DarkVoid Online blogs

Progress

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 16:32:14 +0000

Well, shield effects are in, which means collision detection is in too. I've also managed to reduce the lag spikes that were happening when using a proper server.

Unfortunatly, I've also managed to 1/2 the frame rate with the addition of then new effects and the collision detection routines

I've also added 'wasd' controls, just do the same as the cursor keys, but it was requested and easy . I've also added the stabilisor function. If you are out of control, press and hold 'T' until you feel ready to take control again.

Crashing in to a barrel and lighting the shields up

Movement tests

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 00:26:16 +0000

Well, I *think* i've got basic movement nailed, it seems to fly nicely to me now. Feel free to 'play now' and try it .

Currently there are some diagnosic lines present, which show the fly by wire working under the hood

Red/Green/Blue are local x/y/z axis, orange is current velocity vector, cyan is current thrust vector

Shields are next I think

Progress

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 22:59:29 +0000

Well I've managed to make quite good progress. I now have a basic audio system in place. I had some issues, but once I figured out that I need to use the same thread throughout my sound calls it all seems to work. I stream the audio right out of the jar files which means no loading time .

I've also added the roll feature so you can roll the craft.

And it's all uploaded and webstartable

It's currently sitting around 14 meg download, but 8 of that is models and music .

Enjoy!

Eye candy

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 23:06:05 +0000

I've been doing a lot of back end server type work on DVSF recently, ut I've had time to do some tweaks here and there also.

Ok, it's not exactly earth shattering, but I'm farly happy with it so far.

A while ago I discovered the Subsance LAF for Java, and the one of the themes seemed quite nice, so I played around and managed to get it in to DV. I've also looked in to GUI designers for swing apps, and found the formsdesigner for the goodies layout, it's not that bad and quite quickly a simple login screen was created.

I then went on to reskin the standard screen options dialog, so it looks more in keeping with the theme

Large changes

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:34:50 +0000

Well I've been at it again as you can see from the subversion logs. I've updated the version of SGS I'm using, which revealed a bug in my log formatter. The major change is the client is now multi-threaded, the idea here is to take advantage of multi core processors. This has caused me to think about the architecture of the software a little more and I have managed to seperate the components a lot more and I am fairly happy with the result. I *should* be able to swap components, update them or add them quite easily in future.

FSAA

Sat, 13 May 2006 20:49:21 +0000

Kev got FSAA working for his title 'Tilt'. Not one to be outdone, I thought I would give it a go. It's remarkably easy. It doesn't even seem to effect my frame rate that much .

Here are 2 images, one with, and one without the sample rate increased.

Enjoy

With samples set to 4 some of the jaggies go away, particularly on the pilons on the ship.

No Anti Aliasing

New webstart version

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 14:29:12 +0000

There is a server running now.

The webstart version has been updated to connect to it. It does nothing, but it's there and talking.

The user Guest exists and you can stick anything in as the password for now.

Coo

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:07:45 +0000

I was playing in a blockade on puzzle pirates tonight and the flag i'm in use ventrilo for voice comms, which has no linux port. So I booted in to the OS of the beast. The blockade has been over for a while now, and in the calming down before I head to bead, I though I would try DV client. During the performance problems I was getting about 80fps. I managed to get this up to 196fps. On the same machine, windows is giving me 430fps!!!. The odd thing is, doom3 runs faster under linux on this laptop.

I'm all confused.

I'm currently looking at using SGS for the network code and back end.

Performance increase

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 22:58:17 +0000

At last.

I've been chasing a huge performance issue the last week or so and suddenly tonight I've fixed it. This has more than doubled my framerate at home. There as still tweaks to be made to allow for large combat, but that can wait till there is something to have a large combat in. I've done what I need too for now it seems.

New webstart version uploaded of course

New upload

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 21:30:08 +0000

I think I have sorted the loader now, does averaging of normals for smoother objects. I've also played with the lights in the scene .

Go play now

Loader problems again

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 21:36:02 +0000

Having loaded in the first of the new models, some issues with the model loader have been revealed, including the fact that I hadn't got round to smoothed normals yet.

More to do before I get to the network code again

New models

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 19:17:33 +0000

James Studdart has offered to do some models for DV.

Checkout some of his excelent inital models here or visit his home page to see more of his work.

More loader issues, but getting there.

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 23:12:12 +0000

I've discovered a couple of interesting 'features' in my ac3d loader. One that I expected is that although ac3d supports convex and concave polygons, opengl doesn't. It's easy enough as I can just triangulate my models in AC3D and it's sorted. I will make it so that the loader looks at the number of vertecies for a surface, and if it's 3 will use gl triangle instead of gl polygon. At the moment it just uses polygon. The unexpected one is that if I load say 3 models, and there are shared textures (at the moment all my models share all thier textures as they are derivitives of the same object) then if I don't render the first one loaded, the textures on the others go missing. Which is an issue.

Input handling

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 07:36:05 +0000

A few guys from LWJGL tried this out last night and had some issues. One of which was jinput on linux not quitting properly. I already knew about this issue, but at the time I was the only one who had seen it so I wasn't bothered. As it was spotted again I went ahead and fixed it. So thats one bug done.

There are another couple to fix it seems. On windows it may be choppy. I could just vsync and sort it, but I rather like reports of 800+ fps . It also seems to hand on 1 piece of hardware, before it even loads the fighter, which is worrying.

Bah

Loading done!!!!

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 07:43:05 +0000

Well. I think it is anyway. The ac3d loader I wrote will only render tga textures, but thats due to the rendering tech rather than the loader itself. The models appear now, and seem to have the right materails and the right textures exactly as they appear in AC3D itself.

I'm not sure what the next step is, probably to organise things a little better. At the moment the game is populated in the main loop and I want to move game objects off in to the game world data structure where it shoud be. This will mean that adding, removing and updating objects like ships etc will be nice and easy.