https://www.saschawillems.de/ Recent content on Sascha Willems Hugo -- gohugo.io de-de webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000 https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/09/11/vulkan-hardware-database-quick-filters/ Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/09/11/vulkan-hardware-database-quick-filters/ Rethinking filtering Filtering data is one of the most important parts of any database, and the Vulkan hardware database is no exception. Back in April 2025, I added global filters. These let you enable global pre-filters. While that worked, it was not very intuitive. The settings were somewhat hidden away on a separate page, and once enabled, those pre-filters were implicitly applied to all views that supported filtering. That made it cumbersome, or almost impossible, to adjust filters quickly. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/08/23/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-4.13-with-additional-feature-flags-released/ Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/08/23/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-4.13-with-additional-feature-flags-released/ Better late the never Vulkan launched with a small set of format feature flags for images and buffers. These flags can be used to check if an image or buffer supports a given usage scenario. E.g. sampling from an image or using a buffer as the source for a transfer operation. But as the api surface grew, so did the list of format feature flags, making it necessary to not only use a larger data type for those (64 unsigned bits instead of 32) but to also add a new way of querying those flags. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/06/13/new-vulkan-samples-for-using-descriptor-heaps/ Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/06/13/new-vulkan-samples-for-using-descriptor-heaps/ New way of passing data to shaders In Vulkan, data has historically been passed to shaders using descriptors. Managing them can become quite complicated. There are ways to avoid that, such as using buffer device address (obviously for buffers only) or descriptor indexing (aka “bindless”). But until recently, there was no unified way to avoid the complexity around descriptors. This changed a few months ago when VK_EXT_descriptor_heap was introduced. That extension completely overhauls Vulkan’s existing descriptor API, letting you handle descriptors as raw memory. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/03/13/improving-performance-of-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/03/13/improving-performance-of-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ Tackling performance issues Looking at server statistics, the Vulkan database alone is serving up to 3 million requests per month. A number I would’ve never imagined when I first created this back in 2016. It’s quickly approaching 50k reports and one drawback of such a huge trove of data in combination with that many requests: Performance issues. The database server often can’t handle the traffic and when several people run expensive queries, the database might even run into timeouts. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/02/17/vulkanised-2026-talk-on-vulkan-for-hobbyists/ Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/02/17/vulkanised-2026-talk-on-vulkan-for-hobbyists/ Vulkanised is the largest event dedicated to developers using the Vulkan graphics API. It’s an event packed with brilliant talks and I once again had the honour of being among some of the smartest people in real time graphics programming. At this year’s event I gave a remote talk on Vulkan - Now and then for hobbyists. My goal with this was to look at the decade since Vulkan launched from the eyes of a hobby developer. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/02/01/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-4.11-released/ Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/02/01/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-4.11-released/ Version 4.11 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). This version is based on Vulkan Headers 1.4.340 and adds support for the following new extension features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2: VK_EXT_descriptor_heap VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_3d VK_EXT_shader_long_vector VK_EXT_shader_subgroup_partitioned VK_KHR_internally_synchronized_queues VK_NV_push_constant_bank VK_NV_compute_occupancy_priority https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/misc/retro-graphics-cards/ Sun, 04 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/misc/retro-graphics-cards/ About Back in the early days 3D graphics accelerators, things were a bit more interesting than today. We had a lot more vendors, hardware designs were wildly different and pretty much every vendor also had it’s own API. Sadly I gave/threw away most of my old graphics accelerator but started collecting them again. Here is (growing) list of the ones I own. ELSA Victory 3D (S3 ViRGE) 🗓️ Released in 1996 🛠️ Supported APIs: S3D (Proprietary), DirectX 3, OpenGL (unofficial) A-Trend Helios 3D (3Dfx Vodoo) 🗓️ Released in 1996 🛠️ Supported APIs: Glide (Proprietary), DirectX 5, MiniGK (Small subset of OpenGL) QDI V2200 Legend (Rendition Vérité V2200) 🗓️ Released in 1997 🛠️ Supported APIs: RRedline (Proprietary), OpenGL 1. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/01/03/new-how-to-vulkan-in-2026-tutorial/ Sat, 03 Jan 2026 11:50:47 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/01/03/new-how-to-vulkan-in-2026-tutorial/ (Almost) 10 years of Vulkan Vulkan went public almost 10 years ago. That’s a lot of time for a fast-moving area like realtime computer graphics. Vulkan 1.0 had to make concessions in order to support a broad range of devices available back then. That basically meant OpenGL ES 3.2 as a baseline, with additional features available for discrete desktop GPUs. Things have changed a lot since then. Vulkan is now at version 1. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/12/07/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-4.10-released/ Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/12/07/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-4.10-released/ New client application Version 4.10 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). Update to Qt6 Just like the OpenCL hardware capability viewer I recently updated, the Vulkan hardware capability viewer also uses the Qt framework for it’s platform-independent user interface. The app has been on Qt5 for quite some time, but for open source users, Qt5 has been EoL since the end of 2023. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/11/01/opencl-hardware-capability-viewer-1.30-released/ Sat, 01 Nov 2025 11:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/11/01/opencl-hardware-capability-viewer-1.30-released/ Version 1.30 of the OpenCL Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This is mostly a maintenance update to ensure compatibility with recent and future Android versions. Aside from other minor changes and fixes, this version also improves how OpenCL is accessed on Android devices. Some newer devices, like Google’s Pixel phones, no longer publicly expose OpenCL support, so apps that want to use the API need to explicitly load the library. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/09/13/vulkan-hardware-database-availability/ Sat, 13 Sep 2025 17:29:20 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/09/13/vulkan-hardware-database-availability/ Causes for the limited database availability Some of you might have noticed issues with accessing the Vulkan Hardware Database since end of July. This was caused by a targeted denial-of-service (DoS) attack in combination with ever-increasing rampant AI bot crawling. Note the spike in July That lead my hosting company to take precautionary measures to avoid negative effects to their own services. One such measure was to block access from certain countries, esp. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/08/15/fundamental-vulkan-samples-rework/ Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/08/15/fundamental-vulkan-samples-rework/ Fundamental Vulkan Samples rework (Sync, command buffers and more) Some history It’s been almost ten years since I started working on my open source C++ Vulkan samples. Never would I have imagined what the coming years would look like. Back then I only knew a bit of OpenGL and very little DirectX. And I wasn’t that proficient in C++ either, my main programming language back then was Delphi (which has become a small niche as of today). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06/27/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-4.02-released/ Fri, 27 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06/27/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-4.02-released/ New client application A bit delayed, but version 4.02 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). New extensions This version is based on Vulkan Headers 1.4.320 and adds support for the following new extension features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2: VK_ARM_tensors VK_ARM_data_graph VK_ARM_format_pack VK_EXT_shader_float8 VK_EXT_zero_initialize_device_memory VK_KHR_present_id2 VK_KHR_present_wait2 VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9 VK_KHR_unified_image_layouts VK_KHR_maintenance9 VK_KHR_robustness2 VK_VALVE_fragment_density_map_layered Native Linux ARM64 builds (AArch64) Thanks to a contribution by q4a, the Vulkan Hardware Capability viewer now also natively supports Linux on ARM64 (aka AArch64). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06/23/shaders-for-vulkan-samples-now-also-available-in-hlsl/ Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:59:41 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06/23/shaders-for-vulkan-samples-now-also-available-in-hlsl/ One of Vulkan’s biggest additions (compared to OpenGL) was the introduction of the SPIR-V intermediate representation for shaders. This makes it possible to use different shader language front-ends for writing your shaders, with the only requirement being to be able to compile that language to valid SPIR-V with Vulkan semantics. Unlike OpenGL (except for GL_ARB_gl_spirv) this no longer confines you to use GLSL for writing Vulkan shaders. And while GLSL is still the primary language for my C++ Vulkan samples, SPIR-V opens up options for different shader languages. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06/03/shaders-for-vulkan-samples-now-also-available-in-slang/ Tue, 03 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06/03/shaders-for-vulkan-samples-now-also-available-in-slang/ A new shading language enters the ring Unlike other 3D graphics apis, Vulkan did decouple human readable shaders from the api using SPIR-V as an intermediate representation. This makes it possible to use different shader language front-ends for writing your shaders, with the only requirement being to be able to compile that shading language to valid SPIR-V with Vulkan semantics. This opens up Vulkan for shading languages other than glsl and made it possible to also add hlsl to most of my samples (back in 2020). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/04/19/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-4.01-released/ Sat, 19 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/04/19/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-4.01-released/ New client application A bit delayed, but version 4.01 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). New extensions This version is based on Vulkan Headers 1.4.313 and adds support for the following new extension features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2: VK_ARM_pipeline_opacity_micromap VK_EXT_fragment_density_map_offset VK_KHR_depth_clamp_zero_one VK_KHR_maintenance8 VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 VK_KHR_video_maintenance2 VK_NV_cluster_acceleration_structure VK_NV_cooperative_vector VK_NV_partitioned_acceleration_structure VK_NV_present_metering VK_NV_ray_tracing_linear_swept_spheres Updated build environments One of the reasons it took me so long to update this release were required updates to the build environments. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/04/05/improved-filtering-added-to-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ Sat, 05 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/04/05/improved-filtering-added-to-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ Reworking global filters In the last posting I already hinted at reworking how filtering works for the Vulkan Hardware Database. Almost 40,000 reports across multiple platforms is a lot of data, and being able to properly and easily filter that is crucial for a database. Up until now the only global filter option was the api version, so you could e.g. filter all views in the database to show only data based on devices supporting at least that api version. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/01/12/cleaning-up-vulkan-hardware-database-android-reports/ Sun, 12 Jan 2025 12:50:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/01/12/cleaning-up-vulkan-hardware-database-android-reports/ Vulkan device properties on Android Compared to desktop environments like Windows and Linux, Vulkan on Android is a very different situation. Aside from the obvious hardware specific differences between full desktop GPUs and integrated mobile GPUs there are issues that also complicate data retrieval for my Vulkan Hardware Database. One such issue is device naming and how GPUs and mobile devices corelate. On desktop a given GPU like a RTX 4070 from NVIDIA always reports the same Vulkan properties for a given driver version, no matter who produced that graphics card. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/12/06/vulkan-1.4-support-for-the-vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-and-database/ Fri, 06 Dec 2024 07:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/12/06/vulkan-1.4-support-for-the-vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-and-database/ Vulkan 1.4 has arrived Just a few days ago Vulkan 1.4 was released to the public. This is another important step forward for the api and adds some interesting new functionality. See this blog from Khronos for more details. The Vulkan documentation site is a good starting point too if you wanna learn about what’s included in that version and also why it’s included. If you’re looking for some code, the Khronos Vulkan Samples show some of the new features that were already available as an extensions, e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/07/28/extension-detail-pages-for-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ Sun, 28 Jul 2024 14:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/07/28/extension-detail-pages-for-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ New pages for extension details One thing that I always kinda thought was missing from the database was an easy way to pass extension details around. Esp. coverage numbers for platforms. A common question I see in the Vulkan communities I’m active in is “how good is support for this extension”. And usually the answer is “go to the extension list at https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org and filter yourself”. And while that is a way to get an answer to that question, not having an easy way to simply pass around a link that answers this questions has been bugging me for some time now. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/04/01/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.40-released/ Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/04/01/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.40-released/ New client application Version 3.40 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). An update for the Google Play Android version should land soon. New extensions This version is based on Vulkan Headers 1.3.280 and adds support for the following new extension features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2: VK_EXT_map_memory_placed VK_NV_shader_atomic_float16_vector VK_NV_raw_access_chains VK_NV_ray_tracing_validation Other changes Made some minor adjustments to the JSON output that should hopefully fix some wrongly reported format feature flags JSON’s number type is limited to double, and some drivers reported numbers larger than that, resulting in wrong values stored to the database To avoid this, those flags are now stored as string, avoiding any problems with conversion Updated the LunarG Profiles library https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/03/09/gpu-hardware-databases-hit-50000-reports/ Sat, 09 Mar 2024 07:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/03/09/gpu-hardware-databases-hit-50000-reports/ 50,000 reports (and counting) When I started the OpenGL online hardware database in 2011 along with a client application written in Delphi (which is pretty niche nowadays), it was meant as a replacement for a defunct database of OpenGL devices made by someone else. 13 years later my community driven GPU databases now also support OpenGL ES, OpenCL and Vulkan. Judging by the numbers and the feedback I get, the databases are widely used by developers that work the open APIs from Khronos. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/02/25/improving-filtering-for-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ Sun, 25 Feb 2024 07:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/02/25/improving-filtering-for-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ Improving filtering Eight years after launching the Vulkan database to the public, it’s approaching 30,000 uploaded reports from more than 3,300 different devices across Windows, Linux, Android, MacOS and iOS. With that much data available, good filtering capabilities are crucial. One part where the filtering capabilities of the database were severely lacking have been device coverage based listings. Device coverage is a percentage value that states how many distinct devices (not reports) support a given feature. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/01/24/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.33-released/ Wed, 24 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2024/01/24/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.33-released/ New client application Version 3.33 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). An update for the Google Play Android version is also pending and should be live soon. New extensions As the last release has been a while ago, this version did a rather large jump to Vulkan Headers 1.3.276 and adds support for a lot of new extension features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2: https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/10/14/new-vulkan-documentation-site/ Sat, 14 Oct 2023 11:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/10/14/new-vulkan-documentation-site/ Vulkan Documentation has a new home With something as complex as the Vulkan API, good documentation is crucial for developer adoption. And while Vulkan had pretty good documentation from the get-go, with esp. the spec getting lots of praise, there was a lot of room for improvement. The spec e.g. has become so large that lower-end devices have problems loading it up in the browser, other interesting documentation is scattered around different places and related documentation (e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/09/08/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.32-released/ Fri, 08 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/09/08/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.32-released/ New client application Version 3.32 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). An update for the Google Plays Android version is also pending and should be live soon. New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.3.264 adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix VK_EXT_frame_boundary VK_EXT_depth_bias_control VK_EXT_dynamic_rendering_unused_attachments VK_NV_descriptor_pool_overallocation VK_MSFT_layered_driver VK_QCOM_image_processing2 VK_QCOM_filter_cubic_weights VK_QCOM_ycbcr_degamma VK_QCOM_filter_cubic_clamp VK_QNX_external_memory_screen_buffer Other changes Supported image layouts for the VK_EXT_host_image_copy are now properly displayed using their Vulkan enums. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/07/22/automatic-dark-theme-toggle-for-all-gpu-databases/ Sat, 22 Jul 2023 07:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/07/22/automatic-dark-theme-toggle-for-all-gpu-databases/ Dark mode theme A few months ago I added a dark/light theme toggle to the launchpad and all databases (Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES and OpenCL). After getting mostly positive feedback I decided to replace this manual toggle with an automatic toggle that selects the dark or light theme based on your operating system. So if you’re running your Windows with a dark theme, the databases will now automatically switch to a dark mode too. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/03/17/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.29-released/ Fri, 17 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/03/17/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.29-released/ New client application Version 3.29 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). An update for the slightly outdated Google Playstore is also pending and should be live soon. New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.3.243 adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_ARM_shader_core_properties VK_EXT_image_sliced_view_of_3d VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles VK_QCOM_multiview_per_view_render_areas Other changes The new version also includes a usability improvement for filtering data. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/03/04/new-surface-data-listings-for-the-vulkan-database/ Sat, 04 Mar 2023 13:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/03/04/new-surface-data-listings-for-the-vulkan-database/ New global surface data listings Being able to filter for all data available from submitted reports is an important aspect of the database, so I’m constantly adding new global listings that also let you check coverage numbers. The surface part of the database was missing two important listings: One for the surface transform modes and one for the surface composite alpha modes. They have been added to the database and quickly let you find out global and per-platform coverage numbers: https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/02/08/compute-chapter-for-vulkan-tutorial/ Wed, 08 Feb 2023 18:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2023/02/08/compute-chapter-for-vulkan-tutorial/ Vulkan Tutorial For a lot of developers wanting to learn Vulkan, the tutorial at www.vulkan-tutorial.com is the first learning resource they’ll encounter. It teaches most of the basics required to get started with Vulkan, but up until now only for the graphics part. But Vulkan does more than graphics, with compute shader support being mandatory and as such available on all devices and platforms that support Vulkan. New compute chapter And being well aware on how important the tutorial is as a learning resource, we have a small group of people inside Khronos that takes care of keeping the tutorial up-to-date and in line with api changes. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/11/26/reworked-compare-functionality-for-all-gpu-databases/ Sat, 26 Nov 2022 12:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/11/26/reworked-compare-functionality-for-all-gpu-databases/ Comparing devices - Current state A core feature of all my GPU databases (Vulkan, OpenCL, OpenGL and OpenGL ES) is the possibility to compare reports. This lets you quickly see how the implementations differ, e.g. regarding extension support or api limits. For this you check the reports (or devices) to compare from the currently visible list: And after pressing “compare” you’ll get a side-by-side comparison of the selected reports: But the current implementation has an annoying limitation that has been bothering users (and me) for years now: You can only ever select reports (to compare) from the currently visible list of reports. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/11/19/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.27-released/ Sat, 19 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/11/19/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.27-released/ New client application Version 3.27 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.3.230 adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer (proposal) VK_ARM_shader_core_builtins VK_NV_copy_memory_indirect VK_NV_memory_decompression VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/09/30/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.26-released/ Fri, 30 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/09/30/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.26-released/ New client application Version 3.26 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.3.230 adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_EXT_opacity_micromap VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state3 VK_EXT_device_fault VK_EXT_device_address_binding_report VK_EXT_pipeline_protected_access VK_EXT_legacy_dithering VK_EXT_mutable_descriptor_type VK_EXT_rasterization_order_attachment_access VK_NV_present_barrier VK_NV_optical_flow Changes and bugfixes Updated Vulkan profiles library to the latest version Added detection for Windows 11 (was showing up as Windows 10 in older versions) Fixed a bug with large values for maxTimelineSemaphoreValueDifference Database I also did some minor tweaks and bugfixes to the database: https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/04/29/vulkan-hardware-database-gets-global-api-level-selection/ Fri, 29 Apr 2022 07:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/04/29/vulkan-hardware-database-gets-global-api-level-selection/ Some background More than 6 years ago (time flies!) I released the Vulkan Hardware Database and Capability Viewer along with the first public release of Vulkan 1.0. Traffic on the database has been rising steadily and is approaching 1,000,000 hits per month. 2021 more than 3,000 reports have been uploaded to the database, a number that also has been steadily increasing since launch. This makes it my mostly used database (compared to OpenGL and OpenGL ES) and judging by the feedback it seems to be a widely and often used feature among Vulkan developers. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/03/12/vulkan-profiles-support-for-the-vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-and-database/ Sat, 12 Mar 2022 07:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/03/12/vulkan-profiles-support-for-the-vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-and-database/ Vulkan profiles Along with Vulkan 1.3, Khronos also introduced Vulkan Profiles into the Vulkan ecosystem: “The new Vulkan profile mechanism enables the precise specification and management of sets of API capabilities. Each profile specifies a core version of Vulkan plus a set of required extensions, with supported limits, features, and formats. Profiles provide a way to precisely communicate functionality requirements and device capabilities between participants in the Vulkan ecosystem to streamline the development and deployment of portable applications. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/01/28/vulkan-1.3-support-for-the-vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-and-database/ Fri, 28 Jan 2022 07:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/01/28/vulkan-1.3-support-for-the-vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-and-database/ New Vulkan version Vulkan 1.3 has just gone public, adding some recent features into the core to establish a new baseline for the api. You can find more information in this blog from Khronos and additional resources in this one. There’ll also be a special Vulkanized webinar on February 1st that’s dedicated to the new version. As with previous releases I added support for the new core version to the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer and the database day-one. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/01/11/opencl-hardware-database-at-gpuinfo.org/ Tue, 11 Jan 2022 06:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2022/01/11/opencl-hardware-database-at-gpuinfo.org/ New OpenCL Hardware Database 2022 starts off with a new addition to my GPU Hardware databases at GPUInfo.org! With the databases for Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenGL ES being widely used by many graphics developers, ISVs and IHVs, members of the OpenCL working group approached me for a similar database for OpenCL. OpenCL is a mature and widely adopted api for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems, available on all kinds of platforms. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/12/05/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.05-released/ Sun, 05 Dec 2021 09:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/12/05/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.05-released/ Release Version 3.05 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.2.200 (from 1.2.195), adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_ARM_rasterization_order_attachment_access VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering VK_EXT_border_color_swizzle VK_EXT_image_view_min_lod VK_EXT_depth_clip_control Bugfixes This version als includes a few fixes: Proxy settings are now properly applied Proxy type has been changed to http (from socks) to increas compatibility Updating reports with missing extensions is now proplery working https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/10/23/vulkanised-texture-compression-talk/ Sat, 23 Oct 2021 16:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/10/23/vulkanised-texture-compression-talk/ I recently gave a talk on texture compression in Vulkan using Basis Universal and the KTX 2.0 format during this years Vulkanised online event. The short (15 minutes) talk contains some information on texture compression general, using texture compression in Vulkan and why a universal supercompressed format like Basis Universal is important. The presentation and a video recording of all the presentations from day 2, including mine, are now available: https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/10/13/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.04-released/ Wed, 13 Oct 2021 13:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/10/13/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.04-released/ Release Version 3.04 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.2.195 (from 1.2.189), adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_KHR_maintenance4 VK_EXT_rgba10x6_formats VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart VK_EXT_pageable_device_local_memory VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product Support for PowerVR texture compression image format support This version also finally adds support for the PowerVR texture compression formats provided by the VK_IMG_format_pvrtc. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/08/01/vulkan-hardware-database-updates/ Sun, 01 Aug 2021 15:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/08/01/vulkan-hardware-database-updates/ Intro The Vulkan Hardware Database just got another large update, bringing some substantial new features, quality-of-life improvements and bugfixes. A large part of the code has been reworked to make it easier to maintain and expand, and also more secure. Reworked format support views The biggest change in functionality are the reworked format support views. Instead of a single view that would only tell coverage for “is a format supported linear/optimal tiling or buffers”, the listings have been split into separate listings for linear tiling, optimal tiling and buffer format support and now list device coverage by format and flag. