeon crawler, based on my recenlty published random dungeon article, polished up far enough to show it to the public.  Actually one of the biggest issue holding it back were the textures. It uses parallax (bump) mapping for giving flat surfaces a realsitic 3D look (it’s pretty much an extension to bump mapping), and for that technique you not only need a color map and a normal map but also a heightmap for each texture. After not being able to find good ones around the net I decided to quickly do the textures myself.

A quick overview of what’s in this prototype : As always it uses OpenGL and let’s you walk around a randomly generated dungeon. Lighting and parallax mapping are done using shaders (so there is no real limit to the number of light sources) and all physics and collision stuff is handled by a recent beta version of the Newton Game Dynamics engine. One of the new features is an included character controller that allows you to setup a physically correct playerbody that interacts with the environment within a few lines of code. But that’s not the only use of Newton in that prototype, as I’m also using it’s raycast functionality to determine visibility for the map. That was a pretty natrual choice as I already submitted the geometry of the dungeon to newton for creating a static physic body, so adding raycasting for visibility check was pretty easy and works fine.

Other than that, there is not much to say about this very early prototype. I’m still not sure if I’ll ever make a game based on all that random dungeon stuff, although I already wrote down a nice and basic game design that’s not your traditional dungeon crawler.

So in the meantime enjoy this video I just uploaded, and please watch id in HD. Sadly it’s only 30 fps (originall recorded with 60fps) but it should be sufficent to get an impression :

Update : Some people complained that the explosion didn’t look realistic, and after watching videos of real nukes I guessed they we’re right. So I revamped the explosion to make it look more realistic in itself, as well as adding several effects like a screen blind and shaking. So enjoy the new video below, it’s much better than the old one!

After releasing my explosion texture generator, I guess it’s now time to show you what I’ve been using it’s textures for. It’s for nukes, which will be used for the global projects that are weapons of mass destruction (e.g. atomic bombs). And as usual I implemented them in a separate prototype first, cause trying to get something like this tested and done so that it also looks nice in the final game would take much more time than just creating a new OpenGL project and testing things in there.

So without much words, here is a youtube video of the effect, but please remember to watch it in HD and don’t forget that it’s still work-in-progress and likely to change at least a bit until it’s made it’s final way into the game :

Up until now everything you’ve seen from “Phase 2″ have been some static screenshots. So I thought it would be a good idea to create a quick in-game video showing some of the new features, along with some of the stuff I changed over the past few days and weeks. As you can see on the video I also redid some of the old windows, like the one for army management in order to make them look nicer, but also to make them easier to use. Especially the army management window in “Phase 1″ was a total mess with a lot of info, buttons, lists etc. and therefore it was very hard to use.

The video is roughly 3 minutes long and since not everybody likes to download big video files I decided to sign up for youtube and post a HD-version of the video. And don’t forget to select the HD-version of the video, as the SD one isn’t looking pretty and a lot of details will be missing. And if you don’t want to watch it on youtube, you can download the video here (wmv format, ~120 MBytes, 1280×720, 30fps).

Edit : I’ve opened up my video channel on youtube. I’ll upload videos from my games and projects over there so you can directly watch them in your browser without having to download them. And for future reference I also added a link to the video channel in the upper navigation menu.

I have uploaded a new video (wmv-format, ~60 MBytes, ~5:40 mins) of the tracked tank vehicle implemented in newton. This video shows a more advanced, and almost finished version that allows you to control each track separate (using two analog sticks on my gamepad), as well as rotating the turret, which is implemented with a derived custom joint (and controlled using two neck buttons on the pad). It also allows for realistic turning when the tank is moving, something that wasn’t working in the version that the first video showed. For this I “just” had to check if both tracks accelerate in the same direction and then if the delta is too high I bring the other track up to speed. Works fine so far and now the tank really moves like a real tank. Once again, if you want to know more about how I implemented this and if you want to participate in the discussion about this technique, head over to this thread on the newton forums.

Update : Julio Jerez, the man behind Newton Game dynamics, has it’s own channel on youtube showing off stuff made with Newton. He already uploaded the above mentioned video there, you can access it here. But I suggest you download the video, as youtube has a rather low resolution combined with a horrible qualit.

Back in 2006 I tried to simulate a tracked tank in Newton using a very uncommon method. Instead of moving the tank around with forces I tried to implement an “inverted” conveyor belt material for the tracks, to achieve a more realistic movement. Sadly it didn’t work out 100% perfect back then, but recently I revisited my demo and I now got something that almost perfectly moves like a tank.

