Although I have not posted any updates for a while I am no slouch. Of course given my .MAP tutorials that are still in progress it is clear that I am still working. But that is really only the tip of the iceberg. I left DirectX 10 behind long ago but have recently been catching [...]
20
May
Making Buildings from .MAP Files Part 2
Overview This is part 2 of my series on loading buildings/interiors/maps from Valve Hammer Editor .MAP files. Part 1 can be found here. The purpose of this tutorial is ultimately to generate a convex solid-leaf BSP tree in which each leaf contains at least part of a room. Generating convex sets of polygons is the first [...]
14
May
Making Buildings from .MAP Files Part 1
Overview Valve Hammer Editor is a pretty common tool for making buildings and structures for games these days, and in some cases entire levels. It exports .MAP files containing solids, called “brushes”, which make up the solid areas of the building/structure/map. There are a few tools that can convert these to .BSP files for use [...]
31
Mar
Fixed-Time-Step Implementation
Overview There are many topics covering the concept behind fixing your time step. Last time I read them was many years ago and having just re-read them I just realized they already cover about 50% of what I planned to cover, but while they do give implementations and explain certain concepts fairly well, people still [...]
11
Mar
[Update] Post Processing
Another progress update. There isn’t much special to say about what I have added because it is fairly standard post-processing, but I felt a few screenshots would be of interest for anyone following this project. I generally lay down a solid foundation before adding any features. I could have added post-processing long ago but I [...]
11
Mar
Passing Data Between Game States
Overview I mentioned in the previous article that passing data between game states is easy enough, and a many readers wanted to know how this could be done. So by popular demand I will provide 2 methods for how this can be done. I will also go into more detail on how state changes are [...]
03
Mar
General Game/Engine Structure
Overview The subject of how one should organize a game has been appearing a lot lately. Mainly these questions are focused on how to organize all the different parts of the game, such as the menu, the gameplay area, the bonus rounds, the story screens, etc. The most common proposal I see are switch cases [...]
15
Feb
DXT Compression Revisited
Pre(r)amble I made a previous post on a new method for compressing images into the DXT format. Various sources, including former NVIDIA employee Ignacio Castaño, agreed that the quality was not quite what it should be, and I began a more thorough investigation into why. Some of my test images also had a few bad artifacts [...]
04
Jan
iOS Support
A few weeks ago I purchased a MacBook Pro and later began the arduous process of porting the engine to iOS. My engine is organized into mini-engines, which are each their own projects (brought together into one master project) and build into separate libraries. The sound library, terrain library, physics library, etc. This keeps things [...]
01
Dec
New DXT Compressor (Algorithm Explained)
Overview DXTn is a type of image compression whose decompression is hardware-accelerated, which means you can send the same amount of texture information over the bus to the graphics card for a much smaller bandwidth fee since it does not need to be decompressed before the transfer. This makes DDS files using the DXTn compression [...]