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/07/08/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.02-released/ Thu, 08 Jul 2021 14:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/07/08/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.02-released/ Release Version 3.02 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.2.184 (from 1.2.175), adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_EXT_physical_device_drm VK_EXT_multi_draw VK_EXT_global_priority_query VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_uniform_control_flow VK_HUAWEI_subpass_shading VK_NV_ray_tracing_motion_blur VK_NV_external_memory_rdma VK_EXT_provoking_vertex VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2 Queue family presentation support on Linux This version also fixes a long-standing issue with presentation support on Linux always getting reported as false. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/04/24/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.01-released/ Sat, 24 Apr 2021 16:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/04/24/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-3.01-released/ Release Version 3.01 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OSX). New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.2.175, adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_EXT_ycbcr_2plane_444_formats VK_EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state VK_EXT_color_write_enable VK_KHR_synchronization2 VK_KHR_zero_initialize_workgroup_memory VK_KHR_workgroup_memory_explicit_layout VK_NV_inherited_viewport_scissor Queue family flags for Video encode and decode This version also adds support for the video decode and encode queue family flags that have been introduced with the provisional Vulkan Video acceleration extensions. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/02/19/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-now-available-on-ios/ Fri, 19 Feb 2021 07:40:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/02/19/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-now-available-on-ios/ New target platform - iOS Thanks to a contribution by the fine folks at LunarG, the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now also available on Apple’s iOS based devices. Adding the fifth supported platform, which means that the app is now available on almost every device supporting Vulkan. I have also unlocked the iOS for the database so you can now filter and search through Vulkan data for all iOS devices present in the database. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/01/10/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-and-database-update-3.0/ Sun, 10 Jan 2021 07:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/01/10/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-and-database-update-3.0/ Intro 2021 starts with a huge update for both the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer application and the accompanying Vulkan Hardware Database, bringing some long-awaited features along with many smaller changes, additions and improvements. Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer 3.0 Update mechanism One of the most requested features was a proper update mechanism, that would allow users to update reports with stuff added in newer versions. This version finally adds such an update mechanism. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/12/06/vulkan-hardware-database-extension-feature-additions/ Sun, 06 Dec 2020 15:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/12/06/vulkan-hardware-database-extension-feature-additions/ New extension data features The Vulkan hardware database just got another big feature update, adding some long outstanding functionality mostly related to extension features and properties.The Vulkan hardware capability viewer got support for those some time ago, and the database already displays these for single reports. But up until now there were no listings on those extension related information. This meant it was not possible to filter devices based on that data. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/12/06/vulkan-hardware-database-extension-feature-additions/ Sun, 06 Dec 2020 10:30:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/12/06/vulkan-hardware-database-extension-feature-additions/ New extension data features The Vulkan hardware database just got another big feature update, adding some long outstanding functionality mostly related to extension features and properties.The Vulkan hardware capability viewer got support for those some time ago, and the database already displays these for single reports. But up until now there were no listings on those extension related information. This meant it was not possible to filter devices based on that data. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/11/27/vulkan-samples-and-hardware-capability-viewer-updated-to-final-ray-tracing-extensions/ Fri, 27 Nov 2020 20:15:46 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/11/27/vulkan-samples-and-hardware-capability-viewer-updated-to-final-ray-tracing-extensions/ Vulkan ray tracing extensions final specifications have been released The finalized specifications for the cross-vendor hardware accelerated ray tracing extensions have finally been released, after being available as a provisional extension for some time now. So Vulkan now has official cross-vendor, cross-os support for accessing hardware accelerated ray tracing features. A great overview can be found on the Khronos blog, along with a great article on how ray tracing works. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/10/11/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-mac-osx-support-device-simulation-json/ Sun, 11 Oct 2020 11:45:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/10/11/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-mac-osx-support-device-simulation-json/ New target platform - Mac OSX With the recent updates from the Vulkan® Portability™ initiative and the addition of the relevant extensions in release 2.21, Mac OSX has become an even more important target for Vulkan applications. So I decided to officially add support for Mac OSX to the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer. This only required a few changes to the application’s source code (mostly related to surface extensions) and a new target for the Travis CI setup to build the binaries. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/10/03/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.21-with-support-for-vulkan-portability-released/ Sat, 03 Oct 2020 10:20:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/10/03/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.21-with-support-for-vulkan-portability-released/ Release Version 2.21 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.2.154, adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_KHR_portability_subset VK_EXT_4444_formats Vulkan Portability Most notable is the addition of VK_KHR_portability_subset to support the Vulkan® Portability™ initiative (github). This extension allows non-conformant Vulkan implementations to be built on top of other graphics api like Metal or DirectX, and allows identification of features missing for a fully-conformant Vulkan implementation. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/08/02/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.2-released/ Sun, 02 Aug 2020 09:15:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/08/02/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.2-released/ Release Version 2.2 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.2.148, adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_EXT_fragment_density_map2 VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state VK_EXT_private_data VK_EXT_image_robustness Wayland support Also new with this version is a dedicated build for Wayland. The Linux versions have always been built for X11, but thanks to external contributions, the application now also has a native Wayland version available at the download page. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/06/06/new-vulkan-gltf-examples/ Sat, 06 Jun 2020 15:21:13 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/06/06/new-vulkan-gltf-examples/ Moving to glTF When I started writing my first Vulkan samples glTF was still in it’s infancy, esp. in terms of tooling. So I went with more common formats and went with the Open Asset importer library (Assimp) for loading these. But things rapidly changed with glTF 2.0, which is now pretty much and industry standard and supported by many DCC tools. And since both Vulkan and glTF are both Khronos standards this is a perfect match. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/03/28/vulkan-debug-utilities-sample-and-tutorial/ Sat, 28 Mar 2020 14:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/03/28/vulkan-debug-utilities-sample-and-tutorial/ I have contributed a new sample to the official Khronos Vulkan Samples repository that shows usage of the VK_EXT_debug_utils for adding debugging information to your Vulkan application. This extension combines the old VK_EXT_debug_marker and VK_EXT_debug_report into a new extension that also implements some changes and additions based on developer feedback for the old extensions. For example it’s now possible to debug instance creation and destruction with this new extension. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/01/11/vulkan-hardware-database-feature-update/ Sat, 11 Jan 2020 08:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/01/11/vulkan-hardware-database-feature-update/ Intro The Vulkan hardware database just got one of it’s biggest updates, bringing with it some fundamental changes, lots of optimizations and some quality-of-life improvements. The main reason behind this update were requests from inside the Khronos group, asking for feature coverage based reporting. What does Feature coverage mean? Up until now if you were looking for a specific extension and the devices (or reports) that supported it, the database would only tell you that a device would support the extension, with the driver version being reported just being the latest known version. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/12/02/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.03-released/ Mon, 02 Dec 2019 09:30:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/12/02/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.03-released/ Version 2.03 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.1.129, adding support for new extensions introduced with this header: VK_KHR_performance_query VK_KHR_separate_depth_stencil_layouts VK_KHR_buffer_device_address Aside from new support for these new extensions, this release also includes some small bugfixes related to surface extensions and adds a mapping for VK_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_TYPE_CPU. This is of interest for those that are using software Vulkan implementations like Swiftshader or gfxportability. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/10/30/khronos-vulkan-unified-samples-repository-is-here/ Wed, 30 Oct 2019 19:06:14 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/10/30/khronos-vulkan-unified-samples-repository-is-here/ It’s finally here. Khronos just made the Unified Vulkan Samples repository publicly available. For more details see the official press release. About The goal of this project is a central source for high-quality Vulkan samples, with contributions both from Khronos members as well as external contributors like me. It also comes with an extensive framework that takes care of platform-related stuff like window and input handling and offers functionality for loading assets like glTF models, shaders, etc. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/10/08/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.02-released/ Tue, 08 Oct 2019 17:30:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/10/08/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.02-released/ Version 2.02 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.1.124, adding support for all new extensions introduced with this header: VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore VK_KHR_shader_clock The reasons behind this new release just 3 days after the last one is the new new VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore extension, one that people have been anticipating for long. And as there are already drivers supporting this out in the wild, e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/10/05/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.01-released/ Sat, 05 Oct 2019 09:25:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/10/05/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.01-released/ Version 2.01 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.1.123, adding support for all new extensions introduced with this header: VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_extended_types The main reason for this update is another one though, as it also fixes a bug for extension properties with array values not being properly saved to json and thus not being stored in the database. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/10/05/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.01-released/ Sat, 05 Oct 2019 09:25:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/10/05/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.01-released/ Version 2.01 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.1.123, adding support for all new extensions introduced with this header: VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_extended_types The main reason for this update is another one though, as it also fixes a bug for extension properties with array values not being properly saved to json and thus not being stored in the database. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/08/30/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.00-released/ Fri, 30 Aug 2019 17:00:50 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/08/30/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-2.00-released/ Version 2.00 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). The major version bump is caused by a big change in how the code for reading device extension properties and features is generated. You can find a detailled rundown on how this works below. You can download the new version from vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php. Appimage for Linux Deploying Qt applications on Linux is not as easy as on Windows, esp. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/06/07/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.93-released/ Fri, 07 Jun 2019 21:16:53 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/06/07/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.93-released/ Version 1.93 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version fully supports Vulkan 1.1 and adds support for reading additional features and properties for the following extensions: VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock VK_NV_shader_sm_builtins VK_KHR_depth_stencil_resolve properties VK_EXT_buffer_device_address features VK_EXT_pci_bus_info features In addition there were also a few changes to the Android version of the app: The app is now using the arm64-v8a architecture, as this is a requirement for distributing Android apps in Google’s playstore beginngin this August. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/05/26/opengl-hardware-capability-viewer-1.2-released/ Sun, 26 May 2019 09:47:25 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/05/26/opengl-hardware-capability-viewer-1.2-released/ Version 1.2 of the OpenGL Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all Windows and Linux. This version adds support for reading the list of supported SPIR-V extensions. These will be displayed on a new tab, and will also be uploaded to the database so you can view and compare them across multiple devices. Note that this only works with devices suppoting GL_ARB_spirv_extensions, and that even with that extension present implementations are free to report an empty list of no SPIR-V extension is supported. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/27/vulkan-examples-for-ray-traced-shadows-and-reflections-using-vk_nv_ray_tracing/ Sat, 27 Apr 2019 20:40:09 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/27/vulkan-examples-for-ray-traced-shadows-and-reflections-using-vk_nv_ray_tracing/ After adding a basic Nvidia RTX ray tracing example last week, I spent some more time with Vulkan and the VK_NV_ray_tracing extension. The result are two new, more advanced examples that I just uploaded to my Vulkan C++ example repository. As with the basic example I tried to keep them as straight forward as possible with all the relevant code parts put into one source file, so that following and building upon is as easy as possible. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/21/new-vulkan-example-on-raytracing-using-vk_nv_ray_tracing/ Sun, 21 Apr 2019 16:19:22 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/21/new-vulkan-example-on-raytracing-using-vk_nv_ray_tracing/ With all the new Turing extensions that NVIDIA has released alongside it’s new GPU architecture, I decided to replace my GTX 980 with a RTX 2060, mainly for the purpose of doing RTX ray-tracing related Vulkan stuff and also checking out things like mesh and task shaders. Getting my first RTX accelerated ray tracing example up and running was pretty easy, thanks to tutorials like the one from NVIDIA and iOrange. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/20/turing-shader-extensions-and-visual-studio-2019-support-for-spir-v-extension/ Sat, 20 Apr 2019 09:55:22 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/20/turing-shader-extensions-and-visual-studio-2019-support-for-spir-v-extension/ I have released an updated version of the SPIR-V Extension to the Visual Studio Marketplate. If you already have this installed in Visual Studio, you can update it from the extension window. Version 0.6 adds support for Visual Studio 19 and nvidia’s new turing shader extension, allowing you to generate SPIR-V from the IDE for ray tracing (generation, hit, miss, etc.), mesh and task shaders. Supported shader extensions: .vert (Vertex shader) . https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/13/device-based-views-for-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ Sat, 13 Apr 2019 18:25:42 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/13/device-based-views-for-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ I have just pushed the first big fundamental update to the Vulkan hardware database since it went live in february 2016. With more than 5,000 reports uploaded it already contains lots of valuable data, but I felt that the visualization was lacking. When creating the Vulkan hardware database, I took the same approach as with the OpenGL and OpenGL ES database, making the web front-end more or less as pretty view of the database setup. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/03/29/flipping-the-vulkan-viewport/ Fri, 29 Mar 2019 20:02:24 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/03/29/flipping-the-vulkan-viewport/ Introduction This short tutorial deals with Vulkan’s viewport setup, which differs from the one in OpenGL and other APIs. I’ll try to explain what it takes to get your (OpenGL) scene rendered properly, and how e.g. VK_KHR_MAINTENANCE1 can help you deal with differences across the APIs, something that’s esp. helpful if you try to add Vulkan as a backend to you renderer without wanting to alter your actual scene data. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/03/23/adding-support-for-gltf-meshes-without-indices/ Sat, 23 Mar 2019 11:26:43 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/03/23/adding-support-for-gltf-meshes-without-indices/ I have pushed an update to my Vulkan glTF PBR 2.0 application that adds support for rendering primitives without indices. Up until now, all primitives of a glTFs scene had to come with indices to be rendered by the application, which is usually the case for more complex scenes. After getting a request for this, and checking with the glTF 2.0 spec, primitives without indices are actually a valid glTF 2. https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/archive/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 15:10:24 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/archive/ https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/03/08/getting-a-vulkan-application-up-and-running-on-a-low-spec-device-with-buggy-drivers/ Fri, 08 Mar 2019 15:22:53 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/03/08/getting-a-vulkan-application-up-and-running-on-a-low-spec-device-with-buggy-drivers/ Introduction Ever since starting to work on my C++ Vulkan glTF PBR application, I was bugged by the fact that it just wouldn’t work on my everyday phone, just crashing at a certain point with an error code that actually should never be thrown by that certain function. After a few unsuccessful attempts at finding the cause for this, I finally found the root of the problem and was actually able to get this up and running. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/12/07/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.92-released/ Fri, 07 Dec 2018 21:28:52 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/12/07/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.92-released/ Version 1.92 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version fully supports Vulkan 1.1 and adds support for reading additional features and properties for the following extensions: VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8 VK_KHR_shader_float_controls VK_EXT_fragment_density_map You can download the new version from https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/11/17/updates-to-the-vulkan-hardware-database-and-the-hardware-capability-viewer/ Sat, 17 Nov 2018 08:44:39 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/11/17/updates-to-the-vulkan-hardware-database-and-the-hardware-capability-viewer/ I have released a small update of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer to 1.91 for Windows and Linux. It adds support for reading the features of the recently added VK_EXT_transform_feedback extension and replaces the experimental VK_NVX_raytracing extension with VK_NV_ray_tracing. You can download the new version from https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php. New features for the online Hardware Database The online hardware database at https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org also got a few new features and now also has dedicated listings and pages for properties and features that are specific to extension. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/10/06/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.9-released/ Sat, 06 Oct 2018 15:44:15 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/10/06/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.9-released/ Version 1.9 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version fully supports Vulkan 1.1 and adds support for reading additional features and properties for the following extensions: VK_KHR_driver_properties VK_KHR_shader_atomic_int64 VK_NVX_raytracing VK_NV_mesh_shader VK_NV_shading_rate_image VK_NV_compute_shader_derivatives VK_AMD_shader_core_properties You can download the new version from https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/09/15/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.8-released/ Sat, 15 Sep 2018 09:04:44 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/09/15/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.8-released/ Version 1.8 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). As with 1.8 this version fully supports Vulkan 1.1 and adds support for new extensions: VK_EXT_inline_uniform_block VK_KHR_vulkan_memory_model VK_EXT_vertex_attribute_divisor The UI has also been slightly updated. Instead of listing extension features and properties on a separate tab, these are now included in the extensions tab: You can download the new version from https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/09/05/vulkan-conditional-rendering/ Wed, 05 Sep 2018 18:59:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/09/05/vulkan-conditional-rendering/ Introduction Note: Source code that demonstrates this feature can be found in this new example at my open source C++ Vulkan examples repository. With the new VK_EXT_conditional_rendering extension, Vulkan gains the possibility to execute certain rendering and dispatch commands conditionally, based on values stored in a dedicated buffer. So instead of having to rebuild command buffers if the visibility of objects change, it’s now to possible to just change a single buffer value to control if the rendering commands for that object are executed without the need to touch any command buffers. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/08/15/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.7-released/ Wed, 15 Aug 2018 18:23:06 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/08/15/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.7-released/ Version 1.7 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). As with 1.7 this version fully supports Vulkan 1.1 and adds support for new extensions: VK_EXT_conditional_rendering VK_KHR_8bit_storage You can download the new version from https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/07/19/vulkan-input-attachments-and-sub-passes/ Thu, 19 Jul 2018 17:47:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/07/19/vulkan-input-attachments-and-sub-passes/ Introduction I have added a new example to my open source C++ Vulkan examples that demonstrates the use of input attachments and subpasses within a single render pass. Input attachments are image views that can be used for pixel local load operations inside a fragment shader. This basically means that framebuffer attachments written in one subpass can be read from at the exact same pixel (that they have been written) in subsequent subpasses. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/06/08/multiview-rendering-in-vulkan-using-vk_khr_multiview/ Fri, 08 Jun 2018 17:54:50 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/06/08/multiview-rendering-in-vulkan-using-vk_khr_multiview/ I have added a new example to my open source C++ Vulkan examples that demonstrates the use of multiview rendering. Multiview enables rendering to multiple views simultaneously instead of having to use multiple passes. Esp. with stereoscopic rendering (e.g. for VR related applications) there’s usually little change between two views, like different matrices, and having to do multiple passes for such small differences is inefficient. With multiview an implementation can now render different views simultaneously in a single pass and the Vulkan extension even adds hints for the implementation to even further improve performance (see correlation mask down below). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/05/21/opengl-hardware-database-overhaul/ Mon, 21 May 2018 18:12:26 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/05/21/opengl-hardware-database-overhaul/ After reworking the OpenGL ES hardware database some time ago (which was in dire need of an update to be usable again) I have also released a substantial update to the OpenGL hardware database. Server-side processing Biggest change is the use of server-side processing (as with the Vulkan and OpenGL ES databases), so gone are the days where each request to the report listing page would fetch all reports at once, and had the client do the heavy lifting, resulting in a long delay before any filtering or sorting could be done. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/vulkan-examples/ Sat, 19 May 2018 21:44:18 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/vulkan-examples/ About To help people get started with the Vulkan graphics api I released a repository of examples C++ along with the start of Vulkan. I started developing these before Vulkan was publicly released while being a member of the Vulkan advisory panel, and have since then added more and more examples, demonstrating many different aspects of the api. The list of examples (already more than 60) range from basic api usage to more complex setups, and also include examples for different rendering methods and effects (physical based rendering, screen space ambient occlusion, deferred rendering, etc. https://www.saschawillems.de/privacy-policy/ Wed, 16 May 2018 19:52:02 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/privacy-policy/ Privacy policy This Privacy Policy is intended to inform the users of this website in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on the nature, scope and purpose of the collection and use of personal data by the website owner and operator Sascha Willems (webmaster [at] saschawillems.de). I take your privacy very seriously and will treat your personal information confidentially and in accordance with the law. Collected data This website collects usage data and statistics in the form of server log files. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/04/26/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.6-released/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 04:44:41 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/04/26/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.6-released/ Version 1.7 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). As with 1.6 this version fully supports Vulkan 1.1 and adds a few new features: Support for the new VK_KHR_push_descriptor extension Support for YCBCR formats You can download the new version from https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/04/02/opengl-es-database-es-3.1-and-3.2-support-capability-listing-pages/ Mon, 02 Apr 2018 09:11:47 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/04/02/opengl-es-database-es-3.1-and-3.2-support-capability-listing-pages/ After the recent overhaul I now also have added support for OpenGL ES 3.1 and 3.2 to the OpenGL ES hardware database and the Android app. Both versions added lots of new capabilities that have been lacking from the client application and database, so even though there are lots of reports for OpenGL ES 3.1 and 3.2 those only contain capabilities up to OpenGL ES 3.0. GLES 3.1 brought compute shaders, GLES 3. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/04/01/opengl-es-capsviewer-updated-to-0.6/ Sun, 01 Apr 2018 14:00:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/04/01/opengl-es-capsviewer-updated-to-0.6/ I have released update 0.6 for the OpenGL ES CapsViewer. Changelog : Added OpenGL ES 3.2 capabilities (if supported by device) Added OpenGL ES 3.1 capabilities (if supported by device) Minor bugfixes The update should be automatically installed, and if you’ve submitted a device where 0.2 reported a wrong OpenGL ES version, please feel free to resubmit it. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/03/30/opengl-es-hardware-database-overhaul/ Fri, 30 Mar 2018 15:02:48 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/03/30/opengl-es-hardware-database-overhaul/ I finally found some time to overhaul the OpenGL ES hardware database. I admittedly neglected my OpenGL databases in recent years (mainly due to Vulkan ® and a severe lack of spare time), and especially the OpenGL ES one was in dire need of an overhaul and a cleanup. So I spent a few days fixing lots of problems (both technical and data-related) as well as getting it (mostly) on par with the Vulkan hardware database and the changes are now live. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/03/08/vulkan-1.1-is-here/ Thu, 08 Mar 2018 12:44:57 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/03/08/vulkan-1.1-is-here/ A bit later than initially planned Vulkan 1.1 was released to the public yesterday, as usual with day-one driver support by most of the IHVs. Vulkan 1.1 promoted several extension to the core and also adds interesting new functionality like vendor independent subgroup operations. You can get all the details at the Khronos Vulkan landing page. Note that all my open source examples, demos and applications will work fine with Vulkan 1. