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10:00 pm (CST): AVALANCHE is here. 3:00 am (CST): I'm going to say, ready by June. Barring any unexpected medical circumstances, because I appear to be falling apart and my jaw is killing me, and as always there is significant chance that someone is going to try to kill me for being such a Dick. Oh, and today is the birthday of a very special person. The person with the power to change the world. That's right, I'm not just talking about someone who happens to be delusional and overly-conceited, I'm talking about George Lucas. I think that George's birthday should be declared a national holiday, so that we can all dress up like Star Wars characters and celebrate the shallowness of our existence. I know that's what I'll be doing today. I call Han, don't copy me you bastards. 12:00 am (CST): It's already been a month. I guess I'll push out that Dixerius release I talked about. I haven't actually been developing Dixerius at all, but since it shares the engine code-base with my active project, it's getting free benefits. Here's what's new in version 2.2:
  8:30 pm (CST): I'm actually not being lazy, I've spent the last month working non-stop on the Next Project. I don't intend to reveal anything until it's ready for an initial release. I have no idea what the timeline is currently, but probably within another month. Maybe a couple weeks depending on how the content creation phase continues to proceed. I'll have a new Dixerius version up soon with a ridiculous amount of added technology items as well. 11:00 pm (CST): It's that time again. A new Dixerius release (v2.1) and SDK release (v0.2) are now available. Here is some of what's new:
11:00 pm (CST): I've been working a lot over the past couple days, and have another Dixerius release with the following new features:
1:30 pm (CST): There has been a lot going on lately. I left Human Head again, in order to pursue my own business ventures. That's all moving forward, but I'm waiting on other people to be able to know exactly what I'm going to end up doing. I was also tied up a bit more than usual by the fact that I've been seeing a woman (this happens rarely in my cycle of life, because women are hateful and vile creatures, except for my Amy!), but that's kind of offset back into place now that I'm a jobless bum again. So, until I can move forward in doing something that is actually productive for my career, I'm going to get back to working on the R-Cube and that other project I keep talking about. As part of that, I wrote some more mesh optimization/combining routines into mesh2rdm, and added some extra collision and server-side mesh support to the R-Cube. There are new versions of Dixerius and mesh2rdm up that reflect those changes. I'm probably going to put a server logic module SDK up in the near future, even though I know that not a single person is going to care or use it. Maybe I can bother some people I know to make them pretend like they care (Josh) and make something with it (DON'T ARGUE WITH ME), at least. Well, I'll see you all in hell, then. 2:30 pm (CST): New version of Dixerius up. This is probably a final-ish version. The hope is to keep the engine completely unified with the next game I'm making in the technology, which is the whole reason for these Dixerius releases. This one has the following improvements:
12:30 am (CST): I haven't been feeling well lately. I think the back of my cranium may be preparing to explode outward. Anyway, following up on the previous post, I've been writing Q3 BSP support into mesh2rdm. It's done. It converts all of the lightmaps/lightgrid and visibility/tree data to my own formats as well. The nice thing about how the R-Cube handles this is that every model is still its own completely contained thing. So you can have completely vis'd Quake3 BSP's floating around in the world and inter-connected. mesh2rdm also supports deforming and scaling of the mesh, and it will modify all of the node/leaf data and such to compensate for this. It also automatically merges leaf surfaces. If you know anything about q3bsp, you know why this is a very useful thing.  That is an animated pinky with shadowmaps casting from a direct light and shadowed area being filled in by a directional ambient factor. The lightmaps and directionality are still completely tied into my special "ambient light" type, which now has various types of handling for various texture shader/geometry setups. Generally speaking, it's pretty awesome. I'm going to add support for Jedi Knight 2/Jedi Academy BSP's to mesh2rdm as well. I don't actually know what needs to be done there, but it probably isn't all that significant. Oh, and versions of Dixerius (the R-Cube engine) and mesh2rdm which support all of this stuff are now up for download. Like anyone cares. 1:30 pm (CST): It's been a while since I've really worked on anything in my spare time. I just don't have the energy these days. But this weekend I've been making various improvements to the R-Cube engine. Previously, I had a special ambient light type that has no attenuation and just does a pass with some baked in normal highlights. I decided that looked kind of stupid, so I decided to do something that's still stupid but a little more interesting.  This is just indexing into a gradient based on the local modelview-transformed normal and the normal map so that everything is uniform. I'm sure it would look better if I had some semblance of ambient sources. Despite that though I think it looks nice. I've also been doing a bunch of re-organization and optimization in the renderer. The ultimate goal here is to prepare the engine for a new game that I've been plotting, but there is one more major technology addition to go before I'm ready for that. 12:30 pm (CST): New version of Dixerius is up. Mostly experimental renderer changes, as well as various speedups and visual improvements. 