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Bought an iPad about two days ago.

Started creating a game for my tablet with Dragonfire SDK  It’s a simple API and in one evening I got good results….

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.

Started creating a game for my ipad about one month ago. These screenies show some progress.

The game is loosely based on Topo for the C64. Oddly enough it’s created by C.Kramer, and my name is F.Kramer (what a strange coincidence). See Youtube for the gameplay.

The next is a screenie of topotablet game running on the DragonFire SDK Emulator. Because each build should be uploaded to the buildserver of Dragonfire this meant uploading around 15 mb every time I wanted to created a build. So I decided to make very lossly compressed images (and removed the detail) of the world map. Now each build is around 2Mb in size.

Heli animation is done. I want to create a crisp font for this game, but this is a lot of work (especially because there are no font editors avaiable).

The animation for the city is ready too. The only things remaining are a menu, game logic and a highscore table.

 

This is an artist impression of the app on an iPad (rendered). You can barely see the heli…

I have finally found enough time to look at some problems with the planetary engine I am working on.
One of them was the clipping of the parts of the planet. Some parts were shown when others were not.
The second was that there were more holes in the geometry than swiss cheese. This was because the geometry rendering was not correct.

 

It should be very round to look like a planet, but It really looks like mentos candy right now. The above picture was ripped from my planetary engine and rendered in my favourite 3d program to really look at he geometry.

I

Above you can see a lot of geometry was missing. This was due to the amount of primitives I gave for the set of indices in DrawUserIndexPrimitives.If you are drawing Trianglestrips then you need to have two vertices to start the trianglestrip and after that 1 index for each triangle in the strip.It’s explained very clearly in Riemers article about it.

This is a screenshot from my planetary engine. It runs about 5 to 60 fps, so that’s not very stable.

Yess!!!

I managed to certify for the Web Components Developer exam.

It was very though but I managed to get 71% on the exam, and you need 70% so that was close…

am working on a planetary engine (a real time procedural planet engine) for use in my space simulator space engine shooter adventure.

The planet rendering code is ported from IUE

As you can see there is a lot to do:

• Add texturing
• Fix Gaps in the patches
• Elevation data does not seem to get through
• Fix all problems related to OpenGL porting to Directx (XNA)
• Performance (now around 10 fps)
• Camera movement and other rendering problems
• A lot, lot more….

But for the first try to port this thing it’s actually a quite good result. I am also making a C# – OpenGL port to make the transition of the procedural geometry generation easier.