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/03/04/conservative-rasterization-in-vulkan-using-vk_ext_conservative_rasterization/ Sun, 04 Mar 2018 08:20:19 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/03/04/conservative-rasterization-in-vulkan-using-vk_ext_conservative_rasterization/ I have added a new example to my open source C++ Vulkan examples that demonstrates the basic use of conservative rasterization using the VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization extension. This has been missing from Vulkan some time now (while other APIs already offer this feature) but has recently been added and is already support by at least NVIDIA. Conservative rasterization changes the way fragments are generated, and enabling over estimation generates fragments for every pixel touched instead of only pixels that are fully covered. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/02/26/how-to-video-debugging-a-non-visible-model-in-vulkan-using-renderdoc/ Mon, 26 Feb 2018 19:04:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/02/26/how-to-video-debugging-a-non-visible-model-in-vulkan-using-renderdoc/ One of the most common Vulkan related that I’m seeing a lot is about rendering stuff that somehow ends up being not visible on the screen, even though technically everything looks okay (no validation layer errors, correct buffer uploads, etc.). Luckily there are debugging tools tools like RenderDoc that can help locating and fixing such problems. But not everyone knows about such tools or how to use them for debugging these kind of problems. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/02/11/vulkan-gltf-2.0-c-phyiscal-based-rendering/ Sun, 11 Feb 2018 14:08:25 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/02/11/vulkan-gltf-2.0-c-phyiscal-based-rendering/ I have released the first working version of a separate (from the examples) Vulkan physical based rendering example that uses the glTF 2.0 model file format. The repository can be found at https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan-glTF-PBR. glTF is a royalty free format specification by the Khronos Group and is a new format for 3D models gaining lots of traction. With version 2.0 it also added several PBR extensions and definitions. I decided to make this a stand-alone project instead of “just” another example in my Vulkan C++ example repository to make it easier getting into the code. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/vulkan-gltf-pbr/ Sun, 11 Feb 2018 08:10:58 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/vulkan-gltf-pbr/ About A physically-Based Rendering Vulkan reference implementation in C++ with image based lighting using glTF 2.0 models. The lighting equation is based on the reference glTF PBR implementation from Khronos. The main component of this project was writing a Vulkan glTF model loader and renderer that uses tinygltf, supporting most of glTF 2.0’s features. The application supports both pbr material workflows (metallic-roughness, specular-glossiness), renders the whole scene hierarchy and fully supports skinned animations for up to 128 bones. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/12/30/new-vulkan-example-cascaded-shadow-mapping/ Sat, 30 Dec 2017 19:22:17 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/12/30/new-vulkan-example-cascaded-shadow-mapping/ In what is most probably my last Vulkan example for 2017 I have added a cascaded shadow mapping example to my open source Vulkan C++ example repository: One big problem of traditional shadow mapping, esp. with large outdoor scenes is the resolution you get as one single shadow map has to cover the whole camera spectrum. With cascaded shadow maps the frustum is split up into multiple frustums (along scene depth) with each getting it’s own, full-resolution, depth map. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer/ Sat, 18 Nov 2017 19:01:57 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer/ About The “Vulkan hardware capability viewer” is a multi-platform client-side application that collects all available information from a Vulkan implementation that can be uploaded to a public database. The application is written in C++, uses Qt for the user interface and runs on Windows, Linux and Android. Goal of this tool is to create a database aimed at Vulkan programmers that need to check implementation specific information or just want to see what devices are supported or how far spread a certain feature is. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/10/30/combined-vulkan-and-opengl-es-listing-for-android/ Mon, 30 Oct 2017 12:26:13 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/10/30/combined-vulkan-and-opengl-es-listing-for-android/ Upon popular request I finally got around combining android device data from my Vulkan and OpenGL ES hardware databases into a convenient table. This should be handy if you plan on supporting both apis on Vulkan or if you just need to check for general device support. The new page can be reached via https://android.gpuinfo.org/ It combines all android device reports from the Vulkan database with all reports from the OpenGL ES database and also uses google’s official device list for translating device IDs (stored with Vulkan and OpenGL ES reports) into actual retail names. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/09/16/headless-vulkan-examples/ Sat, 16 Sep 2017 13:26:10 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/09/16/headless-vulkan-examples/ I have just added two minimal, mostly self-contained cross-platform headless Vulkan examples to my open source C++ Vulkan repository. Unlike the other examples in my repository these two don’t require a surface (created from a window) and as such can be run on systems with no window compositor. The intention behind the two examples is to show how Vulkan can be used for running graphics and compute tasks without the need for an actual user interface to be present i. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/09/10/how-to-shrink-down-a-github-repository/ Sun, 10 Sep 2017 12:41:13 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/09/10/how-to-shrink-down-a-github-repository/ Starting point With my Vulkan C++ example github repository approaching 200 MB in size I decided it was about time to shrink it down to a reasonable size again. Shrinking a git(hub) repository isn’t just about deleting locally present files but requires cleaning up the history as files that have been removed are still present in the repository’s history and therefore still contribute to it’s size. A big chunk of the repo’s size is caused by binary assets like textures and 3d models. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/08/27/delphi/pascal-opengl-header-updated-to-4.6/ Sun, 27 Aug 2017 09:46:43 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/08/27/delphi/pascal-opengl-header-updated-to-4.6/ The Delphi/Pascal OpenGL headers have been updated to support OpenGL 4.6. The current version of this header can always be found at the github repository, the 4.6 release has also been tagged. This version adds support for all ARB extensions added to OpenGL 4.6 and brings a few cross-platform fixes (mostly for Free Pascal) along with a few fixes and added constants for a few extensions that have been missing. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/08/19/the-vulkan-device-simulation-layer/ Sat, 19 Aug 2017 17:11:31 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/08/19/the-vulkan-device-simulation-layer/ LunarG recently made the new Vulkan Device Simulation layer public. This is a Vulkan instance level layer that injects physical device properties, limits and features based on a json input file, simulating different features than the actual Vulkan device you are running on. The idea behind this is to help developers check if their Vulkan applications can handle devices with missing features and tighter limits without having to actually run on a such a device. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/07/01/ios-and-macos-support-added-to-the-vulkan-examples/ Sat, 01 Jul 2017 10:22:24 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/07/01/ios-and-macos-support-added-to-the-vulkan-examples/ Thanks to a contribution from Bill Hollings, one of the developers from MoltenVK , my open source C++ Vulkan examples now also support Apple’s iOS and macOS platforms. MoltenVK is a commercial Vulkan implementation that runs on top of Apple’s Metal api with a free trial available. Details on how to build and run the examples for those platforms can be found in this readme. Note that not all examples will work on iOS or macOS due to the differences in supported features like geometry or tessellation shaders not being available in Metal. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/05/28/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.4-released/ Sun, 28 May 2017 10:47:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/05/28/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.4-released/ A new version of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This is the biggest update since I released this tool, including lots of new features that also brought along a few changes to the online database. I also decided to drop the “beta” tag now that more than 1,300 reports have been uploaded, making this the first non-beta release of the Vulkan Hardware Capability viewer. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/05/06/updates-to-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ Sat, 06 May 2017 18:22:37 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/05/06/updates-to-the-vulkan-hardware-database/ Server-side processing (performance) In preparation for the next release of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer I published a major change to the Vulkan online hardware database at http://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/. Up until now all data was handled client-side, so when loading up the report listing all reports were fetched and displayed by the client. While this was more or less fine in the beginning, delivering all reports to the client even if only the 25 newest ones were visible now takes several seconds (even on a fast connection) and fetching all rows for each visitor is also putting strain on the database. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/04/22/physically-based-rendering-and-moving-hdr-assets-out-of-the-repository/ Sat, 22 Apr 2017 13:42:37 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/04/22/physically-based-rendering-and-moving-hdr-assets-out-of-the-repository/ The last days (and weeks) I’ve been working on a Vulkan example implementing physically based rendering with image based lighting (you can find a nice article with lots of details over at Trent Reed’s blog) and just pushed it to my public github repository. While working on this demo I realized that putting all the binary assets (models and esp. textures) in the repository might not have been a great idea. https://www.saschawillems.de/impressum/ Fri, 31 Mar 2017 09:12:56 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/impressum/ 1. Inhalt des Onlineangebotes Der Autor übernimmt keinerlei Gewähr für die Aktualität, Korrektheit, Vollständigkeit oder Qualität der bereitgestellten Informationen. Haftungsansprüche gegen den Autor, welche sich auf Schäden materieller oder ideeller Art beziehen, die durch die Nutzung oder Nichtnutzung der dargebotenen Informationen bzw. durch die Nutzung fehlerhafter und unvollständiger Informationen verursacht wurden sind grundsätzlich ausgeschlossen, sofern seitens des Autors kein nachweislich vorsätzliches oder grob fahrlässiges Verschulden vorliegt. Alle Angebote sind freibleibend und unverbindlich. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/03/30/visual-studio-2017-support-for-spir-v-extension/ Thu, 30 Mar 2017 14:11:45 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/03/30/visual-studio-2017-support-for-spir-v-extension/ I have released an updated version of the SPIR-V Extension for Visual Studio with support for VS 2017, VS 2015 is also still supported. The extension adds context menu entries to glsl shader files for compiling them to SPIR-V (Vulkan and OpenGL). You can find details about it over here. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/03/25/updated-vulkan-example-binaries/ Sat, 25 Mar 2017 12:52:59 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/03/25/updated-vulkan-example-binaries/ Took a bit longer than expected, but I finally got around releasing updated binaries for my open source C++ Vulkan examples. Compared to the last updated (in 2016) there are numerous changes and lots of new examples added. One major addition is touch support on Android. So if you just want to run Vulkan examples (to e.g. test your device) you can grab these pre-built binaries instead of compiling from vulkan. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/12/28/updated-android-vkquake-binaries/ Wed, 28 Dec 2016 19:04:51 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/12/28/updated-android-vkquake-binaries/ For those that want to test out my Android port of of Axel Gneiting’s vkQuake, I have released updates binaries at http://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/vkquake.php Please note that the .apk does not contain any game files, so you need to get the .pak files from the shareware or registered version in order to play this. See the page above for details on this. This release is based on vkQuake’s latest version and is pretty much feature complete. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/11/19/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.2-released/ Sat, 19 Nov 2016 16:22:05 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/11/19/vulkan-hardware-capability-viewer-1.2-released/ I have released an update to the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer. The new version (1.2) adds support for os-specific surface capabilities that are added to the reports and online database. This adds a new category to the tool and reports at the online database (for example this one) containing: Surface properties (extents, usage flags, transforms, etc.) Surface Formats (incl. color spaces) Present modes You can download the new version from https://vulkan. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/09/06/updated-vulkan-example-binaries-and-vkquake-for-android/ Tue, 06 Sep 2016 18:58:32 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/09/06/updated-vulkan-example-binaries-and-vkquake-for-android/ Finally found some time to update the binaries for my open source ++ Vulkan examples. Since the last binaries have been a few months old these contain lots of changes and new examples. So if you just want to run Vulkan examples (to e.g. test your device) you can grab these pre-built binaries instead of compiling from vulkan.gpuinfo.org : Windows Note : The windows binaries require the media pack (see below) to be present for loading shaders, meshes and textures. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/spirv-vs-extension/ Tue, 30 Aug 2016 17:43:19 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/spirv-vs-extension/ About With the launch of Vulkan, SPIR-V has been introduced as it’s binary shader format, replacing text based shader formats in favor of an intermediate representation. To make life a bit easier I have just released a Visual Studio (2015) extension that adds SPIR-V related commands to the context menu of shader files (and folders containing shader files): This allows you got generate binary SPIR-V files from GLSL right out of your IDE. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/30/spir-v-extension-for-visual-studio/ Tue, 30 Aug 2016 17:43:19 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/30/spir-v-extension-for-visual-studio/ Source (C#) and download (VSIX for VS2015) can be found at https://github.com/SaschaWillems/SPIRV-VSExtension With the launch of Vulkan, SPIR-V has been introduced as it’s binary shader format, replacing text based shader formats in favor of an intermediate representation. To make life a bit easier I have just released a Visual Studio (2015) extension that adds SPIR-V related commands to the context menu of shader files (and folders containing shader files): https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/13/vulkan-tutorial-on-rendering-a-fullscreen-quad-without-buffers/ Sat, 13 Aug 2016 22:30:35 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/13/vulkan-tutorial-on-rendering-a-fullscreen-quad-without-buffers/ Rendering a fullscreen quad* the easy way (*) Which is actually just a huge triangle Having to render a fullscreen quad (or something that fills the whole screen) is a common task in 3D real time graphics, as many effects rely on rendering a texture over the whole screen with proper uv coordinates in the [0..1] range. This applies to post processing (glow, blur, ssao), deferred shading or procedurally generated output. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/12/porting-vulkanquake-to-android/ Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:27:44 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/12/porting-vulkanquake-to-android/ Axel Gneiting from iD software recently ported Quake to Vulkan (based on the QuakeSpasm OpenGL port) and released the sources at github with support for windows and Linux. With Vulkan also being available on Android, I decided to use the knowledge gained while porting my Vulkan examples and Demos over to Android and add it to his Vulkan Quake port. I have tested with the registered and full .pak files of the original Quake and both are fully playable. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/06/new-vulkan-example-indirect-drawing/ Sat, 06 Aug 2016 11:27:23 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/06/new-vulkan-example-indirect-drawing/ I have added another example to my open source C++ Vulkan examples. The new one is about indirect drawing (including multi draw if supported). Contrary to their non-direct counterparts, the indirect drawing commands in Vulkan take their draw calls from a buffer that is ideally stored in device local memory. So instead of running single draw commands that get their index base, index count and instancing numbers passed by the host upon getting called, the indirect commands are backed by a buffer that stores an arbitrary number of draw commands. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/07/17/new-vulkan-example-deferred-shading-and-shadows/ Sun, 17 Jul 2016 17:11:16 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/07/17/new-vulkan-example-deferred-shading-and-shadows/ Based on the recently updated deferred shading example, I have added a new example to my open source C++ Vulkan samples. This example adds dynamic shadows from multiple light sources, showcasing a few technologies that can be used to make rendering of multiple shadows more efficient. To achieve this, the example uses a layered depth attachment with one layer per light source that is sampled in the final scene composition. Traditionally one would do multiple passes to render the depth maps for the scene’s light source, and to avoid this the example also uses shader instancing by doing multiple invocations in the geometry shader. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/07/03/updated-vulkan-deferred-shading-example-video/ Sun, 03 Jul 2016 19:46:10 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/07/03/updated-vulkan-deferred-shading-example-video/ Over the past few weeks and months I’ve been constantly working on my Vulkan examples, enhancing existing demos, adding new ones, fixing bugs reported and merging pull requests (thx to anyone that has contributed!). I even found some time to work on a Vulkn deferred shading playground using Crytek’s famous Sponza model. You can find the repository for it here. This Sunday I decided to visually upgrade the deferred shading example included in my samples repository. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/05/28/tutorial-on-using-vulkans-vk_ext_debug_marker-with-renderdoc/ Sat, 28 May 2016 17:16:56 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/05/28/tutorial-on-using-vulkans-vk_ext_debug_marker-with-renderdoc/ Warning VK_EXT_debug_marker is deprecated and has been replaced by VK_EXT_debug_utils. Please refer to this tutorial and sample instead. Intro The Vulkan validation layers included with the LunarG SDK are a must for debugging applications at run-time, and every Vulkan developer should get used to them as soon as possible. They are crucial for getting applications validated against the specification and ensure portability across different implementations. But what they can’t catch are logical errors, so even with all validation layers enabled and all errors eliminated you still may not see what you where expecting and need an additional layer of debugging your rendering step-by-step. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/04/11/khronos-chapter-munich-vulkan-slides/ Mon, 11 Apr 2016 17:39:46 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/04/11/khronos-chapter-munich-vulkan-slides/ I’ve been speaking about my Vulkan launch day contributions and my experiences moving from OpenGL to Vulkan at the Khronos Munich Chapter Grand Opening last friday at the AMD offices. This was a great event, and finally getting to know some of the people in real was an awesome personal experience. So at this point I’d like to thank all the people that helped make this event happen and all these that attended, had a real blast talking and discussing about Vulkan! https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/03/28/vulkan-examples-update/ Mon, 28 Mar 2016 10:43:12 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/03/28/vulkan-examples-update/ The last few weeks since the Vulkan launch (one month ago) have been pretty busy. I’ve been adding new examples to to my github repository (almost at 30), fixed some bugs (thanks to everyone that has contributed!) and finally added Android support to all examples (removing the few separate Vulkan Android samples). I also provide pre-built binaries for Windows, Linux and Android (only ARM right now) if you just want to try out the examples at vulkan. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/02/18/vulkan-is-here/ Thu, 18 Feb 2016 11:37:24 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/02/18/vulkan-is-here/ Khronos finally launched Vulkan 1.0! After 18 months of hard works and a huge industry-wide collaboration, this is a huge success. And this is not only an API-launch, but a hard launch with drivers for Vulkan from NVidia, AMD, Intel, etc. on mulitple platforms. My launch contributions Some time ago I was invited to be a part of the Vulkan Advisory Panel board. So I actually got a head-start and also released some Vulkan related stuff to the public on launch day. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/12/19/vulkan-specification-complete-release-imminent/ Sat, 19 Dec 2015 08:50:20 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/12/19/vulkan-specification-complete-release-imminent/ Great news! The Khronos Vulkan Working Group just announced that the specification is complete (and has entered the legal review process) and the release is imminent. Though the initial time frame of 2015 was missed (by a bit), this should mean that Vulkan will be ready for launch in early 2016. This will include SDKs for all supported platforms, production ready drivers from several IHV, resources, tools, demos, examples and much more. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/12/14/vulkan-related-works/ Mon, 14 Dec 2015 21:55:21 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/12/14/vulkan-related-works/ In case you don’t follow me on twitter or aren’t watching my github repositories, I’ve been working on Vulkan related stuff over the last few months. And with Vulkan’s release approaching it’s time for a short summary on what I plan on release upon or shortly after launch of the new graphics and compute API. Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer As with OpenGL and OpenGL ES I’ll also do a Vulkan Hardware Capability viewer (github). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/11/18/opengl-es-capsviewer-updated-to-0.5/ Wed, 18 Nov 2015 14:13:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/11/18/opengl-es-capsviewer-updated-to-0.5/ I have released update 0.5 for the OpenGL ES CapsViewer. This update adds support for Android TV devices. The update should be automatically installed. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/10/11/introducing-gpuinfo.org/ Sun, 11 Oct 2015 10:17:29 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/10/11/introducing-gpuinfo.org/ Aside from playing around with a certain new API, I’ve also been working on the web front end OpenGL and OpenGL ES hardware database. Though I redid the visual side of both some time ago they differed too much for my taste and especially the OpenGL ES database was lacking lots compared to the OpenGL one. No live search, bad visuals (especially for the reports), lacking compare features and much more. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/gpu-info-org/ Sun, 11 Oct 2015 08:06:37 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/gpu-info-org/ About https://www.gpuinfo.org With now three device hardware databases for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan, I decided to create a single landing page the will display links to those three databases along with the number of uploaded reports. This is written in PHP just like the databases and the sources can be found at github. Landing page The landing page will direct to the different databases and also displays the number of reports uploaded to those databases. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/08/13/vulkan-from-the-pov-of-a-hobby-3d-developer/ Thu, 13 Aug 2015 15:17:25 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/08/13/vulkan-from-the-pov-of-a-hobby-3d-developer/ As there have been lots of new information on Vulkan, Khronos’ new graphics and compute API I decided to do a little write up of the new API from a hobby 3D developer’s point of view. Although I’ve been writing games, demos and applications with OpenGL for roughly 15 years now I still consider myself a hobby developer in terms of 3D graphics. My job is not depending on pushing pixels, maxing out draw calls or swizzling shader commands, and most of my work on 3D (primarily OpenGL) is done during my spare time (mostly late at night). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/07/07/status-update/ Tue, 07 Jul 2015 20:56:58 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/07/07/status-update/ Just as the last blog post is starting to collect dust (time flies by oO) : I’m still doing lots of 3D development during the late hours in my spare time, still with C++ (Visual Studio rocks :) ), but most of that development is done under an NDA so that’s the main reason I haven’t been updating this blog lately. Other than that I’ve also been working on a dungeon crawler prototype using modern C++ (C++11/14) and modern OpenGL (4. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/05/06/parallax-offset-mapping-with-webgl/ Wed, 06 May 2015 19:56:34 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/05/06/parallax-offset-mapping-with-webgl/ Years ago I wrote a demo showcasing different normal mapping techniques with Delphi, but never got around cleaning up the source and releasing it. While working on my WebGL dungeon crawler prototype I dug out the old code, cleaned it up and ported it over to WebGL, so you don’t need a compiler to see it in action and play around with it. Parallax mapping uses an additional heightmap (together with a normal map) to add more depth to flat surfaces depending on the current camera angle. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/04/25/geometry-instancing-with-webgl-2/ Sat, 25 Apr 2015 12:39:30 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/04/25/geometry-instancing-with-webgl-2/ WebGL, based on OpenGL ES, brings hardware accelerated OpenGL to your browser, and version 2.0 is around the corner (specs). I’ve been playing around with WebGL (via JavaScript) for some time now (see my GitHub WebGL repo) and recently Google’s chrome (canary) got WebGL 2 support. WebGL 2.0 adds some interesting new features, with geometry instancing being one of them, so I sat down and wrote a small demo that shows how to render the same instance of a single mesh with differing shader attributes using instancing and only one drawcall : https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/04/19/using-opengl-es-on-windows-desktops-via-egl/ Sun, 19 Apr 2015 20:05:03 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/04/19/using-opengl-es-on-windows-desktops-via-egl/ OpenGL ES is an embedded version of OpenGL mostly used on mobile devices that offer only limited GPU capabilities compared to modern desktop GPUS. Introduction Thanks to android, OpenGL ES is very widespread, and as WebGL is also based on OpenGL ES (2.0), chances are pretty high you’ll get into contact with OpenGL ES at some point during your 3D development efforts. And at some point you may want to prototype your OpenGL ES applications on a desktop system (windows, linux, mac), or just distribute a desktop version of your mobile game using OpenGL ES. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/02/05/glcapsviewer-1.0-beta-release/ Thu, 05 Feb 2015 21:48:12 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/02/05/glcapsviewer-1.0-beta-release/ I just released version 1.0 (beta) of the OpenGL hardware capability viewer (C++ port using Qt). Note that it’s a beta release and my first C++ (and Qt) application released to the public. Release on gitHub: https://github.com/SaschaWillems/glCapsViewer/releases/tag/v1.0-beta Binary downloads (win32) : https://github.com/SaschaWillems/glCapsViewer/releases/download/v1.0-beta/glcapsviewer_v1_0-beta_win32.7z or http://opengl.delphigl.de/releases/glcapsviewer_v1_0-beta_win32.7z If you find any bugs, please post them in the comment section or (better) open an issue at the github repository. Right now windows only, other platforms (linux first) will follow as soon as I’ve moved the project to CMake. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/01/11/new-features-and-url-for-the-opengl-hardware-database/ Sun, 11 Jan 2015 11:39:39 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/01/11/new-features-and-url-for-the-opengl-hardware-database/ In preparation for the release of the next glCapsViewerversion (C++), the OpenGL hardware database has been completely overhauled and also got a new url for easier access. After releasing the sources to the php front end of the database, I decided to clean up the sources for all pages, throw out old (bad) code and add in new features using external libraries like DataTables. The OpenGL hardware database was my first php based web project, so much of the code wasn’t very pretty, and almost all search and filter functions were hard coded and not available everywhere and for all table columns. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/01/04/going-github-with-glescapsviewer/ Sun, 04 Jan 2015 15:31:58 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2015/01/04/going-github-with-glescapsviewer/ In my last posting for 2014, I wrote a little bit about going open source with my projects. So I took the C++ rewrite of the OpenGL hardware capability viewer as a first step in releaasing more of my sources to the public. And while I found bitbucket to be fine, I decided to move over to GitHub. Most of the developers I use to interact with are there (and not on bitbucket), and I prefer their UI and functionality over bitbucket (plus they seem to be super active with adding new stuff). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/12/21/2014-final-posting/ Sun, 21 Dec 2014 12:48:22 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/12/21/2014-final-posting/ As another year ends, it’s time for a small retrospect. Next year marks the 10th anniversary of my personal blog, so I’ve been posting about my programming adventures for over a decade now (the first version of www.delphigl.de went online 2003 afair) and I’m still having lots of fun hacking code into different IDEs with different languages, though focus is shifting from time to time. And that’s actually what makes coding so much fun, it’s a constant learning progress that forces you to constantly sharpen your coding skills, learn new languages, adopt to new technologies etc. