Kickoff

Here we are. This is my blog. This is where I write particular thoughts associated with moments in time, thus logging things I think and do.

But that's obvious. Sorry; writing as I think. *Ahem*

Let's be specific. This is a place where I log things I am developing/working on. That is, projects of mine. What sort of projects do I work on? Well, there's many sorts, actually. I'm either a renaissance man, or a jack of all trades; further data is necessary to decide just how pretentious I sound right about now.

Music, coding, illustration, 3d modelling, writing, designing. That's the basic summary. These are primarily geared towards the overall domain of `computer game development', but not necessarily.

Well, that's the Cliff's Notes, let's cease the blathering and begin the blog in earnest. I will begin by outlining the primary collection of my current projects:

• Synergy Engine
  
  This is a game engine I have been coding in C++ using the Allegro, AllegroGL (weaning off of this) and OpenGL libraries. It's very much in its infant stages currently. I called it the Synergy Engine primarily because that is how it began; simply a combination of many different fragments of code and classes that I had previously written, formed into a working system. Thus, the engine was devised under the concept of attaining a `power' that was more than the sum of its pieces, but rather from the synergy of their cooperation.
  
  It originally was scoped to be primarily 2D in its functionality, but curiosity and to a lesser extent boredom bested me, and I began to focus principally on 3D rendering. So far it has been very fun, satisfying, educational and fruitful. What I have currently is 1024 lit cubes floating around in space at 40Hz, mouse-look and WASD controls for transforming the camera, console commands for controlling variables, error logging and some basic resource caching. Should be cross-platform compatible (though I definitely wouldn't stake my life on that). Not bad for someone who only vaguely knew the rendering pipeline conceptually before commencing the project.
  
  
• Ultragraph
  
  Fantastic name, I know. How do I begin describing this project without sounding like the hugest nerd in the world. Wait, we crossed that threshold long before now, so I'll just go all-out:
  
  Ultragraph is a program that allows a user to model mathematical graphs in 3D, assigning custom data to vertices and edges, and performing a number of queries and operations on graphs such as topological sorting, traversing, spanning tree, circuit finding, path finding, travelling sales person, etc. I want to add a number of other tools, such as support for layers, hiding/showing of groups of vertices and operation/state history. I'm sure there's things I've left out.
  
  The main purpose of the program is to allow for something I call Knowledge Management. Basically, we can use graphs with state histories and layers to model the `knowledge' of some entity, such as a character. Vertices contain data which may be as simple as a text string pertaining to some proposition that is held to be true by the entity's knowledge, such as `All men are mortal'.
  
  Edges can represent a lot of different things, but principally I think they are best used for modelling causality between propositions. Perhaps logical dependency (that is if there is an edge (A, B), then B depends upon A being true. That is, if A is false, B must also be false. We could also use weighted edges to model probabilistic inferences.
  
  `Okay,' you might be saying, `WHY would you want that?' Well, turns out, I think it's an extremely useful tool for role playing. Yes, I mean role playing as in sitting at a table with other people, and dice, and character sheets and `The pungent stench of mildew emanates from the wet dungeon walls,' style conversation. Well not exactly. More so the internet forum mutation of role playing; the non-real-time stuff.
  
  If you are playing a highly intelligent, analytical character, having a mathematical model of all of their knowledge accumulated over the entire coarse of the role play, that you can query and use for inference, is something which will really cut down how long it takes you to make a post, and it will make your character behaviour a lot cooler, because you'll truly be playing a character that never lets a fact slip (unless you, the player, play that they slipped it).
  
  So it gives you much more control. Anyway, there's many many other applications for such a program besides role playing; graphs are hugely applicable to all sorts of things. Anyway, that's Ultragraph.
  
  
• Zanath
  
  This is an 3D Action-RPG in the vein of Zelda:OOT. I know what you're thinking, `RPG = dead project walking'. Well, it's not really my project, I'm just on board for it, so that doesn't really bother me; if it survives, that's great; if it doesn't, I'll live.
  
  I'm currently doing concept art for environments and modelling some basic terrain for engine testing purposes. As well as dropping my thoughts on game play and story
  considerations pretty much every chance I get, which is quite often.
  
  
• Music Project (Cable Sack, Obscura Child)
  
  Title undecided at this point. Collaboration with my best friend and other associates. We have a solid concept that we are constructing and extrapolating from, and some interesting ideas on possible working process paradigms. Not much more can be said at this point, it's very young.

Today was reasonably progressive; I did an Edit for someone I know from Pixel Joint, who's doing a Runescape sig; here's how that shaped up:

Original

Edit

Turned him into a monster! Satisfying, since I haven't really touched any digital art since the start of the semester (14 weeks ago, and I wasn't exactly in-form even back then, anyway). Felt good to get in on some illustration and actually do something that didn't frustrate me.

Zanath work comprised mainly of trying to figure out how the HELL to make a low-poly tree model that actually looks half decent. It's incredibly frustrating that very little information on this seems to exist on the internet (seriously, is this innate knowledge to our species that I'm just missing?). Here's some renders of where I'm at with it:

Trees of Torment

Let's ignore that the trees all have the same z-rotation. But you can see how glaring the foliage planes are. The trunks are simple, since I've been pouring my attention into the damned foliage. I feel like I am getting closer, though. If I can't break this block soon, I'll set it aside and turn my attention to things I know I can do, like rocks, walls, houses, turrets, etc. Basically anything that isn't a plant.

Also, you can see the glaring need for the terrain to have either a giant texture (megatexture I call it, though it has nothing to do with the id tech, that's just what I call that method), or texture splatting of some kind (multi-channel blending). Shadow decals or light mapping aren't possible, since part of the design spec is the game must have day/night cycles, so that ball is really in the coder's court.

Synergy saw some love! I had a second attempt at moving the geometry definition to Display Lists; no performance change (actually it almost went down 1Hz!). However, after I played around with the code execution sequence, moved some things around, simplified, I managed to turn that -1Hz into +10Hz! So I'm sitting on 40Hz now, which is satisfying. Curious what it looks like? Behold the cubes!

Synergy - Cubetopia

Read over a lot of material about Shadow Volume methods for calculating real-time shadows. Looks fun! I'll definitely give it a crack after I've ironed out texture mapping and anti-aliasing.

That's about it... and this took a lot longer to write than I thought it would; it's now nearly 5am. Delightful.