3:00 pm (CST): There is a new version of Dixerius up, which features mostly tweaks for musical mode.  I also forgot to post about a crappy little webcam monitoring program I put up a while ago called DixAlert. It currently only has some noise analysis logic and no actual feature detection, although the e-mail and export options are useful. While I haven't been updating a lot lately, there are a lot of projects I want to do, from experimental software rasterizers to R-Cube Engine enhancements and stand-alone games. Unfortunately, I have no time in which to work on these projects. Damn the man. Oh, and I added a Links section to the web site. So you can go visit the wonderful places I visit. 1:00 pm (CST): Rather shockingly this morning I received an e-mail, from someone who was having a small problem with Virtual6502 displaying unrecognizable characters in the disassembly and memory views. The reason this was shocking is because I didn't think anyone was actually using the program, much less for serious development purposes. So that news made me happy. So, thanks to his help in testing, I managed to fix the problem, and there is a new version up with the fix. You can get it in the 6502 section of the site. 6:30 am (CST): I guess I forgot to mention that I've released a couple versions of Dixerius. It also contains a built-in animator now. Here is a scene made with the Dixerius animator and mesh2rdm tool.  Dixerius v1.1 and mesh2rdm can both be downloaded from Games/Tech->General. 1:30 am (CST): So, shortly after saying I was going to be busy with work, my office burned down. Yes, I was a little surprised about that one too. So, you know what they say. When life gives you lemons, make some damn code. I've released my mesh2rdm tool, which evolved into a bit of a previewer for Final Fantasy VII PlayStation-format battle models as well. It exports them with a variety of options, including their texture maps and all of their animations and weapon models. I also made a lovely feature that generates a diffuse texture map based on vertex colors in the model, and makes appropriate adjustments to the texture coordinates with vertex duplication on the output model. That makes the models easily usable in modern engines, because pretty much no modern engine supports painting vertex colors onto models. In addition to all of that fancy exporting, you can also set the program up to view FF7 LZS models and use it to look at them by simply double-clicking them in explorer. All around usefulness there. You can get it in the games/tech section under technology. Here are some pretty pictures I took while messing with the resulting models.     So there is that, I may be making something with FF7 resources that requires the original PSX disc to install (kind of like the GLTriad requiring FF8 disc stuff), but if I do it won't be done for a very long time. Probably going to be getting back to work again since we are starting to sort things out now, hopefully my coworkers don't start spontaneously combusting as a result of me saying that. 8:00 pm (CST): Quake Royale had a good (short) run. I've been busy with work stuff and will continue to be, so I don't think I'll be making any big releases or updates (generally, not just referring to Quake Royale) for a while. That is, other than for silly little projects that can be done within a day or something. I've also been poking around and trying to find out who to contact to get the Jedi Knight engine source released. I tried rallying up what's left of the horrible community over at Massassi to begin with, but mainly got people going "it'll never work :(", as well as some people being downright spiteful and angry (in that special closed-game-community "we're special, we don't care if you are correct and more knowledgeable, we will post long paragraphs of nonsense and call you stupid anyway" kind of way). So because that has failed, the only route is a good producer contact or something. We'll see how that goes. Right now I'm coming down with a ridiculous fever and my skin hurts. Goodnight. 12:30 pm (CST): So, that Quake project I was working on. IT HAS BEGUN. 3:00 am (CST): I've embarked on my traveling, but I figured I'd make an update before I actually leave the country. I'll be going away and coming back in a few weeks, so any e-mail, forum posts, people waiting for JK2 forum authorization, etc. will probably have to wait until then. In the mean time, I've been working seriously on a Quake mod. Yes, Quake 1. I've spent most of my time writing the engine for it, but that is about done. The mod itself will be finished shortly after I return, and it will be epic. Here are some tech shots in the mean time.     All assets are upsampled and cached at runtime, so the engine looks its best without any new resources. It's QuakeWorld-based and works fine with custom skins as well. It scales all the way back down to something that looks close to normal Quake (although it still upsamples textures by 2x or 4x unless you explicitly disable this). I'm pretty happy with it (although I need to write some better filtering for those crappy alpha textures) and am about ready to move onto content creation and gameplay. Well, see you in a few weeks. Archived updates... All works on this web site are the result of my own personal efforts, and are NOT in any way supported by any given company. You alone are responsible for any damages which you may incur as a result of this web site or files related to this web site. |