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/12/06/small-update-to-the-delphi/pascal-opengl-header/ Sat, 06 Dec 2014 11:09:22 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/12/06/small-update-to-the-delphi/pascal-opengl-header/ Due to some user feedback, I’ve updated our delphi/pascal OpenGL header translation. You can get it over at the bitbucket repository, and now finally with a proper markdown readme ;) The changes include fixed type declarations for boolean types (so you can now finally write glDepthMask(GL_FALSE)), and some fixes for exception handling on 64-bit windows platforms. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/09/24/javascript-repository/ Wed, 24 Sep 2014 19:01:12 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/09/24/javascript-repository/ Following Java (on Android) and C++ (on Windows), I just released my first Javascript sources over at my bitbucket repository. My first (ever) public JavaScript demo is the random dungeon generator that I wrote an article about (a long time ago). It generates random dungeons of different sizes and can be tested directly in your browser over here. Included are the JavaScript sources for the random dungeon generator that use HTML5 for drawing a simple representation of the randomly generated rooms and corridors. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/08/26/delphi/pascal-opengl-header-now-supports-opengl-4.5/ Tue, 26 Aug 2014 19:14:03 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/08/26/delphi/pascal-opengl-header-now-supports-opengl-4.5/ With OpenGL 4.5 being released (and NVidia already having drivers out in the wild) I’ve updated our Delphi/Pascal OpenGL Header translation to the latest OpenGL version. You can always grab the most recent header translation from the bitbucket repository, where you’ll also find updates aside from the major OpenGL releases. If you’re missing anything from the headers, like a vendor specific extension missing, or want to give feedback just drop me a line. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/07/18/soruces-for-simple-opengl-2.0-hud/gui-for-android/ Fri, 18 Jul 2014 19:34:49 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/07/18/soruces-for-simple-opengl-2.0-hud/gui-for-android/ As I’m currently prototyping a new game for Android, I was in need of a quick (and simple) way of adding some selectable text elements on top of my 3D OpenGL ES scene. So I created a simple demonstration with full source (you can get them from my OpenGL ES git repository) that renders a 3D scene and a basic hud with clickable text elements on top of it in orthogonal mode. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/07/12/android-opengl-es-repository/ Sat, 12 Jul 2014 19:16:21 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/07/12/android-opengl-es-repository/ Following the C++ (OpenGL) repository, I recently added an Android OpenGL ES repositry (using Java) over here. It currently only contains two public demos, one for a simple stl viewer and another one for using the camera input of an android device as an OpenGL ES texture, but over time I plan on adding more and more demos. And though I used to mock Java in the past I really like coding with Java nowadays. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/06/19/enhanced-c-compute-shader-particle-system/ Thu, 19 Jun 2014 10:00:29 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/06/19/enhanced-c-compute-shader-particle-system/ I’ve just added an OpenGL C++ repository over at bitbucket, and the first C++ demo is an enhanced port of the attraction based compute shader system from my last post. Sources : https://bitbucket.org/saschawillems/opengl-c Compiled win32 binaries : https://bitbucket.org/saschawillems/opengl-c/downloads/computeShaderParticleSystem_win32_bin.zip Compared to the Delphi version, the C++ version uses point sprites (instead of smoothed GL_POINTS), has a random color fade and allows for several user inputs : Note : This demo requires at least OpenGL 4. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/06/07/compute-shaders-for-particle-systems/ Sat, 07 Jun 2014 15:19:33 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/06/07/compute-shaders-for-particle-systems/ Next on my list of new OpenGL functionality are compute shaders. They’ve been introduced into the GL core with 4.3, and pretty much allow you to do GPGPU directly in OpenGL without having to resolve to other APIs like OpenCL. So my first compute shader demo implements a (simple) attraction based particle system. It generates two shader storage buffer objects (SSBOs). One for particle positions and one for particle velocities, and the compute shader then accesses these SSBOs to calculate particle velocities depending on an attraction point (in this demo it’s the mouse cursor) and accordingly updates the particle positions. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/06/02/gl_arb_debug_output/ Mon, 02 Jun 2014 19:25:11 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/06/02/gl_arb_debug_output/ I’ve just been playing around with GL_ARB_debug_output, a new extension introduced with OpenGL 4.3. This extension adds debugging capabilities to OpenGL, e.g. allowing you to have a callback fired by the OpenGL implementation that’ll inform you upon errors or even (heavily depending on the IHV) gives performance hints. I wrote a small sample (in Delphi) that demonstrates this new functionality. It creates an OpenGL 4.3 forward compatible context (no more legacy stuff) with debugging capabilites and displays debug messages from your OpenGL driver. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/05/09/delphi/pascal-opengl-header-updated-and-on-bitbucket/ Fri, 09 May 2014 18:47:54 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/05/09/delphi/pascal-opengl-header-updated-and-on-bitbucket/ I just updated our Delphi / Pascal OpenGL Header to include the two missing extensions GL_ARB_sparse_texture and GL_ARB_bindless_texture introduced alongside OpenGL 4.4. And from now on you can always get the latest release from the repository over at github. Since the latest drivers for my GPU sadly won’t support OpenGL 4.4 (AMD dropped driver support for Vista, so maybe it’s finally time to upgrade) I haven’t been able to test the two new extensions. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/04/28/opengl-hardware-database-updated/ Mon, 28 Apr 2014 17:09:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/04/28/opengl-hardware-database-updated/ I finally got around uploading an almost complete new version of the OpenGL Hardware Database. Besides the new visuals, to bring it in line with the design of the OpenGL ES Hardware Database, it offers new functionalty like search boxes on almost every page, new listings like max. supported OpenGL version per device and much more. Another fine change allows you to call certain pages with parameters, so now you can create and share links for e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/04/06/a-note-about-nvidia-drivers-on-windows-an-glcapsviewer/ Sun, 06 Apr 2014 09:24:51 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/04/06/a-note-about-nvidia-drivers-on-windows-an-glcapsviewer/ Thanks to Christophe Riccio, it came to my attention that most NVIDIA driver reports on windows are discarded when trying to upload them to my OpenGL hardware database. The cause for that is pretty simple : Contrary to the other vendors, NVIDIA does not include their (or any, e.g. OpenGL ICD) driver version inside the GL_VERSION string on windows (at least not on Windows Vista and up, on XP this still seems to be the case). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/02/21/opengl-es-capsviewer-updated-to-0.3/ Fri, 21 Feb 2014 16:08:08 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/02/21/opengl-es-capsviewer-updated-to-0.3/ High on the heels of the last release (0.2), I just updated the OpenGL ES CapsViewer to version 0.3. Changelog : Changed way of setting up the OpenGL ES render context Certain devices (mostly those with PowerVR GPUs) were reporting wrong OpenGL ES versions (e.g. 1.1 instead of 2.0). I’ve changed the way of setting up the highest possible OpenGL ES version, so those devices should now display their real supported OpenGL ES version. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/02/18/opengl-es-capsviewer-update-to-0.2/ Tue, 18 Feb 2014 19:57:42 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/02/18/opengl-es-capsviewer-update-to-0.2/ I’ve just released an update for the OpenGL ES CapsViewer to google’s playstore. This version should fix crashes upon startup that seemed to be caused by a wrong egl configuration, so for this version I’ve changed the method of selecting the egl configuration for the render context. So if the application crashed on your device feel free to update (in case you’ve turned automatic updates off) the the most recent version and submit your OpenGL ES reports. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/opengles-hardware-capability-viewer/ Mon, 03 Feb 2014 09:30:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/opengles-hardware-capability-viewer/ About My first ever mobile app is now available over at Google’s PlayStore! This is a premiere for me, and though I wasn’t on wether to spend the 25$ registration fee for the google’s developer console, I hope many android apps and games will follow. Download via Google play The OpenGL ES CapsViewer is the mobile counterpart to the OpenGL CapsViewer, reading the OpenGL ES implementation info of your Android device, as well as device information that may be of use to developers. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/02/03/opengl-es-caps-viewer-available-on-playstore/ Mon, 03 Feb 2014 09:02:33 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/02/03/opengl-es-caps-viewer-available-on-playstore/ My first ever mobile app is now available over at Google’s PlayStore! This is a premiere for me, and though I wasn’t on wether to spend the 25$ registration fee for the google’s developer console, I hope many android apps and games will follow. Download via Google play The OpenGL ES CapsViewer is the mobile counterpart to the OpenGL CapsViewer, reading the OpenGL ES implementation info of your Android device, as well as device information that may be of use to developers. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/01/30/3d-loader-for-android-first-roaming-zombies/ Thu, 30 Jan 2014 20:59:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/01/30/3d-loader-for-android-first-roaming-zombies/ A 3d game needs 3d models, so I wrote a simple .obj (wavefront) model loader, and it was surprisingly easy with java. It took me roughly 30 minutes and is no more than 50 lines of code (including declarations and comments). So the “game” (still no gameplay in) can now display 3d models, and since it’s a zombie game, I’ve put in a (drum roll please) zombie! But it’s not just visual, but also backed by an NPC class that makes it move (more or less randomly) around the dungeon in a turn based manner. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/01/20/zombie-infected-random-dungeon-crawling/ Mon, 20 Jan 2014 19:05:49 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2014/01/20/zombie-infected-random-dungeon-crawling/ 2014 started off pretty busy and I haven’t had that much time to work on my current (and first) android project. But at least I wrote down the first pages of the basic game design draft, and I plan on doing a randomly generated, zombie themed dungeon crawler with not your usual zombie story. So in terms of gameplay it’ll be a traditional dungeon crawler (think of Eye of the Beholder, or more recently Legend of Grimrock), with semi-realtime movement but with a modern horror theme based on a zombie infection (yeah, I know, zombies are all around nowadays, see the success of DayZ, but I always wanted to do something with zombies anyway). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/12/29/2013-final-posting-dwelling-in-randomly-generated-mobile-dungeons/ Sun, 29 Dec 2013 20:43:46 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/12/29/2013-final-posting-dwelling-in-randomly-generated-mobile-dungeons/ Another year has (almost) passed, and as with the previous years I’ll keep up the tradition of publishing a final posting before heading into 2014. From a personal point-of-view, 2013 wasn’t thad bad (though still far from perfect) like some of the years before. I still earn my money as a sofware developer using delphi and love my job, and recently I even bought the house I’ve been spending most of my 32 years in (though there is still a bit of renovation to be done, but the house itself is in a good shape). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/12/18/opengl-es-hardware-database-preview/ Wed, 18 Dec 2013 19:14:02 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/12/18/opengl-es-hardware-database-preview/ It took (a bit) longer than expected, but I finally got the first preview of the online OpenGL ES Hardware Database online. I want this to be the match to the widely used OpenGL Hardware Database (filled by the glCapsViewer). Where the former is aimed at developing desktop applications with OpenGL, the later one is planned to be a helper for all developers planning on deploying OpenGL ES based applications, games or tools on the Android platform (other platforms that support OpenGL ES may follow in the future, the database design is flexible enough) that want to know what features are offered by the different devices on the market. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/11/08/from-delphi-windows-opengl-and-newton-to/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 19:04:19 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/11/08/from-delphi-windows-opengl-and-newton-to/ …Java , Android, OpenGL ES and Box2D. That’s what I’ve been doing the last few days during my (currently rather rare) coding sessions. I wrote a simple physics playground using JBox2D for my phone that allows me to drop different objects by the touch of a finger and also uses the orientation sensor to change the gravity vectors. Putting lots of dynamic objects inside a confined box, and seeing them fall over by just tilting the phone is a fun affair ;) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/10/20/new-target-android/ Sun, 20 Oct 2013 18:50:29 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/10/20/new-target-android/ I’ve been using a symbian “smartphone” (a Samsung SGH-i560) for ages now, but finally decided to swap it for a new and shiny Android device, mainly to code on. So I recently bought myself a Huawei Ascend G510. It’s a middle class Android handset with a dual-core CPU (1,2GHz) and a 4.5" screen that supports OpenGL ES 2.0 that doesn’t cost a fortune (~140€) and condidering the pricetag it’s a pretty good phone. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/10/05/project-page-for-trugbild/ Sat, 05 Oct 2013 09:40:42 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/10/05/project-page-for-trugbild/ I finally got around creating a project page for Trugbild, my entry for the 2013 Pascale Game Development challenge. Results aren’t in yet (deadline was expanded for late entries), so I’m still waiting on how the entry did. I plan on adding stuff to the game in the future (that’s why the current version is called “PGD challenge edition”), and I’m also going to port it to Linux (and maybe Mac OSX). https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/trugbild/ Sat, 05 Oct 2013 09:20:36 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/trugbild/ About “Trugbild” (german for “delusion”) was made for the 2013 Pascal Game Development challenge over at PGD. The theme was “at your command”, which means you had to create a game with indirect control over e.g. a character. The deadline for this contest was one month, and since I knew upfront that my time to work on an entry would be very limited, I decided to go for something more experimental. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/09/15/trugbild-finished-pgd-2013-challenge-edition/ Sun, 15 Sep 2013 13:56:05 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/09/15/trugbild-finished-pgd-2013-challenge-edition/ The 2013 pascal game development challenge deadline is today, and Trugbild (at least the version for this challenge is finished and available to the public now). I haven’t had that much time to work on it in the final week of the contest, but I managed to add in new content (chapters, decisions), fixed some minor issues and made some small tweaks to the game to add some polish. And though it’s not perfect and not 100% what I initially had in mind for it I’m pretty happy with what I was able to create in roughly a month. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/09/08/trugbild-almost-done/ Sun, 08 Sep 2013 18:05:57 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/09/08/trugbild-almost-done/ The final date is quickly approaching, with only one week left to finish work on Trugbild. Last week was extremly busy (including a business trip), so I didn’t make much progress on it. To compensate for this I sat down the whole weekend to push progress on the project, and I can happily announce that all coding work on the game is done. I finalized the ending screen, which now has two (slightly) different visuals, depending on the player’s bias. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/09/02/half-time-on-trugbild/ Mon, 02 Sep 2013 18:28:43 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/09/02/half-time-on-trugbild/ The first two weeks of the contest’s one month deadline have passed and I’m pretty happy with the progress so far. Though I won’t be able to put much work into the game this week due to job assignments I’m confident to have it done in time. At least the “PGD Challenge 2013 edition”, and depending on feedback I may add more stuff to the game after it’s release. After all a month is not that much, especially when you’ve got a full-time job, so there are lots of things I’d like to implement that won’t make it in time. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/08/24/setting-and-progress-on-trugbild/ Sat, 24 Aug 2013 15:31:01 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/08/24/setting-and-progress-on-trugbild/ Although my spare time is pretty limited these times, and motivating myself to code after work (where I code almost all day code) isn’t very easy progress on “Trugbild” is coming along very nice. I guess one of the best ideas was to limit the technical aspects of the game to some very basic OpenGL and gameplay stuff. This allows me to concentrate on the game itself, without having to think alot about complex programming problems. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/08/19/first-screenshots-from-trugbild/ Mon, 19 Aug 2013 20:04:24 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/08/19/first-screenshots-from-trugbild/ After getting the first prototype for my PGD Challenge entry up and running I quickly found a name, it’s called “Trugbild” (German for “delusion”). Once I got the visuals of the prototype the way I imagined the game to look in the first place, the name somehow directly came to my mind and I found it pretty fitting for such a “game”. First work-in-progress screenshots (click on the thumbnails) : https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/08/17/taking-part-in-the-3rd-pgd-game-challenge/ Sat, 17 Aug 2013 09:48:46 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/08/17/taking-part-in-the-3rd-pgd-game-challenge/ Once again, Will from Pascal Game Development has organized another game dev challenge. Though it’s more of a game jam due to the lack of any prize and registration requirements the theme of it is pretty interesting. It’s called “at your command” and requires indirect control of some main protagonist (or multiple ones). While reading through the theme of that competiton, creativity struck and I decided to participate with a rather abstract “game”. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/07/28/delphi-/-pascal-header-for-opengl-4.4/ Sun, 28 Jul 2013 18:57:06 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/07/28/delphi-/-pascal-header-for-opengl-4.4/ I just updated our OpenGL header translations to the latest 4.4 specs just released by Khronos. So if you’re developing cutting-edge 3D stuff with Delphi or Free Pascal you can now use the latest features available, as long as you’ve got the hardware and your vendor released new drivers (currently only NVIDIA seems to have GL 4.4 drivers out there). This header also fixes some minor bugs that have been reported by some of our community headers. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/07/13/projekt-w-phase-2-new-beta-release-201--linux-x86_64-support/ Sat, 13 Jul 2013 10:50:39 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/07/13/projekt-w-phase-2-new-beta-release-201--linux-x86_64-support/ The current open beta of Projekt “W” - Phase 2 has been updated to revision 201. New for this release Added a linux x86_64 release. From now on all upcoming releases will also be available for linux x86_64. Fixed a bug that stopped ecology buildings from getting finished. Fixed wrong global project calculation for minimum required funds to progress. (Linux) The sound library (libbass.so) is now loaded dynamically. If there was a problem loading it you get a corresponding message instead of the game not starting. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/06/24/going-multi-platform-part-6-mac-osx/ Mon, 24 Jun 2013 18:13:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/06/24/going-multi-platform-part-6-mac-osx/ After hard weeks of work, february finally saw the release of a linux version for Projekt Weltherrscher - Phase. This marked the first step on my journey to go multi-platform, something to too easy for a game that was made on and for windows (with an IDE that actually only runs on windows). But those that are into multi-platform development know how close Mac OSX and linux are in terms of coding (OSX is based on Darwin which is based on unix), so after getting the game to run on linux the next (natural) step would have been porting it to Mac OSX. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/06/01/projekt-w-phase-2-new-beta-release-190/ Sat, 01 Jun 2013 11:42:43 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/06/01/projekt-w-phase-2-new-beta-release-190/ Later than expected (partially due to a power supply failure on my PC) here’s the new beta release #190 of “Phase 2”. As usual it’s available for windows and linux. (Windows) Projekt “W” - Phase 2 - Open Beta rev. #190 (~83 MBytes) (Linux, i386) Projekt “W” - Phase 2 - Open Beta rev. #190 (~80 MBytes) Here are some highlights from this release, for a full list of changes take a look at the changelog : https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/05/28/projekt-w-finally-gets-its-own-theme-song/ Tue, 28 May 2013 17:55:55 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/05/28/projekt-w-finally-gets-its-own-theme-song/ After all the years that Projekt “W” has been in development the game finally has it’s very own theme song! While adding in new sounds (and replacing old ones) I found the music of the current build to be kinda unfitting and decided to dig through the depths of the internet to find some (free) tracks that would be a better fit for the game’s mood (especially with the new space backdrops). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/05/10/the-challenges-of-a-games-sound-design/ Fri, 10 May 2013 18:08:19 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/05/10/the-challenges-of-a-games-sound-design/ Usually I’d add some nice screenshots to show off progress on “Phase 2”, but this time it’s an area of game development that’s pretty hard to show off in screenshots : Sound design. I find this is one of the hardest parts as far as game design goes, at least for me. I do all the parts of game development on my own (design, code, content, etc.) but when it comes down to sound design, the result is usually so bad or bland that (I guess) most people just turn it off. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/05/02/introducing-the-ai-builder/ Thu, 02 May 2013 20:00:57 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/05/02/introducing-the-ai-builder/ The next public release of “Phase 2” will include a new feature, the AI builder. Managing your regions (constructing and upgrading buildings) becomes more and more tedious the longer a game has been going on, and once you own dozens of regions later on in the game that you’ll have to manage, this task gets very repetitive and takes up a lot of your time. And since monotony can do a lot of damage to the gameplay I decided to add the option to let the AI do the construction and or upgrades for your regions. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/04/07/projekt-w-phase-2-new-beta-release-170/ Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:22:52 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/04/07/projekt-w-phase-2-new-beta-release-170/ It took much longer than initially expected, but here comes a new release of Phase 2, both for linux and windows. (Windows) Projekt “W” - Phase 2 - Open Beta rev. #170 (~74 MBytes) (Linux, i386) Projekt “W” - Phase 2 - Open Beta rev. #170 (~78 MBytes) Selection of screenshots : As hinted in my last postings this release includes the new space backdrops as well as the extensive ingame tutorial that’s aimed at both beginners, as well as experienced players that wan’t to know about the details. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/03/20/implementing-the-ingame-tutorial/ Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:02:23 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/03/20/implementing-the-ingame-tutorial/ Now that the open beta of “Phase 2” has been downloaded a few times (with a 10:1 ratio between Windows and Linux) it seems that people like it. But one thing I’ve heard several times now was the lack of a tutorial. Since the game is pretty complex, especially compared to the current games, many people are finding it hard to get into the gameplay and actually win a game (I guess it’s the same thing I felt when I played my first matches of “Panzer General” almost 20 years ago). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/03/04/redoing-backdrops-and-tuning-globe-shaders/ Mon, 04 Mar 2013 20:57:49 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/03/04/redoing-backdrops-and-tuning-globe-shaders/ The backdrops of the different nations have always annoyed me since I started to work on a 16:9 (and currently 16:10) widescreen display. When I created them way back for “Phase 1”, I made them with Corel’s Bryce (a pretty old version) and rendered them for 4:3 and 5:4 displays. And I always wanted to redo them since starting to work on “Phase 2”, which has been some time now, but never actually got around this and never had a clue what to do. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/02/15/projekt-w-phase-2-first-linux-release/ Fri, 15 Feb 2013 20:57:55 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/02/15/projekt-w-phase-2-first-linux-release/ Believe it or not, but after a month of hard work (and only very little sleep), the first open beta release of “Phase 2” for linux (i386) is finally here! Only a few small issues had to be fixed since my last posting about going multi-platform. No big deal, only a few visual glitches, missing staff images and (very annoying) a missing flood fill algorithm. I use flood fill to generate the colored territorial maps on each turn, and lazarus doesn’t implement this for the linux widget sets, so I had to write one on my own that isn’t slow as hell. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/02/09/going-multi-platform-part-5-finishing-touches/ Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:23:06 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/02/09/going-multi-platform-part-5-finishing-touches/ After weeks of hard work and learning a lot about the differences between coding on windows and linux, the current source revision of Phase 2 is completly functional on linux and playing the same as a windows version. So if you’d put them side-by-side in fullscreen mode you wouldn’t notice any differences! Currently I’m putting the finishing toches on the linux release and only a very few minor things have to be fixed and adjusted before I’ll release the linux version into the wild, so you guys can play with it and provide me with feedback, the linux world is far more fractured than the windows world, so I’d love to know how the game runs on different distributions. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/02/03/going-multi-platform-part-4-first-run-on-a-native-linux/ Sun, 03 Feb 2013 16:44:35 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/02/03/going-multi-platform-part-4-first-run-on-a-native-linux/ After another week of intense coding on “Phase 2”, trying to fix the mistake I made with nativeXML, I finally got all of the xml stuff switched over to my own xmlwrapper. As hinted at in my last posting, nativeXML wasn’t working on linux (and I haven’t been unlocked for their support forums, after over a week of wait!) so I decided to write my own wrapper unit that uses fpc’s or delphi’s xml implementation, depending on the compiler target. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/01/28/going-multi-platform-part-3-first-throwback/ Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:15:59 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/01/28/going-multi-platform-part-3-first-throwback/ Last weekend I worked on getting the lazarus / free pascal build of “Phase 2” to look and play exactly the same as the delphi build. I had to change some small things here and there, but after a few hours you can now no longer distinguish between the two builds, maybe except for performance. It looks that some stuff that’s pretty fast with delphi is kinda slow with fpc, for example accessing stringlists and stuff. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/01/21/going-multi-platform-part-2-first-compile-and-run/ Mon, 21 Jan 2013 12:25:01 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/01/21/going-multi-platform-part-2-first-compile-and-run/ I’ve been working to get the current code of “Phase 2” to compile and work under linux for the whole last weekend (and my eyes kinda hurt, again sitting in front of a monitor ;)). And things went much faster than I expected, so I was able to compile and run the game under linux for the very first time ever! First step was to add code for all things that are specific to an operating system. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/01/18/going-multi-platform-part-1-the-setup/ Fri, 18 Jan 2013 20:00:52 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/01/18/going-multi-platform-part-1-the-setup/ As mentioned in my agenda for 2013 (and in several older posts), I’ve been wanting to release “Phase 2” of Projekt W on more platforms than just windows. Especially in the developer community linux has a big fan base, and the bigger the audience for the game, the better. So shortly after the last post I updated my lazarus installation to the latest one (along with a current FPC compiler) and started to make the code compile with it. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/01/12/agenda-for-2013/ Sat, 12 Jan 2013 11:40:10 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2013/01/12/agenda-for-2013/ And so 2013 is here and it’s a good idea to update you on my agenda for this new year. My primary target for 2013 will be the release of a final “Phase 2” version of Projekt “W”. And with a public beta available that’s pretty close to the final product I’m pretty confident that this will finally happen this year. People seem to be mostly positive about the current public beta release (or at least I haven’t heard any negative comments) and all comments up until now have been pretty nice, something I’ve been missing before the release of a public beta. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/12/25/2012-final-posting-and-a-new-release/ Tue, 25 Dec 2012 14:14:06 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/12/25/2012-final-posting-and-a-new-release/ We’re in the final days of 2012 (and the world didn’t end, who would’ve thought) and continuing my “tradition” this will be the final post of this year including different topics. So first of all I’d like to wish all my friends, relatives and readers a good start into 2013! As for my personal situation, a lot changed in 2012 (if you’ve read last years final posting you might remember) and mostly for the positive. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/12/08/new-projekt-w-phase-2-beta-release-121/ Sat, 08 Dec 2012 10:52:12 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/12/08/new-projekt-w-phase-2-beta-release-121/ I have updated the “Phase 2” beta to release #121. This is dubbed the “AI update”, as it adds a lot of functionality and tweaks to the (enemy) AI of the game. When releasing the first “Phase 2” beta, it’s AI was pretty much at the same code level as the one for “Phase 1” and it actually didn’t do a lot of the new stuff that the gameplay offered. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/11/17/using-generics-in-delphi/ Sat, 17 Nov 2012 12:03:07 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/11/17/using-generics-in-delphi/ When it comes to “new” language features in Delphi (which usually have been in Free Pascal for years) I’m always willing to give them a shot. I’m using the for..in loop a lot, and also tend to shorten my code with things like ifthen (the poor mans ? operator, but sadly without any compiler magic). And I also use the with statment a lot, though it doesn’t have the best reputation amongst Delphi coders due to it’s scope problems. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/11/04/updating-the-ai/ Sun, 04 Nov 2012 09:02:35 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/11/04/updating-the-ai/ Now that the beta is out in the wild (and up until now I haven’t heard any big complaints) it’s time to finally bring the AI in line with all the changes in “Phase 2”. In the last beta, roughly 90% of the AI code was the same as in “Phase 1” and so the current AI isn’t much of a challenge. So I just started rewriting most of the AI code for the next beta, and one of the areas the AI was always lacking (already in “Phase 1”) was building construction. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/10/21/projekt-w-first-public-phase-2-beta/ Sun, 21 Oct 2012 14:24:28 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/10/21/projekt-w-first-public-phase-2-beta/ More than five years after the release of “Phase 1”, the first public beta for “Phase 2” goes live! I’ve been working on “Phase 2” almost every single day for the past five years, and a lot of coding, creativ work and though went into this game. And though at some times it looked like I’d never get it done I finally got to a point where the game is in such a good shape that I can release a beta to the public, so everyone being curious can take a look at the game’s current shape and how much it evolved compared to “Phase 1”. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/10/13/finishing-the-the-first-public-beta/ Sat, 13 Oct 2012 17:41:19 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/10/13/finishing-the-the-first-public-beta/ Believe it or not, but after posting about “Phase 2” for over five years now I’m putting the finishing touches on a soon-to-be-released beta of the game! Actually I already realeased a beta over at a german forum to see how it works with other people’s hardware configurations, but since that version was missing a lot of english translations and was missing some stuff that I wanted to finish off before going public, the “international” release of the first “Phase 2” beta will take a little bit more time. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/09/30/from-phase-1-to-phase-2/ Sun, 30 Sep 2012 18:00:43 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/09/30/from-phase-1-to-phase-2/ From time to time I sit down and play through a game of “Phase 2” after doing some coding on it, just to get a feeling on the game’s progress and user interface. And sometimes I also fire up “Phase 1” to see how much has changed and how much new content has made it’s way into the game. And recently I was curious on what has actually changed behind the scenes, i. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/09/07/weekend-posting/ Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:36:50 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/09/07/weekend-posting/ It’s weekend and my last posting was almost a month ago, but don’t worry, I’m not idle at all. As for “Phase 2” of Projekt “W”, I finally got around writing the manual to it, and while doing so I noticed that it’s actually pretty hard to write a manual for such a complex game. And even worse if it’s your own game, as it’s extremly hard to write a manual that can be used to learn the game by someone that has never played it. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/08/14/battlefield-terrains-and-some-technical-stuff/ Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:13:04 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/08/14/battlefield-terrains-and-some-technical-stuff/ As you might have noticed from pretty much all battlefield-related screenshots I’ve posted over the last months (or even years), the battlefield was always surrounded by water (and earlier on by some kind of bowl), and I was never really happy with it. Especially when fighting in a desert scenario, surrounding it with water looked pretty odd, and adding a sandshader didn’t make things any better. But just having the battlefield floating in the air didn’t look good either, so I recently sat down and finally decided to add real 3D terrain surrounding the battlefields, with different terrains depending on the setting you’re fighting in. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/08/08/delphi-/-pascal-header-for-opengl-4.3/ Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:02:45 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/08/08/delphi-/-pascal-header-for-opengl-4.3/ Just a quick heads-up to let you know that I’ve updated our “official” OpenGL-Headers for Delphi / Free Pascal to the recently release version of OpenGL 4.3. So if you’re developing cutting-edge 3D stuff with Delphi or Free Pascal you can now use the latest features available, as long as you’ve got the hardware and your vendor released new drivers (I can’t wait for the first OpenGL 4.3 report to be uploaded to the glCapsViewer database Update : Thanks to end, who has uploaded the first OpenGL 4. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/08/04/phase-2-jungle-warfare/ Sat, 04 Aug 2012 19:42:46 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/08/04/phase-2-jungle-warfare/ Some live footage from the battleground : Somehow I could hardly resist not to call this post “Welcome to the jungle”, cause that’s exactly what I thought when playing around on the game’s manual battlefield in the “jungle”-setting. I did a lot of postings about the new manual battles for “Phase 2”, and in several of those I mentioned that there is a lot of content that needs to be created for the different settings of the battlefield. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/07/28/phase-2-satus-update-july-2012/ Sat, 28 Jul 2012 19:00:11 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/07/28/phase-2-satus-update-july-2012/ Well, another month passed by quickly, but I don’t want to let a month pass without a single post, so here is another states update on progress for “Phase 2”, and again with screenshots first (this time in 1920x1200 resolution with 4xAA) : The first shot shows the overhauled intro for “Phase 2”. Redoing the intro has been on my todo-list from the very beginning, as the “intro” for “Phase 1” wasn’t pretty anyway. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/06/24/phase-2-status-update-june-2012/ Sun, 24 Jun 2012 10:48:08 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/06/24/phase-2-status-update-june-2012/ With the last post about “Phase 2” now almost two months old it’s time for another status update, and no status update without current screenshots : “Phase 2” is progressing nice. Not at the speed of light, but it’s going forward on a steady pace and now most of the open issues that made it unplayable have been fixed and several new features were also added. So the current build is pretty close to something I can release! https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/05/28/dungeon-crawler-demo-with-source-released/ Mon, 28 May 2012 17:02:05 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/05/28/dungeon-crawler-demo-with-source-released/ Some of you might remember my article on random dungeon generation that I released back in 2010. I recently took a look at the demo and sat down to finish it up and release it to the public along with the complete source code. The demo comes with full source code, including the source for random dungeon generation (with practically no limit for the dungeon size) and implements a simple OpenGL renderer with per-pixel-lighting. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/dungeon-crawler/ Mon, 28 May 2012 16:51:13 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/dungeon-crawler/ About Javascript In 2014, I converted the Delphi dungeon generation code to Javascript. A browser demo can be found over here. Windows Back in 2010 I released an article on random dungeon generation and wrote a small prototype along with it. But only recently I got the time and motivation to finish this demo up and release it alongside with source code, so anyone interested can take a look at the source and make something out of it. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/05/04/projekt-w-phase-2-new-screenshots/ Fri, 04 May 2012 20:03:49 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/05/04/projekt-w-phase-2-new-screenshots/ As usual, time flies by and my last update has been roughly a month ago, but no, I haven’t been lazy, and so here are a few new screenshots from the current development version of “Phase 2” (thumbs, click for larger view) : As you can see, the game is looking more and more finished with each new batch of screenshots. One thing you might notice is that I switched over to a different font compared to the older screenshots / videos. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/04/09/phase-2-quick-status-report/ Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:17:22 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/04/09/phase-2-quick-status-report/ Well, the last few months have been pretty rough as hinted at in my last posting for 2011, but slowly things start to settle, and though having a new job means not much time for hobbies anymore (8 hours a day plus driving to and from work won’t leave much sparetime, though working atmosphere is pretty fine) I recently started to continue work on “Phase 2”, and I guess that’s a good sign after all. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/03/02/glcapsviewer-0.7-released-proxy-support-added/ Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:59:05 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/03/02/glcapsviewer-0.7-released-proxy-support-added/ Some of you using glCapsViewer to upload reports for the OpenGL hardware database weren’t actually able to do so, especially those that wanted to upload reports from work or other places that needed special proxy settings to connect online. So after several requests I’ve added a new proxy settings window to the glCapsViewer that should allow those folks behind a proxy to also upload their reports. Note that I only updated the windows and linux versions, as an external person has to compile the Mac OS X release (thanks to Apple for not allowing me to compile for their OS from e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/02/23/glcapsviewer-new-database-features/ Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:17:38 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/02/23/glcapsviewer-new-database-features/ In addition to a new logo for glCapsViewer, I also worked on the database itself. Aside from fixing a problem with extension counts on the statistics page, making visual and practical changes to e.g. the report pages, I also added some features to the PHP-backed database : Supporting percentage for extensions on the statistics page A new column showing the percentage of reports supporting the given extension was added. So you can now quickly look up how common an extension is amongst the reports in the database. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/02/14/newton-2.35-beta-headers-uploaded/ Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:17:52 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2012/02/14/newton-2.35-beta-headers-uploaded/ I’ve just got note that version 2.35 of the Newton Game Dynamics engine has been released, which is mainly a bugfix release as Julio is already working on a 3.00 release with lots of new features. And though I hardly get any time to do some coding I just took the time and updated the headers to the latest 2.35 (beta) release. As usual, you can grab them here. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/12/23/2011-final-posting/ Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:58:37 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/12/23/2011-final-posting/ So here we are again, another year is coming to an end and though 2011 wasn’t a very good year, it’s ending even worse than I could’ve imagined. A recent (14th december) personal loss of a very close relative (don’t ask for details, the internet is not the right place to discuss personal stuff) has caused a drastic change to my personal situation. It’s not that I wasn’t prepared for it, but still this was pretty much unexpected and the timing of this event is alos pretty bad with the year ending and a lot of stuff left to do. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/projekt-w-phase-2/ Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:58:39 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/projekt-w-phase-2/ About Projekt “W” - “Phase 2” is the successor to the original Projekt “W” released back in 2007. The “W” stands for “Weltherrscher”, which is german for “World ruler” and is a turn-based strategy game where you have to conquer the world. It includes lots of new features, additional content, more varied gameplay and adds a lot of strategic depth to the gameplay.The game is a turn-based strategy game where you lead one of the five remaining nation to complete world domination by wiping out all other nations. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/11/10/phase-2-november-work-in-progress-video/ Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:16:33 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/11/10/phase-2-november-work-in-progress-video/ I’ve just uploaded a new work-in-progress video from my current version of Projekt “W” - Phase 2. It’s been some time since my last posting on “Phase 2”, and though I didn’t have that much time to work on it I still got a lot of stuff done, and what’s better than showing screenshots of that new stuff? Correct, showing an HD video of it : As you can see I (once again) redid the whole user interface. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/09/05/glcapsviewer-mac-os-x-version/ Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:25:13 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/09/05/glcapsviewer-mac-os-x-version/ Thanks to the kind help of damadmax (a user from the delphigl.com forums) I can now also offer a Mac OS X version of glCapsViewer, so all you mac users out there can now start submitting your reports. With Mac OS X now also available the most common operating systems are covered, so hopefully the OpenGL capability database will grow into a valuable source for all OpenGL developers out there. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/08/15/glcapsviewer-0.5--sql-database/ Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:52:06 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/08/15/glcapsviewer-0.5--sql-database/ I’ve just released version 0.5 of glCapsViewer, and though the tool itself doesn’t seem that much different from 0.4, the real difference is in what’s behind it. Cause I’ve dropped the simple PHP listing (and searching) of uploaded XML files in favour of a real SQL database. This is not only much faster but allows for a lot of new features, and one these first new features (and propably one of the most important) is the possibility to compare (up to eight) reports in a single page. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/08/07/glcapsviewer-opengl-capability-viewer--online-database/ Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:42:58 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/08/07/glcapsviewer-opengl-capability-viewer--online-database/ If you’re creating OpenGL apps (no matter if games, apps or demos) that you want to distribute, you often get error reports from user with the oddest things happening on their systems. Recently I distributed a benchmark for “Phase 2” to some people and after hours of trying to get it working for everybody I noticed that some of the testers had graphics cards that supported shaders (vertex and fragment) but no framebuffer objects, a pretty odd combination. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/opengl-hardware-capability-viewer/ Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:34:25 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/opengl-hardware-capability-viewer/ About The “OpenGL hardware capability viewer” (short “glCapsViewer) a multi-platform client-side application that reads out all important hardware capabilities of the current OpenGL-implementation present on your system (currently up to OpenGL 4.5), that can then be uploaded to a public database, serving as a tool for OpenGL developers. The early versions of this tool were developed using Delphi / Free Pascal, but the project has since then been redone in C++ is available for multiple platforms. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/08/01/color-selection-fbos-and-traditional-render-to-texture/ Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:32:20 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/08/01/color-selection-fbos-and-traditional-render-to-texture/ In what happens to be a rarity nowadays you’ll now get exactly what you could guess from the caption of this posting. I’ve been working on those three things yesterday and today and thought I might share some of my experience implementing color selection the right way into a complex user interface. Those of you that coding apps/games/whatever using OpenGL might know that the old selection functionality of OpenGL (which wasn’t that bad at all) is a no-go nowadays, mainly due to the fact that it’s done in software for some time now by all big graphics cards vendors and therefore sadly disqualifies it for a realtime usage. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/07/21/secret-agency-and-some-icons/ Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:44:58 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/07/21/secret-agency-and-some-icons/ As already told (countless times I guess now) I’m still working on the new GUI but I’m making good progress. Only one window needs to be transitioned over to the new GUI before I can call this milestone done and move over to work on other stuff like adding content and functionality. My current plan is to have a version with the new GUI and all features (only one feature of “Phase 2” is missing) done that I can release for public testing by this yeas end. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/07/19/new-toy-hd6850/ Tue, 19 Jul 2011 09:39:23 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/07/19/new-toy-hd6850/ Back in the days before I got myself a PS3 I used to upgrade my PC every year. But since then (early 2009) I haven’t really bought any new PC games and thus never felt the need to upgrade my hardware. But well, my HD4850 (512 MB) started to show it’s age, especially when I wanted to play The Witcher 2 (I loved the first one, and the second one seems to be a great RPG too) and realized that even at lowered details and dialed back resolution (which isn’t really nice when you have a big display) the game was chugging along (20~25 fps with a lot of stuttering). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/06/24/the-eternal-circle-of-gui-design-and-some-new-screenshots/ Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:13:44 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/06/24/the-eternal-circle-of-gui-design-and-some-new-screenshots/ Odd title, but it perfectly describes my “workflow” when it comes down to the GUI of “Phase 2”. But since the user interface is such a crucial part for a complex strategy game I don’t feel bad when putting hours and hours (and days) into optimizing the interface of a single “window”, especially seing as how horribly one of my old drafts looked. And yes, I really like the current UI. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/06/12/game-design-game-modes/ Sun, 12 Jun 2011 11:22:50 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/06/12/game-design-game-modes/ Something that has been lacking in “Phase 1” was replayabilty or better said the motivation to replay the game. This was mainly due to the fact that there was only on single game mode (now called “default”) to choose from in both singleplayer and hotseat games. So basically each game played the same except for maybe the player playind it different or the random factors that change some of the AI’s behaviour. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/05/27/game-design-coastal-building-spots/ Fri, 27 May 2011 12:08:11 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/05/27/game-design-coastal-building-spots/ Once again personal things kept me from posting news recently, so excuse the big gap between the last (game design related) posting and this one. Though I haven’t posted news recently I still worked on the game almost every day and a lot of things have been changed, added and done. So expect a higher posting frequency in the near future concerning my progress on “Phase 2”! Something that has been implemented into the game from the very first prototype onwards was a property for all regions with a coast. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/04/20/phase-2-eyecandy/ Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:33:46 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/04/20/phase-2-eyecandy/ Don’t worry, I’ve been doing some gameplay related stuff too (including a revamp of global project functionality, coastal building spots for regions), but somehow I had the urge to spice up the game’s main view a bit and decided to implement a nice atmosphere for the globe. Something I wanted to do for a long time but somehow never got around. Another thing you can see in the video below is the new water shaders. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/04/07/three-new-newton-demos-with-source/ Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:23:23 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/04/07/three-new-newton-demos-with-source/ While answering some questions concerning physics implementation to the man behind Tower22 (a survival-horror game under development with Delphi) I created a few new newton demos demonstrating several different things you might need in a game, demo 07 shows how to implement simple explosions (though for a real game you’d need to add some stuff like raycasting etc.), demo 08 shows how to use the contact process callback to play sounds depending on the impact of a collision (can be used to spawn particles, do damage calculations, etc. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/04/04/newton-2.33-beta-headers-uploaded/ Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:51:13 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/04/04/newton-2.33-beta-headers-uploaded/ I just updated the Delphi/Freepascal headers for the Newton Game Dynamics engine to the latest release, 2.33 (beta). Grab them here. The latest release of the compiled SDK for newton can be downloaded here. The latest version of NGD added a new interesting feature, destruction. Julio (the man behind NGD) has uploaded a video of this new feature over here. As usual I don’t have that much time for coding, but I plan to upload a destruction demo (with soource) for Delphi/Freepascal at some point, but I can’t tell when. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/03/18/japan/ Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:53:46 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/03/18/japan/ Right now my thoughts are with the people of japan, a proud nation that has been hit very hard by earthquakes and tsunamis and also is doing everything possible to prevent a second (or even worse) Chernobyl over at Fukushima I. Ususally I’m not affected by disasters and human suffering (though it may sound harsh, but both are part of life) but with what happened (and what’s still happening) in Japan it’s totally different. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/03/11/game-design-regional-construction-queue/ Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:22:29 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/03/11/game-design-regional-construction-queue/ This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time now and I was pretty unsure wether it would be a good idea or not, as it would change a fundamental part of the gameplay, what I’m talking about is constructing buildings in your regions, a very important part of the gameplay that you spend a lot of your time with. Up until now you’ve been able to construct only one building at the same time in each region, forcing you do revisit a region once this building is finished in order to start constructing the next building. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/03/01/newton-sdl-developer-demos-updated-to-sdk-2.32/ Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:15:42 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/03/01/newton-sdl-developer-demos-updated-to-sdk-2.32/ Just a quick note that I finally got around updating the SDL developer demos for the Newton Game Dynamics Engine to the latest 2.32 release of the SDK. Also note that I also uploaded the character controller demo for NGD 2.32 (I haven’t updated this one to 2.x up until now), and also note that it’s “just” an update of the version for 1.53 and that it does NOT use the integrated character controller of the Newton Game Dynamics SDK. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/02/27/game-design-espionage-and-sabotage/ Sun, 27 Feb 2011 15:58:37 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/02/27/game-design-espionage-and-sabotage/ As usual my last big posting concerning “Phase 2” is now almost three months old and therefore I decided to change my habbit on posting news for “Phase 2”, so from now on I’ll add a new categorie called “Game Design” in which I’ll post smaller “snippets” about changes in the game’s design. Those postings will be more frequent and should be a better way of showing what’s going on behind the scenes that thos “quarterly” big postings on my progress with “Phase 2”. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/02/22/newton-game-dynamics-engine-goes-open-source/ Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:13:04 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2011/02/22/newton-game-dynamics-engine-goes-open-source/ Time flies by, already march and still this is my first posting for 2011. I’m pretty busy outside of coding, but rest assured, I’ll have some new info on “Phase 2” soon. But still this news item is a great one, as the Newton Game Dynamics realtime physics engine recently went open source (under the zlib license), with both branches of the code, 2.xx and 3.xx now available online. As you may now this has been my (free) physics engine of choice for years now (used in several games like Jagdgeschwader, Newton Playground, tech demos etc. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/12/28/2010-final-posting/ Tue, 28 Dec 2010 12:30:30 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/12/28/2010-final-posting/ Welcome to my last posting of 2010! I haven’t been doing regular yearly recaps on my blog since launching it like 5 years ago (time flies by, eh?), but I think it’s a good idea to do a little recap on what happened in 2010 and on what I plan to get done in 2011. Please note that this posting may contain some personal notes and/or ramblings of mine! https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/12/06/newton-2.26-beta-headers-uploaded/ Mon, 06 Dec 2010 11:07:42 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/12/06/newton-2.26-beta-headers-uploaded/ I’ve just uploaded updated header versions for the latest beta of the Newton Game Dynamics Engine, namely 2.26. This new versions adds severel new functions and procedures, but no changes within the joint library. You can grab the updated headers over here. As usual they should work with Free Pascal and Delphi (tested both under windows) and should also work under linux, though I don’t test them there. Note : A user over at the newton forums pointed me to some small errors in the current header. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/11/10/projekt-w-on-current-ct-magazine-issue/ Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:27:29 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/11/10/projekt-w-on-current-ct-magazine-issue/ Upon opening my letterbox (yes, the real one) this morning I found a free copy of the current issue of the german c’t computer magazine. Why I got this one for free? Because it features the last release of Projekt “W” (Phase 1, v1.2). Back in september I got a mail from the editorial staff of the c’t magazine telling me that Projekt “W” (which is listed on their online download portal) made it into the preselection for the next c’t’ software collection to be featured in one of their future issues. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/10/28/phase-2-status-update/ Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:48:27 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/10/28/phase-2-status-update/ As promised some (long) time ago (but better late than never) here is a new status update on the progress for “Phase 2” of Projekt “W”. Although my spare time is getting more and more limited due to some real important real life things that I have to take care of I still somehow manage to make progress on what now seems like my personal swansong, and actually a lot of things happened since my last status update, so this one is getting a bit longer this time. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/09/18/playstation-move/ Sat, 18 Sep 2010 11:26:37 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/09/18/playstation-move/ Don’t worry, this is no advertisement, and no, I don’t get any money or so from Sony for this, but it’s something I wanted to talk about since all this motion gaming stuff seems to be the future (though it’s been here for a long time now, just think of the EyeToy camera for the PS2). But this week (wednesday here in germany) Sony released it’s new Move controller for the PS3 which is based on the PS-Eye camera and which claims to be better than what the competition has to offer. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/07/20/new-user-interface-in-motion/ Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:08:34 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/07/20/new-user-interface-in-motion/ 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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/07/08/phase-2-running-on-linux-using-wine/ Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:52:27 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/07/08/phase-2-running-on-linux-using-wine/ After releasing “Phase 1” (which was actually quite some long time ago) several people were asking for Linux support, but actually I wasn’t keen of having to port the game over to Linux (and I haven’t changed on that since then), so there never was (and never will be) a port for Linux. And as it seems it was also not possible to get the game running using WINE due to the fact that it used GDI+ for doing several imaging related things. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/07/05/quick-interception/ Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:22:24 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/07/05/quick-interception/ Time flies by, and so the last posting is already collecting dust. As usual I’m not getting much time to work on “Phase 2”, but I’m making steady (though little) progress on an (almost daily) base. So the new user interface I’ve been talking about in my last posting is in (with a few minor things to be done and sorted) and it looks stunning, adding a lot to the game, both in terms of visual style and usability. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/05/05/the-old-gui-is-history/ Wed, 05 May 2010 20:18:31 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/05/05/the-old-gui-is-history/ Yes, you read that right. In a “shocking” turn of events I decided to scrap almost the whole old GUI for “Phase 2” in favour of a new and better one. Most of you might now ask if I went insane or so, but to counter this I’ll elaborate on why I scrapped the old GUI and decided to put a new one in : When I’m not in front of my PC and working on “Phase 2” (that’s actually the only thing I’m doing in front of the PC nowadays, no more gaming or such, spare time is rare for me) I always have pen and paper in close range so I can put down and work on new ideas anytime they hit me. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/04/13/some-words-about-phase-2/ Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:16:49 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/04/13/some-words-about-phase-2/ My first posting on “Phase 2” for Projekt “W” in three months does not mean that I haven’t been working on it. Actually although my spare time is very limited (it gets worse and worse almost every month) I still try to squeeze out some spare time each day to do at least minor things related to “Phase 2”. And since event small steps sum up I got several things done towards a first release of “Phase 2” and so I decided to upload some screenshots and talk about what I’ve been doing. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/03/04/omni-directional-lights-using-cubemap-shadows/ Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:27:20 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/03/04/omni-directional-lights-using-cubemap-shadows/ It looks like my dungeon crawler prototype isn’t actually evolving into a game, but much more into a personal testbed for more-or-less current rendering techniques (due to Projekt “W” I’ve been lacking in the field of recent rendering techniques a bit). And so one of the things I always wanted to implement were shadows for omni-directional light sources. I’ve been doing that with stencil shadows years ago, but stencil shadows aren’t the preferred way of doing this nowadays due to their limitations, including sharp edges (yes, there are ways to get around this, but they’re expensive in terms of computing) and a high demand for fillrate. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/02/26/first-dungeon-crawler-prototype-hd-video/ Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:48:23 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/02/26/first-dungeon-crawler-prototype-hd-video/ 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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/02/07/random-dungeon-generation/ Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:03:14 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/02/07/random-dungeon-generation/ Javascript Demo If you want to see this in action, you can find a javascript version of the algorithm described in here that runs in your browser over here. Introduction Ever since playing my first dungeon crawler (which must have been “Eye of the Beholder” if I remember correct, but there have been a lot of them in my early gaming days) I wanted to do something similar. And in my first years of coding I even started several dungeon crawlers (using Turbo Pascal under DOS), but none of them really took off due to several reasons. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/01/31/newton-sdl-demos-updated-to-2.16/ Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:39:42 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/01/31/newton-sdl-demos-updated-to-2.16/ After several requests and after updating the headers, I decided to release updated sources for the SDL developer demos showcasing some of Newton’s features. Those updated demos (including sources) should be useful to both starters (to see how Newton 2.00 works) and people that already used 1.53, as there haven been some changes. So the following demos now also have sources for Newton 2.00 : “Demo 01 - Basic demo”, “Demo 02 - Joints” and “Demo 03 - Buoyancy”. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/01/14/new-staff-/-transfer-market-window-and-more-on-staff-experience/ Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:26:57 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2010/01/14/new-staff-/-transfer-market-window-and-more-on-staff-experience/ After a long time without updates on “Phase 2” of Projekt “W” (due to the fact that I just haven’t had time to work on it), I got around doing some work on it in the recent days and** finished the overhaul of the staff / transfer market window**. As mentioned in my recent postings on “Phase 2”, all the windows will be revamped to make them look more like they’re in a game rather than in some kind of office application for windows. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/12/31/newton-header-updated-again/ Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:06:01 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/12/31/newton-header-updated-again/ After updating some of my projects to the recent beta of Newton **I decided to revert back to the original header format, using only one file **(NewtonImport.pas) instead of the three from the last update (which was a result of Stucuk updating the headers and splitting them in order to easily use them with his own wrapper). So I uploaded a new package for the headers, now only containing one header (NewtonImport. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/12/29/newton-2.15-beta-headers-uploaded/ Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:18:49 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/12/29/newton-2.15-beta-headers-uploaded/ From my lack of recent updates it should be pretty clear that I don’t have much time (or better : pretty much no time at all) for my programming stuff, so over the past few months I also had no time to release updated headers for the beta releases of the Newton Game Dynamics Engine. As of now there have been many beta releases and the current one is 2.15. In my abscence Stucuk was the one that took care of that situation and released several headers for the numerous betas of NGD. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/10/14/status-update-on-phase-2/ Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:21:30 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/10/14/status-update-on-phase-2/ After taking a longer break from coding (it’s been almost four months since my last update on “Phase 2”) I returned to coding last week. Followers of my work might already know that I sometimes take longer pauses from development, mostly when either my motivation or my inspiration is gone, and as for this longer break it was connected to both. After implementing the nuke shown on my last update I actually wanted to start full work on the global projects, but without inspiration for what projects to do and how to implement them into the sourcecode I decided to take a break. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/delphi-opengl-headers/ Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:51:13 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/delphi-opengl-headers/ About As the OpenGL headers shipping with Delphi are often outdated and thus lacking many recent OpenGL functions and extensions, we, over at the german Delphi OpenGL community, decided to publish our own header translations. Since around 2002 these headers have been updated with new OpenGL specifications on a regular basis. As of 2009 I’m the only remaining maintainer of these headers, and even though I no longer use Delphi for private Development, I still try to keep them up-to-date. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/07/29/new-screenshot-gallery-wipeout-hd-fury-playstation-3/ Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:55:49 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/07/29/new-screenshot-gallery-wipeout-hd-fury-playstation-3/ Right now I’m taking a break from coding and when I get the time I prefer to spend it in front of my shiny PlayStation 3. One of the first games I got for it (I even got me a credit card to be able to buy it on the PSN) was WipeOut HD, a futuristic hover racer. It’s looking gorgeous and I’ve been having a blast playing it. Recently the addon called “Fury” was released, and for just 10€ you get a lot of new content (8 new tracks, 13 new ships, a new campaing, new game modes, new music, and more) and I decided to take some shots with the ingame photo-functionality. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/07/17/pascal-gamer-magazine-issue-1/ Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:39:15 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/07/17/pascal-gamer-magazine-issue-1/ Jason McMillen (aka “Will”) from Pascal Game Developement has put a lot of effort into getting together the first issue of the “Pascal Gamer Magazine”, an online published free magazine showcasing the state of the pascal game development scene (which actually includes me as I’m using Delphi for development). The first issue is filled with a lot of interesting stuff, and when Jason approached me for an interview and a feature about “Projekt W” I couldn’t resist. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/06/22/prototyping-nukes-including-hd-video-updated/ Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:33:27 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/06/22/prototyping-nukes-including-hd-video-updated/ 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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/06/20/new-tool-explosion-texture-generator/ Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:46:11 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/06/20/new-tool-explosion-texture-generator/ While working on the global project feature of “Phase 2” for Projekt W, which will include weapons of mass destruction, and therefore some explosions, I needed a nice looking explosion texture with a working alpha channel. Sadly all the freeware explosion generators I tried did not offer a way to export the animation into a format with an alpha channel and moreover weren’t very flexible at all (especiall in terms of texture resolution or grid size). https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/explosion-texture-generator/ Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:30:12 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/explosion-texture-generator/ About The Explosion Texture Generator (short ExploTexGen, to keep it in line with my Terrain Texture Generator TerrTexGen) is a tool to create a 2D texture of an animated explosion. Many games do explosions that way, by having them prerendered into a texture (in a grid with each grid cell containing a single animationf rame) and then just putting them onto a texture. This is a well known technique and has been used for many years now and is still used in many games. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/05/30/phase-2-work-in-progress-video-hd-and-youtube-channel/ Sat, 30 May 2009 17:59:34 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/05/30/phase-2-work-in-progress-video-hd-and-youtube-channel/ 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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/05/12/progress-on-phase-2-new-spy-type/ Tue, 12 May 2009 19:47:33 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/05/12/progress-on-phase-2-new-spy-type/ With the last update already more than two months old I thought it was time to tell the outside world about the progress on “Phase 2” of Projekt “W”. And although I’m still not able to put as much time into “Phase 2” as I’d like to (and not nearly as much as I was able to do back when working on “Phase 1”) it’s still progressing. Almost all time I could put into working on “Phase 2” since the last update went into the espionage rework and this part of the game is shaping up very well. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/03/02/projekt-w-releasing-betas/ Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:40:58 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/03/02/projekt-w-releasing-betas/ As you may know from my recent postings I don’t get much time to work on “Phase 2”. It’s progressing, a lot of stuff is already in, some of the new features are finished, some others are still being worked on and other new features right now only exist on paper. So judging by my current progress since “Phase 1” it’s still a lot of time to pass before “Phase 2” will be released, but reading comments and mails I think a lot of people are interested in seeing more of “Phase 2” than just the screenshots I post from time to time. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/02/10/gui-gui-editor-and-espionage-along-with-some-sabotage/ Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:10:55 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/02/10/gui-gui-editor-and-espionage-along-with-some-sabotage/ So in the last update from January I promises you some more information on the progress of “Phase 2” for Projekt “W” along with some screenshots, and today I’m gonna keep this promise! Although I’m still not having as much time for coding (and working) on “Phase 2” as I’d like to have I still manged to do a lot of stuff during the last days and weeks towards the road to “Phase 2”. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/01/13/quick-update/ Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:43:47 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2009/01/13/quick-update/ Since my last news posting already started to collect dust I thought it would be time for a small update. Sadly I don’t have any screenshots to show or any groundbreaking news, but I can assure that I still work on “Phase 2” of Projekt “W”. Right now I’m** implementing a redesign of the whole espionage and sabotage part** of the game, as the initial draft from “Phase 1” lacks a lot and I want to make espionage (and sabotage) much more important for “Phase 2”. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/11/23/fallout-3/ Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:15:26 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/11/23/fallout-3/ As you may have guessed from the lack of updates since my last post I’m not doing any coding at all for some time now due to various reasons, and I can’t tell when I’ll continue work on “Phase 2” of Projekt “W”. So right now I spend my spare time playing games (I recently bought Dead Space, and I do a lot of racing with GTR Evolution on my Logitech Formula Force EX racing wheel) and right now I’m playing through Fallout 3, which is made by Betheshda, the same guys that did Oblivion. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/07/27/promised-mediaupdate/ Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:32:42 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/07/27/promised-mediaupdate/ A week too late, but better now than never. So here is the promised update on the progress of “Phase 2”. A lot of stuff has happened (not everything will be visible to the player) so this post will be a bit longer than usual. Let’s start off with the global projects. As already mentioned several times, these are one (if not the) biggest addition to “Phase 2” and will change gameplay a lot. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/07/12/big-performance-jump-for-phase-2/ Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:24:16 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/07/12/big-performance-jump-for-phase-2/ While working on different parts of the source for “Phase 2” I also took a look at the rendering method for the 3D models and decided to totally rewrite those functions. They now (together with other changes) render models sorted by materials, which gives a huge performance improvements (texture changes are very expensive, and rendering sorted by materials removes a lot of them) that will be included with “Phase 2”. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/07/09/quick-check-in/ Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:47:27 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/07/09/quick-check-in/ Just a quick note to let you know that there will be bigger media update sometime next week. Sadly I’m not having as much time for coding as I’d like to have, but I’m still trying to work on “Phase 2” every minute I can spare, so there have been a lot of smaller and some bigger changes/additions towards the road to “Phase 2”. Right now I started implementing the “global Projects”, mighty projects that need a lot of effort and ressources to finish, but that can, if used right, change the whole game. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/06/11/hex-battles-evolved/ Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:46:27 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/06/11/hex-battles-evolved/ While working on the remaining settings for the battlefields in “Phase 2” (in total, there will be eight different settings, including snow, deserts, lush and dry scenarios and so on) I felt that the look of the hex battles didn’t match the rest of the games visuals. They were too flat, no shadows and nothing surrounding them except the skybox. It just felt bland and urged me to change something about it, and I did. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/05/30/100k-visitors-and-some-projekt-w/ Fri, 30 May 2008 15:33:37 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/05/30/100k-visitors-and-some-projekt-w/ Since relaunching my page with Wordpress back in march 2007, there have been over 100,000 visitors to my page. Although this does not sound much at first, I guess it’s pretty good for a personal page (together with the fact that there were roughly 75,000 visitors to my page before that relaunch) and I hope that all those visitors enjoyed my projects, demos, applications and tutorials. And for those interested in numbers, I just saw that the** traffic generated by my page for the first five months of 2008** (including views and downloads) has topped 1. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/05/26/new-feature-for-phase-2/ Mon, 26 May 2008 18:32:48 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/05/26/new-feature-for-phase-2/ While doing some miscellaneous coding and design-related stuff for “Phase 2” of Project “W”, I had a sudden inspiration for a new feature in order to get more dynamics into the gameplay. The new feature I therefore implemented is a stock market. Nothing revolutionary (I guess most games similar to Project “W” have that feature too) but it’s bringing much more dynamics into the game’s flow. In “Phase 1”, you can only make resources with the regions themselves, but the new stock market will allow you to make a lot of resources (or loose a lot) within a short amount of time, but with a lot of risk. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/05/16/resuming-work-on-phase-2-of-projekt-w/ Fri, 16 May 2008 21:18:50 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/05/16/resuming-work-on-phase-2-of-projekt-w/ The last news concerning “Phase 2” of Projekt “W” dates back to february, but I recently decided to resume work on “Phase 2” again (after playing a lot of Guild Wars in a new guild) and over the last couple of days I finished a new part of the GUI that you’ll see when you attack a region. If you’ve followed my postings on “Phase 2” you should know that the player will be able to either simulate the battles or to fight it out himself on a turn-based hex battlefield. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/04/18/guild-wars-and-a-little-break/ Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:13:44 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/04/18/guild-wars-and-a-little-break/ I already mentioned this a long time ago. I’m an avid Guild Wars player, and right now I’m taking a little programming break and spent most of my online time playing GW. If you’re interested in seeing some screenshots, I’ve created a gallery showcasing some of my Guild Wars moments over here. Note that I haven’t lost interested in coding, it’s just that I need to take a break from it sometimes (it’s not the first break). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/03/16/newton-tracked-tank-proof-of-concept-demo-released/ Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:01:46 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/03/16/newton-tracked-tank-proof-of-concept-demo-released/ Finally, here it is : The demo of my proof-of-concept for realizing tracked vehicles (tanks) using only Newton’s material callback system. Head over here to download it (~3,6 MBytes) and please refer to the readme.txt before playing around with it. Also note that it’s possible that not all gamepads will work, if that’s the case just use the keyboard controls. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/03/14/new-tracked-tank-video/ Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:05:06 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/03/14/new-tracked-tank-video/ 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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/03/05/tracked-tank-with-newton/ Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:47:06 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/03/05/tracked-tank-with-newton/ 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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/02/22/some-newton-beta-goodness-updated/ Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:44:03 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/02/22/some-newton-beta-goodness-updated/ 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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/02/03/impressions-from-the-battlefield/ Sun, 03 Feb 2008 17:45:47 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/02/03/impressions-from-the-battlefield/ Amongst other stuff, I’ve benn mostly working on the different battlefield settings for the turn-based battles that’ll come with “Phase 2”. As of now I plan to have eight different settings (ranging from desert, to snowy, to lush and so on), and each setting also having different maps. This should bring in enough variety into the turn-base battles to make them fun to play. Here are some in-game impressions from the settings I started working on (note that they’re all still work-in-progess, especially the 3D models like trees and buoldings) : https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/01/08/skinning-of-military-units-finished/ Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:03:23 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2008/01/08/skinning-of-military-units-finished/ The title says it all. During the last few days I created all skins for the existing cast of military units and made the 3D models ready to use them, which means changing some parts of the model itself (most models now also have a lower poly-count, which is good for the turn-based battles) and unwrapping the texture-coordinates (a lot of work, it’s not easy, especially not for the more complex models). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/12/23/first-new-skinned-military-unit/ Sun, 23 Dec 2007 20:52:29 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/12/23/first-new-skinned-military-unit/ In “Phase 1”, all military units have the same look across all nations. This is something I actually never wanted, but had to do due to time restrictions. This will be history with “Phase 2”, as (in addition to the new unique units for all nations) all military units will have different skins for each nation. Those of you that at some point did UV-mapping of a 3D-unit know that it’s not easy to create a half-way good looking skin, especially if you haven’t much experience in this field. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/12/10/projekt-w-roadmap-for-phase-2/ Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:58:20 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/12/10/projekt-w-roadmap-for-phase-2/ On a quick note, I have uploaded a roadmap for “Phase 2”, you can take a look at it here. It lists all tasks that are still open, and the tasks I already finished. I’ll update it over time so you can see progress on “Phase 2”. Also please note that some stuff I’ve been talking about for “Phase 2” isn’t on that list yet, but it may be added later on. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/12/02/more-on-the-manual-hex-battles/ Sun, 02 Dec 2007 17:34:46 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/12/02/more-on-the-manual-hex-battles/ Besides other smaller things I finally implemented the A* search algorithm for the manual hex battles, which was the most important part to get the AI working. So if you battle an enemy controlled region now, the computer enemy will be able to find it’s way across the battlfield and around any obstacles towards your units. Next step is now to tweak the battle calculations, something a lot of people weren’t satisfied with. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/11/17/2000-downloads-and-more-on-phase-2/ Sat, 17 Nov 2007 21:14:15 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/11/17/2000-downloads-and-more-on-phase-2/ Since it’s release on august 14th, “Phase 1” of Projekt W has been downloaded over 2000 times. Considering that turn-based games are a niche nowadays, with only a few exceptions (like the Civilization series) I’m pretty happy with the number of downloads. But what makes me even happier is the feedback I’ve gotten from those that played the game. With my recent projects, feedback was very rare, with the exception of my regular forums I also posted about my projects, but with Projekt W that changed. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/10/21/different-ui-themes/ Sun, 21 Oct 2007 20:47:07 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/10/21/different-ui-themes/ In “Phase 1” all nations shared the same theme for the user interface, something I initially didn’t want to do but I postponed that features to “Phase 2” and just started working on this. So in the next version of Projekt “W” every nation will have it’s own distinctive theme for the user-interface, an additional way to distinguish between the different nations. So with “Phase 2” you’ll have a different 3d-background, a different sky and a different user-interface for the nation you choose, and in addition to that I also plan on having different skins for military units depending on their owning nation. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/10/15/projekt-w-battles-and-some-newton-tidbits/ Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:02:26 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/10/15/projekt-w-battles-and-some-newton-tidbits/ Recently I’ve started working on the new turn-based battles that’ll come with “Phase 2” of Projekt “W”. If you have played the game, you already saw the automatic battles with no possibility for the player to intervene. This will be changed, and you’ll have full control over attacking and defending regions. If a battle starts, the game will switch into the turn-based battle-mode where you firt place your units and then move them turn-by-turn (player after player) until one of the parties has been terminated. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/10/09/aftermath/ Tue, 09 Oct 2007 15:06:07 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/10/09/aftermath/ As Projekt “W” (Phase 1) has been out for some weeks now, it’s time for a small recap. With the latest version (1.2) most of the bugs and problems of the first versions have gone, and after watching the feedback (mostly on forums) it seems that people like it. Some even compared it to commercial games and prefer Projekt “W”, and that’s great to know. There also has been plenty of useful feedback, mostly on balancing, that I’ll try to incorporate into Phase 2. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/09/05/projekt-w-patch-1.2/ Wed, 05 Sep 2007 20:11:50 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/09/05/projekt-w-patch-1.2/ Although it took much more time than I expected, Patch 1.2 is done and released! After implementing the tutorial I already wanted to release it (last weekend) but I noticed that there wer a lot of bugs and problems buried within the AI and the army management. Some of them were serious and did hurt the whole gameplay experience, so I decided to push back the patch and fix all those issues. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/08/28/patch-1.2-coming-soon-including-tutorial/ Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:21:07 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/08/28/patch-1.2-coming-soon-including-tutorial/ Right now I’m working on the next patch, version 1.2 for Projekt “W”. This patch will mostly contain changes, especially to the user interface that make the game “faster” too navigate. A lot of actions will also be triggered by double-clicking items or by pressing keys, instead of having to select stuff and to click on a different button. That should make the gameplay experience more smooth. The patch will also add some more information, for example a new window will now pop up if you have finished research, instead of just adding an easy-to-overlook newsitem. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/08/18/projekt-w-patch-1.1-update-1.11/ Sat, 18 Aug 2007 16:51:12 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/08/18/projekt-w-patch-1.1-update-1.11/ Important note : There has been one bug left in 1.1 that would throw an exception when you tried to attack a region that has an empty divison assigned. This is an important issue but only needs an updated exe, so I quickly uploaded a zip that includes the game’s .exe that you just need to replace. Note that I also updated the full installer to 1.11! Win32 Installer for Projekt “W” - Phase 1 - Version 1. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/08/15/projekt-w-phase-1-hotfix-1.01/ Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:11:57 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/08/15/projekt-w-phase-1-hotfix-1.01/ As usual I screwed up the release atleast partially. Besides crashing with resolutions of aspect ratio 5:4 (e.g. 1280x1024) I also forgot to include the music files for winning and loosing the game, so if you did and had music enabled it would crash. So I reuploaded the game with these fixes. I would have provided a patch but that would take it’s time so if you encounter any of the above problems please redownload it (direct download link). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/08/14/projekt-w-phase-1-release/ Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:27:16 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/08/14/projekt-w-phase-1-release/  After a year of work it's time to celebrate the release of the most complex and ambitious of my programming career! **Project "W" - Phase 1 is finally here and free for you to download and play!** Head over to the game’s new page and grab a copy of the game (Windows 32, Installer, ~30 MBytes, includes german and english). The page also includes a lot of information on the game itself as well as a bunch of new screenshots, so while downloading it you can read through the page and browse the shots. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/projekt-w/ Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:16:45 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/projekt-w/ About Projekt „W“ (the „W“ stands for „Weltherrscher“ which is german for „World ruler“) is my current project and up until now also my most ambitious and complex project. First ideas for this game came up in 2003 and I quickly put together a first prototype. But I didn’t really like the game design back then as I felt it was too bloated and boring, so I did put the project to rest. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/07/27/working-towards-release-and-littel-name-change/ Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:08:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/07/27/working-towards-release-and-littel-name-change/ The closer you get towards releasing your game the more small things surface that have to be taken care off before going public, and so over the last days/weeks I have been busy mostly taking care of small bugs and annoyances that needed fixing. Actually I already could have released it but everyone of you working on a game/application knows the feeling when you’re close to release. On the one hand you want to release it (in order to take the weight off your shoulders) but on the other hand you want to release something that’s as smooth and polished as possible. