DarkVoid Online

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.

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.

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

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.

I figured out why my loaded models where all black, was due to the textures. The bits themselves now load ok, it's just where they are placed. Oh, and the texture repeat .

Well, i've done some more testing, and it's certainly my loader. I stuck in some basic cubes with various materials and lighting and it all works well. It seems that if I remove the position information from the AC3D model i see geometry, although it's all black. So I have at least 2 issues there to fix

Working on the AC3DLoader. Think it's almost there, although nothing shows up. I'm assuming (problably wrongly) that it's just a tweak I need to sort it all out.