A short summary : Instead of applying a force that “drags” the tank around the terrain (not very realistic), or using a lot of wheels to mimic a track (more realistic, but very slow) I’m using Newton’s contact process callback, where I go through all contacts that the track is generating against the terrain and then accelerate along the contact’s tangent. Together with my new tank model (you may remember it, I made it for “Phase 2″ of Projekt “W”) that has a much better track (more flat, which means more even contact generation), a joint to make physics for the tracks more dynamically follow the terrain (see end of the video for more on this) and the new beta of Newton 2.00 I now have an almost perfect way of simulating real tank track behaviour. Not only is it realistic, but contrary to the “multiple wheels for a track”-way it’s very fast and you could do dozens of tanks at once without a severe speed drop.

If you want to see it in action, check out this video I created (~3 min, 35 MBytes, WMV format). I also have a demo ready, but the man behind Newton Game Dynamics wants to optimize contacts generation first before I release the demo to the public. And if you’re interested in implementing something like this yourself, head over to this thread I created at the Newton forums where I also tell how I implemented this.

There have been some internal beta-releases of the Newton Game Dynamics Engine over the last few weeks (right now it’s beta 7) and I did implement the last beta into my NewtonPlayGround (no release date yet, but soon after NGD 2.00 goes live), to see how it fares. And I must admit that it has come a long way and that most of the commercial physics solutions out there should fear it’s final release. Newton has a very realstic solver, but most people didn’t like that fact that it wasn’t as fast as the other engines, but that’ll be history with version 2.00. And to give you a hint on how fast it’ll run I created three videos showcasing the beta of NGD 2.00 on my Athlon X2 4200+ (which isn’t that fast anymore, so just imagine what you can do on a fast quadcore CPU) :

The first video (WMV-format) shows 100 catapults running at a smooth framerate. Note that those catapults are not faked in any way, they work like the ones in real-life, using joints and a heavy weight at the other end to fire the catapult off. Some other tests show that it’s even possible to run 300 of those at once with interactive framerates.

The second video (WMV-format) shows 925 barrels stacked in four pyramids running smooth. Those barrels are all using convex hulls (dense meshes). It’s even possible to have hundreds of complex rocks roll down a hill at smooth framerates with the new beta.

I now also added a third video (WMV-format) showing 40 skinned ragdolls stacking at interactive framerates. Those of you that implemented skinned ragdolls with the old version of Newton know that it only needed two touching skinned ragdolls in 1.53 to make the framerates dip into single digits. But as you can see in this video, 2.00 lets you stack a lot of those with nice framerates.

And if you don’t want to watch the videos, here are two screenshots from them, that also show the most important value, called tPhysics. It’s the time Newton needs to do physics calculations :

As promised several times I finally made a new video for Project “W” to showcase the project’s current progress. The video is fresh out of the press and I created it only several hours ago (actually I started two days ago but did several tries). It’s almost 7 minutes long and encoded in windows media format (WMV) so anyone having installed a recent version of the mediaplayer or having installed a codec pack should be able to watch it.
But contrary to the first video I released in january there are two novelties for this one :
- First, everything is in english so people that don’t know german will now finally see what’s going on whitout having to do a lot of guess-work.
- Second, it’s fully narrated by myself. This means that throughout the video you’ll hear me talk about the game and what I’m doing and this is also in english.

So I hope you enjoy the video, but also please remember that I could not show anything from the game or tell too much about it’s background story in order to have a video that’s reasonable in both, size and length. So happy watching…

(556 downloads)

Yesterday deep into the night I decided to give another feature I wanted to have in NPG for a long time a try and implemented it. This time it’s magnet objects, which cause magnetic forces applied to all bodies within their range. This makes up for some great stuff, as you can see in the following video (5 MBytes, WMV encoded).

The feature was simple to implement since I already had implemented springs a long time ago, and basically the only difference between a spring between two bodies and the magnetic force between two bodies is the calculation of the resulting force (which is actually very simple for a magnetic object). Right now (due to the fact that it was very late and I just wanted to see how and if it works) most stuff like constants and distance are hard-coded, but will later on be changeable by the user so that every magnetic object can have it’s own magnetic parameters.

After finishing the implementation of the new skinned ragdoll-feature in NewtonPlayGround I just started to create some sample scenes for the final release. Throughout the last days I finished this feature (adding shadows, possibility to attach springs and joints and matierlas) and also tested it very hard to see if there were any problems or bugs left. And since everything works the way it should, and since I also finished the improvments to the spring implementation I had planed (you can now attach any kind of object to any other kind of object, which didn’t work on the last release) I’m preparing for the final release.

To “celebrate” this I also made a new video that shows the new feature in one of the new sample scenes. You’ll see a zombie (thanks to Psionic3D for this free model) falling down a “torture tunnel”. And just like in real-life it’s different eacht time you restart the scene, so in the following video you’ll see him fall down twice. Grab the video here, it’s ~10 MBytes and in WMV format.

Release for the next version of NPG is planned for middle or end of next week, so stay tuned!