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/07/04/artificial-intelligence/ Wed, 04 Jul 2007 17:01:25 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/07/04/artificial-intelligence/ Some postings ago I already told you that the AI for Project “W” is the first more complex AI that I did (and still do) so I’m gonna post a bit about it this time. My initial goal was to create an artificial intelligence that’s giving the player a challenge without cheating but that’s also behaving different from game-to-game. The first point is pretty clear, if an AI is cheating the player will start to notice it after some matches and it makes the player feel betrayed, which is a real no-go. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/06/21/good-news-for-owners-of-old-graphics-cards-and-more-on-ai/ Thu, 21 Jun 2007 20:00:57 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/06/21/good-news-for-owners-of-old-graphics-cards-and-more-on-ai/ As some people over at a forum I’m active in noted that they wouldn’t be able to play Projekt “W” cause their graphics cards don’t support shaders, I decided to spent some time on implementing a renderpath that works without shaders. Especially the globe uses a more complex shader and recreating something at least similar with the fixed function pipeline wasn’t that easy but in the end I got something that works on old cards and still looks good enough. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/06/14/manual-and-soundsystem/ Thu, 14 Jun 2007 16:24:57 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/06/14/manual-and-soundsystem/ As the project is already close to finish I started to write the manual several days ago and just finished the english one (the game will include german and english languages, so a german manual will also be included) and it’s roughly 15 pages long. And as this game is a bit more complex than most of my other games it’s really recommended to read this cause otherwise out would be hard to play. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/06/05/more-playtesting-balancing-bughunting-and-ai/ Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:23:53 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/06/05/more-playtesting-balancing-bughunting-and-ai/ The title exactly sums up what I’ve been doing on Projekt “W” the last couple of days. After an extensive round of playtesting I squashed the last few remaining bugs and problems I encountered and was finally able to play a whole game without any troubles, crashes or other things that disturbed a smooth gameplay experience. It took me around 90 turns to finish a whole game, playing the oceanic front. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/05/24/transfer-market-new-cursors-texture-compression-and-more/ Thu, 24 May 2007 12:48:56 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/05/24/transfer-market-new-cursors-texture-compression-and-more/ Since the last update on Project “W” I worked on a lot of smaller things and also did a lot of work on the “background” of the game (the stuff most players won’t notice but which is still important to work on), so this news posting will be a collection of all the things I did over the last days. Transfer market : This was actually the last thing that was really bugging me as up until recently each staff member would have the same image with only name and values being different, so I started to take care of this and in the final version there will be around a dozen of different faces for each of the professions (scienists, spies and generals) so the staff you hire is much more personalized and can easily be recognized. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/05/17/first-playtesting-sessions-and-hardware-requirements/ Thu, 17 May 2007 18:32:08 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/05/17/first-playtesting-sessions-and-hardware-requirements/ Although there are still some minor things to do before I can call it a version that’s ready to getting released, Projekt “W” is now in a shape where you can actually play a whole game without it throwing an exception (so far all show-stoppers have been fixed). So today I made the first two playtesting session with the first one being interrupted with a bug that I quicly fixed followed by a second playtesting session. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/05/12/on-the-state-of-project-w/ Sat, 12 May 2007 18:58:57 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/05/12/on-the-state-of-project-w/ I just crossed the last remaining things off from my todo-list for the demo (except for one point which is finishing one of the remaining nation backgrounds) and so far I have been very pleased with it’s progress since I started on the new version back in august 2006 (I still have a backup from that date on my disk in order to quickly check progress). Recently a friend of mine came by and after showing him the current in-developement version he was stunned by the professional looks of it so I guess it’s going in the right direction and all the work I’ve put into it in the end will pay out. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/05/04/hotseat-mode-is-in/ Fri, 04 May 2007 19:34:41 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/05/04/hotseat-mode-is-in/ As already hinted at in my last posting on the subject of Project “W” I implemented the hotseat-multiplayer-mode, which will be the only multiplayer-mode present in the demo. For those that don’t know about it, hotseat is a multiplayer-mode that only uses one PC and therefore only can be used in a turn-based game (like Project “W”). So before starting such a game (see first screenshot) you choose what nation is controlled by a human player (other nations are played by the computer, disabling a whole nation is not possible but maybe later on with different game modes) and you can also set the number of ressources each nation has at the start of the game. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/04/24/endgame-screens-and-top-five/ Tue, 24 Apr 2007 13:08:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/04/24/endgame-screens-and-top-five/ Although I haven’t had that much time to work on Project “W” since my last entry here I actually did get some more points on my todo-list done. As you can see on the screenshot to your left there is now a nice looking game-ending screen which will show some statistics as well as a top-five of the best players. For the screen itself I needed half-a-dozen attempts until I had gotten something finished that looked the way I imagined and had enough space to present all needed information, and as some kind of gift I also decided to add this small highscore-list so that there now is another additional value in replaying the game. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/04/09/cast-of-buildings/ Mon, 09 Apr 2007 19:53:16 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/04/09/cast-of-buildings/ High on 1the heels of my last posting about the cast of the military units for the Project"W" demo, I now also have finished all buildings that will be present in the demo. The number is 39 and even though I didn’t stop the time while creating them I can safely say that it took me far over one hundred hours to design, model and texture them so this was actually the toughest part of the content creation sector for Project “W”. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/04/03/cast-of-military-units/ Tue, 03 Apr 2007 21:34:13 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/04/03/cast-of-military-units/ I just finished modelling and texturing the last military unit left to have the list of units for the demo finished. If you click on the image to your left you’ll get a picture of all the different units that will be in the demo. You can see 10 military units that can be build by the player (2 infantry units, 5 different tanks, a mechanoid walker, two airplanes) and one special purpose unit, the mobile environment changer. https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/opengl/opengl-demos/ Sat, 31 Mar 2007 14:17:55 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/opengl/opengl-demos/ Current OpenGL demos Due to my Vulkan activities I’m not doing much in terms of OpenGL nowadays, but I still do some OpenGL from time to time. If it’s worth releasing, I push it to my open source C++ OpenGL github repository. Archives Note: Some of these demos have been written more than ten years ago and will most likely no longer work with current hardware, but I left them in here for those who are curious. https://www.saschawillems.de/about/ Fri, 30 Mar 2007 19:36:10 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/about/ About this site This is my personal space where I showcase my self-developed projects and blog about my private coding adventures. I try to update it at least once a month. If you wanna follow my projects, all of my open source code is available over at github. About the author For the larger part of my life, programming has played (and still does) an important part. My journey started back at the age of eight when I got a Commodore C64 as a present and discovered that you couldn’t just play games on it, but also write your own games. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/03/28/project-w-new-video/ Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:33:12 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/03/28/project-w-new-video/ 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. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/zorngl-engine/ Sun, 25 Mar 2007 20:49:36 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/zorngl-engine/ About I developed the ZornGL-Engine for my final school grade, where I had 6 months to finish it (starting october 2001) and to present it there I also made a small multiplayer game called “Ancient Rites” with this engine. After finishing this for school, I additionally worked on it several months to make it into an engine for a RPG. But as the engine was one of my first OpenGL apps, it had many problems that had gotten even worse in the end so I decided to totally stop that project. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/jagdgeschwader/ Sun, 25 Mar 2007 14:16:25 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/jagdgeschwader/ About Jagdgeschwader was my entry for the 2005 “Dogfight”-Competition that was organized by the guys over at PGD (Pascal Game Developement). As the theme insists the entry should be about a fierce fight between two contrahents and that’s exactly what I did. I stayed (although it was no must) very close to the theme and created a game where two players fight each other in WW2-aircrafts to the death. The contest went for 2 and a half months and much of that time went into my entry. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/03/24/new-page/ Sat, 24 Mar 2007 21:14:54 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/03/24/new-page/ As you may have guessed from the complete new layout and design I redid my homepage (again, this is the sixth iteration since I went only 4 years or so ago). My old web-package only included 200 MBytes of webspace and that hasn’t been really enough to hold all my projects which forced me to delete old things when uploading new stuff. And therefore I decided to upgrade to the next bigger web-package with 1 GByte of webspace but this one also includes MySQL (5 databases) as well as PHP. https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/newton/demos-and-applications/ Sat, 24 Mar 2007 20:22:33 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/newton/demos-and-applications/ Here you’ll find the demos and applications I wrote in order to demonstrate the features of the Newton Game Dynamics engine. Newton Tracked Tank 2008 (proof-of-concept) The follow up to a 2006 demo I created using newton (which wasn’t working very good back then, now it is). This demo simulates a tank using a realistic method, applying acceleration within the material callback for the tracks. Each contact generated is rotated to point in the moving direction and then an acceleration is applied along the contact’s tangent. https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/newton/sdl-demos-mostly-for-developers/ Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:37:37 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/newton/sdl-demos-mostly-for-developers/ In order to help Delphi and pascal developers getting started with the Newton Game Dynamics Engine I wrote some demos that come with full source code so you can see how different things can be achieved when using Newton. The demos use the Simple Direct Medialayer so that, when using a cross-platform pascal compiler, you can use Newton with all operating systems that are supported by Newton itself (currently Windows, Linux and Mac) . https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/newtonplayground/ Sat, 24 Mar 2007 16:03:14 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/newtonplayground/ About The NewtonPlayGround is a tool to show off the features of the Newton Game Dynamics Engine, a physics engine for real-time applications without having to actually write any code yourself. It let’s you create fully physics backed-up worlds where all objects interact with each other and also let’s the user interact with these objects. It also allows for saving those scenes to XML so that they can be given away to other users of the PlayGround or be used in your own projects. https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/newton/delphipascal-header/ Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:17:31 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/pages/newton/delphipascal-header/ **Newton Game Dynamics Engine 3.x** You can grab a current header for the 3.00 alpha of the NGD over at the Newton forms. It’s maintained by Stucuk, so if you got any questions post them in that thread. **Newton Game Dynamics Engine 2.x** These are the header translations of the current 2.xx version of the Newton Game Dynamics SDK (you can get the latest SDK here). Note that things may change between 2. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/03/17/next-stop-localization/ Sat, 17 Mar 2007 17:06:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/03/17/next-stop-localization/ Once again I finished some points on my todo-list for the demo release, including all missing icons (for buttons, windows, etc.), adding some rebel units (which you encounter while attacking a region that had separated itself from your government), finishing the regionmap (remaining names, adjusting values, etc.) and much more. But one of the biggest still outstanding points on the list is localization of the game. And this is exactly what I’m gonna do next. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/03/13/climbing-the-todo-ladder/ Tue, 13 Mar 2007 13:37:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/03/13/climbing-the-todo-ladder/ Since the last posting here on my blog I got a big share of the outstanding Todos for the coming demo done (around 50% of the points on the list), so work is still going at my projected speed and the game is looking and feeling better and better each day. And as I already hinted at in my last posting one of the things I did was the customization of the regional 3D view. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/03/04/even-more-work-on-the-gui/ Sun, 04 Mar 2007 19:40:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/03/04/even-more-work-on-the-gui/ Right now I’m working down the points on my todo-list towards the demo release and already got several things done. But one point was usability and look of the GUI for the game and this one took (and still takes) much longer than I initially had planned. I did a lot of work on the main menu, including an options screen and adding functionality to have every UI element slowly fade in and fade out. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/02/26/gui-flow/ Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:35:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/02/26/gui-flow/ It’s been a while since the last update on Project “W”, but work is still going on though mostly on things you can’t show via some nice screenshots (and text-only postings aren’t that much fun either). I’m still on-time towards my predicted date for the first demo (early Q2/2007) and right now I think I can actually even finsh it until my self-set deadline. To achieve that I wrote down a list with all the things needed to be finished for a demo relase and that list isn’t very huge and mostly contains smaller things concerning polish of certain game features. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/02/15/more-national-identity/ Thu, 15 Feb 2007 17:11:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/02/15/more-national-identity/ First a sorry for such a long delay since the last posting but after having problems with my internet connection my modem also decided to die, so I haven’t had the chance to update this since the last posting. But now on to the work I did on Project “W”. Most work last days was spent on creating full 3D-backgrounds to strengthen the players identification with the nation he chooses to play. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/02/05/working-towards-the-finish/ Mon, 05 Feb 2007 21:41:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/02/05/working-towards-the-finish/ In terms of coding I’m nowadays spending most of the time working on the smaller things within the game that maybe many players won’t notice, but will have a big impact on the final polish of the game.. Things like additional messages and hint when e.g. a nation is terminated and other important ingame events, tweaking the game’s usability (as I wrote in my initial game design I want to have all of the game’s functionality to be accessible with at most 2 clicks) and more newsmessages. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/30/more-content-and-a-vfs/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:27:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/30/more-content-and-a-vfs/ Once again the past days have been very productive when it comes to Project “W” (although I’ve been a bit distracted by the recent Dawn of War Addon) both in terms of content for the game and in terms of coding. As for the content, I modeled some new buildings so that I currently have 26 of the ~32 buildings finished. I’ve put my priority on creating models for the buildings you can construct right after the start of the game, so the remaining models I have to do will be for some of the more futuristic buildings that you can only build after researching certain technologies. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/24/smaller-steps/ Wed, 24 Jan 2007 13:39:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/24/smaller-steps/ As usual when a project has advanced a lot, like Project “W” did, the steps you make get smaller and smaller. At first you implement the big features and see big changes within a few days of coding but that phase is over for some time now. And therefore I’m currently working on a lot of the smaller things that make the game more playable/enjoyable, and that includes a lot of small facets of game design. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/18/translation/ Thu, 18 Jan 2007 19:24:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/18/translation/ Another long outstanding thing that I was “succesfully” getting around the last months was translation of Project “W”. But this is history, as I sat down the last few days and implemented translation features into the game. At first I wanted to use the ITE of BDS2006, but somehow actually didn’t like it. So I implemented the whole translation stuff myself, and you can directly translate strings in the game’s main editor “WeltEdit”, which then are referenced through unique identifiers within the game. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/15/more-ai-balancing-and-research-tree/ Mon, 15 Jan 2007 17:53:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/15/more-ai-balancing-and-research-tree/ Though I didn’t spent too much time on Projekt “W” since the last posting I still got some stuff done. Firstly I went for the technology tree, which was (very much like the list of buildings) something that I pushed back and back during the whole developement. But since the list of buildings is closely tied to the technologytree I actually had to do this, and many technologies are mainly there to unlock new buildings. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/10/work-on-ai-started/ Wed, 10 Jan 2007 18:43:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/10/work-on-ai-started/ You read right, earlier than I expected I started to implement computer controlled enemies (aka “AI”) that’ll control all non-player regions. But before doing that step I did a lot on the code and made sure all features worked as expected and that there were no bugs left, so I can fully concentrate on the AI without having to fix problems or bugs at the same time. Luckily there wasn’t much to be done on that part, and except for one or two annoyances (e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/06/raging-battles/ Sat, 06 Jan 2007 14:49:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2007/01/06/raging-battles/ Over the past days I implemented the last missing sub-feature of the military feature : attacking enemy regions. This was something I pushed back and forth all the time, cause before implementing it I had to be sure that the values and properties of military units would be final, and recently I made a third draft of what properties those units should have and how they would affect combat. The first draft (back in 2003) was too detailed with a lot of different units, which would have been to hard to balance. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/30/last-posting-of-this-year/ Sat, 30 Dec 2006 19:22:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/30/last-posting-of-this-year/ I guess this will be the last post on my blog in 2006, and I don’t want to let you switch into 2007 without a last update on the status of Projekt “W”. Again I worked a lot on the code itself, made several changes to make my life as a coder easier (e.g. a global window update, so I don’t have to care about what windows to update on what action) and most important I decided to get rid of the pixelbuffers for offscreen-rendering. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/26/next-feature-almost-done/ Tue, 26 Dec 2006 19:32:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/26/next-feature-almost-done/ Short after finishing the research feature I decided to put my fingers on the espionage part of the game. In the very first drafts this was to be only a minor feature, but I promoted it to a main feature (inlcuding it’s own button in the control center) as it adds an interesting twist to the game. It not only allows you to find weak points of your enemies, it’ll also allow you to sabotage your enemies region and division to e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/22/research-feature-finished-and-much-coding/ Fri, 22 Dec 2006 20:24:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/22/research-feature-finished-and-much-coding/ Contrary to the last few weeks I spent most of my time last days with coding on the game, rather than making content or game design : The research feature I showed off in the last posting is now finished and you can already research your way through the (right now very small) technology tree and stuff like new buildings and technologies are unlocked along the way of your research. There is now also a nice preview image for eacht technology, though I initially wanted to also include a 3D view (like with buildings and units) I decided for just an image that I’ll prerender. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/16/next-feature-plus-some-debugging-and-cheating/ Sat, 16 Dec 2006 21:27:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/16/next-feature-plus-some-debugging-and-cheating/ Now that the regional building feature so far has been finished (I also did two more buildings since the last posting, both for research) I went on to implement the next feature, this time it’s research. I already told you that discovering new technologies would be a part of the game, though it won’t be as complex like e.g. the technology tree in the Civilization series of game, but a lot more simple. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/13/more-content-creation/ Wed, 13 Dec 2006 18:12:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/13/more-content-creation/ This is kind of a continuation to my last posting. I still spent most of the time for the project on doing content. That’s the thing about creating games that I really like, as it doesn’t only mean to write code but also to do a lot of differen things like creating graphics, models, writing a stroy and stuff. So right now I’m more in a mood to create content and that’s exactly what I’m doing. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/09/full-sail/ Sat, 09 Dec 2006 19:05:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/09/full-sail/ I would have updated my blog earlier, but work on PjW has been very fluent since the last updates, and I really got a lot of stuff done over the last weeks, though much of it was behind the scenes and can’t be really shown via screenshots. But let’s begin with the things I did that I can actually show with some nice pictures! Number one : I pushed myself to finally start modelling some of the buildings (after finishing the list of buildings to be in the game, except for some special/military buildings). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/04/regional-3d-view-updated/ Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:07:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/04/regional-3d-view-updated/ The detail window for a player’s region has had a 3D preview of the building you’ve built from the very start of the game’s developement, but it was utterly boring and didn’t fit the rest of the game. So I gave it a spin yesterday and wrote a prototype to try out some new ideas on how to change that 3D preview. After some hours of fiddling with different perspectives and rendering styles I came up with an isometric view that I’m rather content with, though it’s still a wip and everything (especially the 3D models of the buildings) will change, tough the view will stay like this. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/01/tidbits/ Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:04:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/12/01/tidbits/ After the design change, I started to fix/change some smaller things that were still open (although not really annoying) mainly with the UI itself. First I made it a bit transparent, so that the newly designed 3D view now shines through the windows which makes up for a nice effect. For that I also had to change rendering of the windows in such a way that they’re rendered from back-to-front (due to the nature of OpenGL’s alpha blending), but since you usually have no more than five windows open at the same time a cheesy bubble-sort does the job. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/11/26/new-style-for-the-main-3d-view/ Sun, 26 Nov 2006 16:42:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/11/26/new-style-for-the-main-3d-view/ As already hinted at in the last post I decided to change the visual style of PjW towards a different look, which gives the player the feeling of actually having the earth between his fingers, rather than just feeling like floating around it in space. So the last days I spent on changing the visuals of the main 3D view (where you’ll spent most of your time) like I did with the nation selection screen. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/11/22/back-on-the-road-again/ Wed, 22 Nov 2006 19:34:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/11/22/back-on-the-road-again/ After putting a many hours into the latest Guild Wars Chapter (and still enjoying it) I returned to work on PjW again. One of the parts back from the old version still in the current build was the nation selection screen, and I really disliked this one. So after having the initial idea on how the new one had to look, I did a quick drawing of my new ideas and spent the last few hours on creating a new one. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/11/07/ot-what-im-up-to/ Tue, 07 Nov 2006 22:00:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/11/07/ot-what-im-up-to/ As you can guess by the lack of recent updates since releasing the updated NewtonPlayGround, I’m not working on some game/project at the moment. Mainly that’s due to the release of chapter 3 of Guild Wars (aka “Nightfall”), and since I’ve been a Guild Wars player from the first day on when Prophecies was released I couldn’t resist the third chapter (since chapter 2, “Factions” already was awesome). So I bought myself the collector’s edition back on October 27th, and been playing the game since for about 100 hours (I finished it with my Necro from factions and also almost finished it with a Dervish). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/10/22/npg-newtonplayground-1.53-released/ Sun, 22 Oct 2006 15:49:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/10/22/npg-newtonplayground-1.53-released/ Better late then never, and so I finally got around finishing and releasing the new version of my Newtonplayground, namely version 1.53 (to accompany the version of NGD used in this NPG release). If you have followed my blog over the last few days/weeks you’ll already know the biggest changes, namely support for skinned ragdolls and magnetic bodies. Other than that there were some bugfixes and I also changed the context user interface for objects from text based buttons to a graphical one (like the main UI). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/10/10/npg-magnetic-objects/ Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:24:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/10/10/npg-magnetic-objects/ 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). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/10/07/npg-final-skinned-ragdoll-video/ Sat, 07 Oct 2006 23:18:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/10/07/npg-final-skinned-ragdoll-video/ 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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/10/04/npg-preparing-newtonplayground-1.53/ Wed, 04 Oct 2006 10:31:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/10/04/npg-preparing-newtonplayground-1.53/ So after playing some newer games with my new rig (which runs like a charm), I started to do some coding again. And I decided to pause developement on PjW for one or two weaks so that I can finally finish up version 1.53 of the [Newtonplayground]((/creations/newtonplayground/). This was something sitting on my neck for too long now, as I already stated in the newton forums that a new version of NPG was almost finished but somehow I always got distracted and just forgot about that. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/27/ot-new-system/ Wed, 27 Sep 2006 20:15:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/27/ot-new-system/ Ordered sunday evening, the new parts for my dualcore-system arrived tuesday morning and everything went smooth. Assembling went easy as suspected and the system did it’s first boot and Windows XP installed without any problems. But what I’m most happy with is the noiselevel of my new PC. My old parts already were rather silent, but this time it’s so quiet that you almost can’t hear it, no matter if it’s just plain working or under full load when e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/24/game-design-again/ Sun, 24 Sep 2006 17:25:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/24/game-design-again/ I’ve been doing some game design on PjW the last few days and still work a bit on it. That’s why I prefer doing games over other stuff (techdemos, engines), because it includes a lot of different things to do. It’s coding, game design, creating content (3D models and such) and much more. So if you’re tired of one part you just to something different that’s still related to the project. