Month: June 2011

A small improvement on the Realtime planet rendering front.

Normals are working and the lighting now really hits off the planet.

It looks a bit dull right now but texturing is the next big thing. And off course a lot a thing don’t look good, like:

1.Cracks

2.Up close it’s a mess. Something does not render well.

3.Textures don’t work although the loading functions should work properly.

What I really would like is to enable normal map texturing, because this would dramatically increase the detail.

I have created a true type with a nifty tool named Scanahand

What this tool does is take a sheet of characters (created by hand and scanned in) detect the edges and transform it into a TTF font!

The font can be used in my game psirens and topotablet with existing tools to create fonts. A lot more precise than the bitmaps I had created before.

I have use the tool Type light 3.0 a nice freeware product capable of making or tweaker the vector graphics from an existing true type font.

When I first started on porting the IUE Planetary Engine I tried to bridge the Gap between Open GL and Directx (XNA) by using a C# framework that enables me to use OpenGL.

Well the framework used is the Open Toolkit Library and is, like XNA, more than just a graphics framework. It has besides OpenGL support for input/music and AI. I mainly used it to see if the Geometry part of the porting is correct. And besides that it has some benefits over debugging a VC++ 6.0 application in an obsolete Visual Studio IDE and Visual C# Express 2010.

I’ve spent a week to see something in the viewport, but It didn’t. Than I suddenly found that the ViewMatrix was wrong (If something doesn’t render always look first at the ViewMatrix and than the world matrix).

Boom, a full planet showed up!! After fixing some input I could seamlessly zoom in and out of the planet at high framerates! So It’s a big step ahead into making this work….

Some updates on the planetary engine front.

Fixed a enormous amount of bugs and graphical artifacts.

• Use TriangleList instead of TriangleStrips (they will be used for easier batching)
• Fixed Matrix calculation and camera frustum calculation
• Heigth calculation works correctly
• Geometry looks correct with trianglelist

Some problems / things todo remain though

• The shape still is oval
• Rotating around the planet is not stable
• No lighting/normals
• No texturing
• Rendering though VertexBuffers and IndexBuffers
• Performance is bad because of the lack of buffers.