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/20/coding-under-the-hood/ Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:10:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/20/coding-under-the-hood/ And another post without screenshots. That’s because I’ve mainly done stuff under the hood, so there isn’t really much to show with a screenshot this time. First I implemented save games. You may think that it’s not the best idea to implement such a feature at this early stage, but for this type of game it’s really necessary. To make it concrete I’ll use army feature of the game as an example : If I want to test this part of the game I would have to open up the army management dialogue, create a new army, assign it to a region and thest e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/16/gui-sciences-and-stuff/ Sat, 16 Sep 2006 14:46:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/16/gui-sciences-and-stuff/ Over the last days I have put some more work into the user interface, so in addition to the overhauled control center I showed you last time I now also have a (small) system toolbar in the top left of the screen which currently has buttons for saving, loading and quitting the game. But more important is the addition of the most important informations to the control center, so the player is always uptodate on the most important values concerning his nation. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/13/new-control-center/ Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:28:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/13/new-control-center/ After thinking a bit more about the control center, I came to the conclusion that the four buttons I initially had in mind (and more or less implemented) were not enough, which in the end would mean that the player would have to press more than just one button to get to some of the important parts of the game. And since this was something I really wanted to avoid in my current game, I had to redo the buttons and now there are six buttons on the control center. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/12/staff-and-espionage/ Tue, 12 Sep 2006 12:28:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/12/staff-and-espionage/ As opposed to what I planned in my last blog entry, I didn’t do any buildings at all cause I haven’t had much time to do work on the game over the weekend. But that doesn’t mean I did nothing! First thing I did was to flesh out the espionage (and sabotage) part of the game in my design document. At first I wanted this to be a minor part of the game with not many options, but after thinking about the whole espionage and sabotage thing, I decided to give it more importance throughout the game. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/08/buildings/ Fri, 08 Sep 2006 17:21:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/08/buildings/ Yesterday I took the next step on the stairway to finishing my current game. As you could see from the last postings, I implemented the army feature first, and now I also implemented buildings. And after starting on implementing the feature yesterday night I did a “runthrough” and implemented the whole feature, not step-by-step as with the army feature. So I made my WeldEdit export buildinginformation to XML and ingame you can now build them in a region. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/05/update/ Tue, 05 Sep 2006 18:29:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/05/update/ Sadly there are no screenshots to show off this time. But this is mainly due to the fact that I’ve spent the most time on coding the game mechanics, so on the surface nothing has changed but the game is still on it’s track (actually I’m rather surprised at how fast I advance with all the things I have planned). And besides this due to a personal loss in my family I haven’t had that much time to code since my last update. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/01/armies-and-units/ Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:42:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/09/01/armies-and-units/ As I already told at some point, armies will play a great role in my current game, especially since it could get a bit hard trying to take over the world without any armies. So I decided this part to be the first one that I’ll try to get playable before getting to the other parts. After having my WeltEdit so far finished that I was able to create the units that’ll be in the final game, I finished the army building window in the game (see the screenshot) and the player is now able to qeue units which will then be build and transfered into a global unit pool (contrary to my first design draft, units will be managed global, not regional anymore), from which the player can assign them to an army later on. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/29/ingame-hexfield-and-more-gamedesign/ Tue, 29 Aug 2006 21:49:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/29/ingame-hexfield-and-more-gamedesign/ Coding on the game is fun, doing game design is fun, but coding boring tools to create content isn’t. So I usually switch between those three things on the fly, so that the boring part of creating tools doesn’t overweight the fun of doing the creative stuff for my current project. And therefore, after coding some hours on “WeltEdit”, the editor to create all content for my current project I went on to implement the three-dimensional hex battlefield into the game, and now have it up and running in it’s own window, nicely implemented into the GUI. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/26/some-infos-about-gamedesign/ Sat, 26 Aug 2006 16:00:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/26/some-infos-about-gamedesign/ Maybe some of you want to know how I do the design for my games, so I thought to write down something on this. Note : I’m no game designer and I never worked on commercial titles (though my freeware games and apps are rather successfull), so take the following stuff as my personal view on this matter, don’t cite me on this in a fiery discussion or so. Most important notice about gamedesign : https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/25/tools-and-content/ Fri, 25 Aug 2006 20:11:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/25/tools-and-content/ Small note : I now put the abbreviation for the working-title of my current project before postings dealing with it, so you can directly see what the post refers to. The last days I spent on coding the tool needed for putting content into my current project. I already had some tools from the old prototype, but they were neither finished nor what I really wanted to quickly create content. So I made one single application (although not totally finished yet) where I can create all the content for my game, like region-settings, unit-info and buildings and export (and also import from) to XML. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/23/animated-skinned-ui-control/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:49:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/23/animated-skinned-ui-control/ I already wrote (and posted screenshots) about the skinned controls in the GUI of my current project. And this time you can even see it in motion, as I attached a small video I captured of that control which you can see here (it’s a flash movie, about 500 KBytes big). Due to the fact that swf is not the best format for videos it doesn’t look as good as in “reality”, but you should see that I also added a fade-in and fade-out to the controls, so that the buttons slowly fade in and seem to kind of glow out when you leave their mouse area. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/20/gui-coding-and-some-hexes/ Sun, 20 Aug 2006 21:31:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/20/gui-coding-and-some-hexes/ After having done the layout for the GUI, I started to implement a new skinned control into the already existing GUI-part of the project. Basically it’s a control consisting of different parts and every part has it’s own texture (overlay, the whole control has it’s own background) and is activated (rendered) as soon as the mouse cursor enters it’s polygonal area. The area itself is specified as a polygon, so you can recreate every complex shape that such a control can have. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/18/more-on-the-gui/ Fri, 18 Aug 2006 20:38:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/18/more-on-the-gui/ Did some more work on the GUI and I guess what I’ve got now is going to make it into the final game (the screenshot already comes from within the game). It has the control center with all important buttons (still not named on the screenshot) and also plenty of space for the information the player needs to know about. And, most important, it (at least in my opionion) perfectly fits the theme of the game. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/17/some-gui-work/ Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:01:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/17/some-gui-work/ I spent some hours doing the basic layout for the control center of the game I already posted about. After doing some drawings (by hand) to get a hang on how it should look, I fired up photoshop and after several hours (and several designs) I came up with the skeleton you can see in the screenshot (click for bigger view) on the left. Right now it misses captions and symbols, so you can’t see what the buttons (the globe in the middle is, maybe as you already guessed, for ending the current round) are done, but that’ll be added. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/15/refining-the-game-design/ Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:10:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/15/refining-the-game-design/ Well, I’m still working at refining the design of my game project mentioned in my last entry. And since back then, alone the document in which I wrote down changes and additions to the initial gamedesign is already 10 pages long. So the ideas are flowing and everything is coming together. And this also is the first time that I ever invested so much time in writing a game-design document. Up until now I usually just wrote down outlines of my idea and implemented the details while coding, which works fine for arcade-like games (see e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/08/back-again/ Tue, 08 Aug 2006 22:27:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/08/08/back-again/ Well, after a bigger break I’m back at coding again (at least hobby-coding, already did some “serious” coding during the last months) and I have started to work on something new that’s actually rather old : Back in 2003 I started on a roundbased strategy-game and wrote a rather big design document and also made a working prototype (but with no actual gameplay in it). But soon I realised that the design of this game was too complex (both in terms of gameplay and in terms of content I had to create), so I dropped it. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/02/11/newtonplayground-1.51/ Sat, 11 Feb 2006 13:32:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/02/11/newtonplayground-1.51/ As already announced I worked on fixing bugs and problems that users (mostly the users over at the newton boards, so kudos to them) discovered in release 1.5 of the NewtonPlayGround. Sadly there were more bugs and problems than I suspected, but none of them was very serious. So I now (hopefully) present you release 1.51 of the NewtonPlayGround, which can be obtained here. It also includes a new feature, namely dampers, for slider and hinge joints. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/02/07/the-days-after/ Tue, 07 Feb 2006 10:29:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/02/07/the-days-after/ The launch of NewtonPlayGround turned out to be more or less smooth. Though the people that downloaded it already found some bugs, none of them were real showstoppers (which are actually a coders nightmare). Up until now there have been 8 bugs/problems reported, with none of them being something really serious and so I already fixed all those bugs and found two more by myself (also just really small ones). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/31/newton-1.51-out/ Tue, 31 Jan 2006 14:42:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/31/newton-1.51-out/ Already released yesterday (had no time to update my blog), Version 1.51 of the Newton Game Dynamics Engine is out! So grab it while it’s hot. Besides some minor fixes, the vehicle container got a lot of attention in terms of bugfixing and is now a real beauty and fun to use. Note that there were no changes in the headers, so the pascal headers (link) for Newton 1.5 are still working with the 1. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/26/manual-done/ Thu, 26 Jan 2006 14:06:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/26/manual-done/ As I already mentioned (a dozen times or so…) writing manual for your own software is not only utterly boring but also not a very easy task. Why? Well, I’ve been working on the NewtonPlayGround since 2004 and I know it in and out (when you write your own applications, that’s what it should be) and now I had to write a rather large document (it’s in HTML form, with a TOC and so on) that should get people knowing nothing about the NewtonPlayGround started with this application. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/15/newtonplayground-is-basically-done/ Sun, 15 Jan 2006 20:06:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/15/newtonplayground-is-basically-done/ Yes, the application itself is finished! I’ve spent almost all time I could spare since my last posting (on average several hours a day) for finishing and fixing the last few things/quirks that were left and it’s finished as of now. There were many small things that annoyed me, which needed improvement/fixing and that was what I spent those hours on. It’s somehow frightening to see how those small things consume time fixing them, as there were so many. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/10/media-update/ Tue, 10 Jan 2006 22:16:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/10/media-update/ Well, I’m still working hard on the NewtonPlayGround to get it out of the door not too long after the final bugfix release of Newton 1.5, so here is a media update to inform you on what’s up with it. And so to show how much I did with the PlayGround, here are some screenshots : And here are the descriptions (from left to right) : Shot 1 : This is the most recent scene, and I just finished it some minutes ago. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/07/bugs-here-bugs-there-bugs-are-everywhere/ Sat, 07 Jan 2006 11:02:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/07/bugs-here-bugs-there-bugs-are-everywhere/ So every programmer out there knows them and as more complex your programs get, the more likely you’ll encounter them. But what also happens is, that you often (at least when doing hobby development) don’t catch those bugs since they don’t occure to you, but only happen for other users. And especially with a complex application like the NewtonPlayGround, where there is no real limitation in what to do for the user, it’s hard to catch all those bugs. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/03/newton-1.5-is-finally-out/ Tue, 03 Jan 2006 16:22:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2006/01/03/newton-1.5-is-finally-out/ Yes, it’s finally out! Though it’s no longer called 1.35, but 1.5 instead due to the huge number of changes/additions. So go to the Newton Page and download it ASAP. And then get the Delphi/Pascal headers from my Newton Subdomain. This time, it’s not only the updated header, but it also contains a translation of the custom joints that are included in the Newton SDK (see my last news post for more info on what that actually is). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/12/28/newtons-custom-joint-interface/ Wed, 28 Dec 2005 12:43:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/12/28/newtons-custom-joint-interface/ So one of the most interesting features of Newton are the so-called custom joints, which basically expose Newton’s low-level functionality for joints and allow you to create all kind of joints. In the end, this means you’re not bound to the given set of pre-defined joints (like it’s the case with other engines, even most commercial ones like Novodex) and so if you need a joint that Newton doesn’t offer you just create it yourself. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/12/14/1.35-is-around-the-corner/ Wed, 14 Dec 2005 16:24:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/12/14/1.35-is-around-the-corner/ Newton 1.35 Believe it or not, but the 1.35 release of Newton is almost upon us! We SDK-developers are getting constantly updated SDKs (almost every two days or so) and it looks better and better with each SDK. The only thing that’s really left for the Newton makers is now the overhaul of the vehicle container and some tweaking and testing. Julio (the main man behind NGD) already said that he wants to release 1. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/11/28/new-newton-beta-sdk/ Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:18:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/11/28/new-newton-beta-sdk/ So much for the regular updates, but the last weeks have been very dull in terms of coding (did almost nothing with Delphi or any other programming language). But this weekend we SDK-developers got another beta of the Newton 1.35-SDK to try out, so I fired up Delphi, updated the header to the recent beta-SDK and also fixed some minor bugs in the NewtonPlayGround to test it with the new SDK. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/11/10/life-goes-on/ Thu, 10 Nov 2005 14:56:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/11/10/life-goes-on/ One of the bigger things that have been finished was the Direct X .X fileloader. After creating some complex objects and scenes and importing them into the PlayGround, I noticed that lighting wasn’t looking like it should and so I added a small debug-function to the X-loader for outputting the vertex normals into the vertex color to see if normals were loaded correct. And guess what? I forgot to multiply the normals by the rotation part of the meshes’ matrix, which caused them to point into wrong directions. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/23/not-much-happening/ Sun, 23 Oct 2005 14:52:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/23/not-much-happening/ Note: As with the last entry, this is not about programming, so skip if you came for programming information. So as told in my last post I got that new shiny GeForce 6800 and I decided to play some newer games and replay some of the recent ones with the higher details I can now set. Sad thing is that I have almost no free time due to personal reasons, so it’s about 1 or 2 hours of spare time a day in the end. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/19/its-here/ Wed, 19 Oct 2005 16:28:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/19/its-here/ Note : No programming news in this item, so if you don’t wanna know about my new gfx-cards, skip this post. As usual, Amazon was lighting fast with their delivery. The mail that my new graphics card was dispatched arrived yesterday in the late evening and the card was already here this morning. Why I order hardware at Amazon? Because getting any of the GeForce 6800 cards for AGP is almost impossible now. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/18/follow-up-to-the-last-post-and-more/ Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:53:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/18/follow-up-to-the-last-post-and-more/ So I finally implemented the new DirectX 3D file format (I mentioned in the last posting, the terrain and vehicle in the screenshot are loaded from .X files) into the NewtonPlayGround. It wasn’t really much work and I also did some more additions to the loader. It now loads textures into a global texture pool, which saves much memory when you have several meshes with the same texture in one scene (e. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/14/switching-formats/ Fri, 14 Oct 2005 10:23:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/14/switching-formats/ So I’m doing 3D coding for quite some time now (over 6 years afair, at least with OpenGL) and the only 3D file format I’ve used in all those years was the 3DS - format, which is still widely used (due to the fact that almost every 3D modeller can export/import it and there are plenty of loader) but by nowadays standards totally out-dated. And due to it’s age this format has some drawbacks that recently made me want to get rid of it. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/10/porting-the-newtonplayground/ Mon, 10 Oct 2005 10:27:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/10/porting-the-newtonplayground/ Porting small demos (like the SDL-Newton demos) is something trivial, but porting such a big application like the NewtonPlayGround is a rather hard and also time-consuming task, so I’ll have to put some thoughts into this before making decissions that I later on may regret. Porting it to other OS’es than Win32 was initially not on my list, but Dominique Louis pointed out that I should use SDL to start with porting, but sadly that’s not the only thing that needs to be done. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/05/springtime/ Wed, 05 Oct 2005 15:47:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/05/springtime/ …is gladly over as I prefer winter. But the title is there to describe the latest addition to the NewtonPlayGround, namely Springs. Implementing them was rather easy, and I took my informations on springforces from this article. Right now there are only unlimited springs in, but I also plan on implementing limited springs. If you’re interested, you can see a video of the newly added springs here (1.75 MBytes, WMV). Depending on how you use them they give some nice, unpredictable (at least for humans) results that make for some great fun. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/03/cel-shading/ Mon, 03 Oct 2005 20:01:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/10/03/cel-shading/ Some time back I already did two demos on cel-shading, which is an easy to implement technique to give a whole scene a comic-like look. It’s especially good-looking on scenes that aren’t too complex and incoroprate mainly basic primitives. So I decided to put this render mode into the NewtonPlayGround : As you can see when comparing the two shots (Well, in case you didn’t realize it : the left one has cel-shading on, the right one not) cel-shading really gives that scene some unique and interesting touch. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/29/newtons-new-vehicle-container/ Thu, 29 Sep 2005 12:13:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/29/newtons-new-vehicle-container/ It has long been promised and finally it’s gonna happen : Newton’s overhauled vehicle container is on the way. And luckily I’m an SDK developer, so I already have access to the new beta SDK and implemented it directly into my current build of the NewtonPlayGround. And with one word : awesome. The container prior to 1.35 was not only inflexible but also very hard to configure. Creating vehicles with a stiff suspension was almost impossible and getting a vehicle to react the way you wanted it to react often took hours of testing and tweaking. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/26/different-shadow-techniques/ Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:02:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/26/different-shadow-techniques/ This time it’s not a topic about physics, but about rendering. One important thing that gives the user a feeling about how a body is positioned are shadows. Since shadows are a nature given “feature” of reality everyone will be able to at least guess the position of an object by the size and perspective of it’s shadow. A very small shadow usually tells you that an object is far above the shadowed object, and the bigger the shadow get’s the closer the object approaches the shadow receiver. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/23/newtonplayground-again-and-dawn-of-war-addon/ Fri, 23 Sep 2005 16:07:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/23/newtonplayground-again-and-dawn-of-war-addon/ So yesterday I finally finished getting motorized and limited joints to work in my NewtonPlayGround. This means that hinges and universals can now not only be motorized but they also can be limited and the motor then will change it’s direction after one of the limits is reached. This is especially interesting for creating complexer walkers which e.g. have a walk cycle. So on a quick test I put together a humanoid walker that almost walks on two legs using those motorized and limited joints. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/19/its-walking/ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:19:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/19/its-walking/ As a follow-up to my last post where I showed you a first version of a more complex walker I was building using the newly implemented features for my PlayGround I now have a video (WMV, 2.7 MBytes) of a more simple walker walking around. Due to a bug in the current beta of Newton, the legs of the other more complex walker won’t work as supposed, so I just created this more simple walker and will start getting the other one to walk as soon as this bug is corrected (Julio, the main head behind NGD already is working on it. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/14/what-im-currently-working-on/ Wed, 14 Sep 2005 11:20:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/14/what-im-currently-working-on/ I had some hours to spare recently, so I decided to put in some new features into my NewtonPlayGround. Some of you know that tool, it’s an app for showing off what the Newton Game Dynamics engine is capable off. It allows the user to create it’s own scene (even very complex ones) and play around with them, save them and even pass them around. The version currently in the makings will be released shortly after NGD 1. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/07/growing-up-with-and-shaping-up-an-api/ Wed, 07 Sep 2005 21:10:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/07/growing-up-with-and-shaping-up-an-api/ This is something I wanted to get out for some time now : When I first found out about the Newton Game Dynamics SDK it was a fresh physics SDK around the block and much stuff was lacking (although it already was very impressive in terms of how it calculated physics). So I saw an opportunity to not only create demos and stuff for a very new API, but also to help shaping up and evolving with that API. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/04/ageia-putting-an-end-to-realistic-in-game-physics/ Sun, 04 Sep 2005 16:58:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/04/ageia-putting-an-end-to-realistic-in-game-physics/ Well it seems that Ageia is planning to get a monopoly on real-time physics in the gaming sector. After announcing their PPU some months ago they recently just purchased Meqon, who provided another real-time physics SDK aimed at game developers. This somehow reminds me of what Creative Labs did some years ago when they realized that Aureal 3D had some good sound hardware : They just bought them, took all usefull stuff for their own and abandoned everything Aureal 3D related. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/02/first-entry/ Fri, 02 Sep 2005 18:57:00 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2005/09/02/first-entry/ Welcome to my blog, this is my first entry to it and I intend to update it at least 2 or 3 times a week. Most of the visitors here may know me from my primary homepage www.delphigl.de and the various forums (NGD, PGD, DGL) I am (or better said “was”) active. I will mainly use it for news and talks about my programming stuff (Newton, OpenGL, Delphi), and maybe some technical stuff that caters to those topics (hardware and so on). https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/bean-machine/ Tue, 01 Jun 2004 14:50:31 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/bean-machine/ About After I already transported a videogame classic into a modern 3D environment (“Napalm Bomber 3D”) I decided to do the same thing to another of my 16-Bit favorites. The advantage of creating a clone is at hand : You don’t have to design a new game from scratch and you can jump right into developement. So this time I took Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine (in asia also known as Puyo Puyo) that has been released by Sega on their MegaDrive (Genesis) in 1994. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/terrorcide-tnsod/ Sat, 01 May 2004 18:48:54 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/terrorcide-tnsod/ About As a fan of old Shoot-em’Up classics like R-Type and Salamander you often have no other choice than firing up an emulator and to play those gems there, but with their old 2D-graphics. And with Terrorcide (“The Nuclear Sword of Damocles”) I wanted to recreate the feeling of such games for the PC, together with modern graphics, effects and a story-based gameplay (the classics usually don’t have had real stories). https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/unknown-constellation-opengl/ Wed, 01 Jan 2003 19:42:59 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/unknown-constellation-opengl/ About I initially started programming “Unknown Constellation” in early 2001 as the “sequel” to Sidus Obscurus. This time, the gameplay should have been much more strategic, as seen in games like Master of Orion or Ascendancy and it should have better visuals. But then I made a big mistake and started coding it using DirectDraw, and after running into some display problems and serious speed problems due to the fact that DirectDraw today is almost unaccelerated, I stopped the whole project. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/napalm-bomber/ Wed, 01 Jan 2003 19:19:36 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/napalm-bomber/ About Napalm Bomber 3D is a remake of Hudson Soft’s classic Bomberman(tm), but with enhanched 3D-graphics using OpenGL. The project started out as a base for a series of tutorials, the I released for the Delphi-OpenGL-Community. But over the time, I added new features and expanded the game, so that it became a full fledged, good looking and fun to play game. The version that I finally released as freewaere includes a lot of different levels on different scenarios, renders realistic shadows, animated player models and nice looking explosions. https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/terrain-texture-generator/ Tue, 01 Jan 2002 20:25:54 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/terrain-texture-generator/ About As the ZornGL-Engine had it’s own terrainrenderer, I decided to write this tool that can automatically generate a single huge texture map for a terrain. Based on the height-values in a greyscale image (the heightmap) it generates a single texture with a given set of texture distrbuted depending on the height of the map at a certain point. Over time the tool evolved and a lot of functionality was added, even upon user request as this tool seems to be widely used (even in some known projects). https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/sidus-obscurus/ Sat, 01 Jan 2000 21:10:19 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/creations/sidus-obscurus/ About Sidus Obscurus was my first big game project that I wrote using Delphi and Win32. Back in the days I didn’t knew about OpenGL so it used some very old DirectX-components for Delphi (called DGC) which gave me a lot of trouble later on as they didn’t work with newer DirectX versions. In total I worked around 2 years on this game, gameplay was a bit like Ascendancy with it’s space exploration, resarch and different alien races but combined with a real-time-strategy part.