This is the journal section for my warcraft3 uber-clone game engine. I call it an uber-clone because it's a superior model of the war3 engine capable of faster framerates, high level shader language, better terrain manipulation, etc. It will hopefully be used for my friend's next game design. It's name is Casper. Log: November 6, 8:10pm( 5 hrs )
- Finished AI pathfinding completely. You can select any unit on the map and
direct him to a location. He will avoid other units and terrain obstacles to
get to that location, much like a starcraft unit does.
October 31, 2:16pm( 4 hrs ) - First phase of terrain sector implementation. I'm overhauling the entire terrain system, from a AxB map to a list of sectors that you can create anywhere in the world. This overhaul is requiring a lot of changes, there are lots of places to re-optimize, such as using the TerrainSector pointer instead of storing i/j coordinates Will finish this later. October 23, 8:26pm( 6 hrs )
- Fixed a lot of bugs today having to do with terrain height value
interpolation and movement. I still need to put in the A* pathfinding algorithm
for this. I was thinking of doing what doom3 does by differentiating
route-searching and path-searching. route searching is used to find out how to
get to a place in the map. path-searching is how to avoid objects on your
route. What can happen are nodes get set up in the levels to determine the
rough shape of paths in the level. During movement when an entity senses that
the next step he takes will collide with an object, he sends a request to the
pathfinder to find him the best way out.
October 20, Changelist Entries( to most recent )
- made translation tool more robust, added bitmap icons to buttons, phase 1 of
adding a bitmap icon to paint-tiles.
October 19, Changelist Entries( to most recent ) - Final Phase Translation/Selection tool October 18, Changelist Entries( to most recent )
- Phase 1 Bounding box model selection and translation. Kind of buggy right now
October 16, Changelist Entries( to most recent )
- Added lifeform and lifeformtype( AI ). Should change to behavior class. Added
a random animation critter as a sample test.
October 15, Changelist Entries( to most recent )
- fixed a shader bug where you have to commit changes for anything in between
begin/endpass to take effect. World transforms weren't getting effected.
Finalized model painting. Animated models load alongside regular models
October 14, Changelist Entries( to most recent )
- Phase 1, level editor's model handling. Can load files, except because the
terrain has been flipped, deform and select terrain vertices need to swap y and
z coordinates. Darn directx for having Y = UP.
October 13, Changelist Entries( to most recent )
- Animation check in phase 4. Fixed some things with original transforms. A
small bug left and clean up to do. Probably two more phases.
October 12, Changelist Entries( to most recent )
- Animation sweep phase 2. Added animation data loading. Mostly test to see if
it works, and unsure if we have to do a recursive matrix multiply.
October 9, 10:38pm ( 5hrs ) - Whew, haven't coded for a while. Decided that I should finish my xfile loading
function today. Initially I had set up an xfile parser, but after talking to a
friend of mine, I realized that one could load an xfile very easily using the
d3dxmeshload functions and then copying the mesh's vertices into your own
custom vertex buffer object. So xfiles load properly now.
August 1, 3:09 ( 4hrs ) - added Gourand lighting support. Some glitches in lighting when normal angles become very steep and almost horizontal. For a smooth shading it works fine though. Been getting a LOT of bashing now. The lock logs have told me nothing. It seems that all locks pass! Lighting is now stored in the diffuse color component of the level. The lerp between the two textures is defined by the alpha component of the terrain's texture. Temporary key "L" is bound to recalculate lighting on the terrain. July 31, 10:41 pm ( 4hrs ) - Ok added a skybox, added cube map texture support. The skybox moves with you. There was a lot of bashing going on when the camera was not reset properly, probably due to a lot of locks or something! Not sure yet, it's so elusive this bashing bug. July 31, 5:47 pm ( 6hrs ) - Finished static Vertex and Index buffer Caching system which took most of my time today. I had to rewrite a bunch of things. Also seperated the original IB-VB pair model. Now it's more efficient because you can use an IB for multiple VB indexing. IBs can also be much bigger. - You don't have to do a big Optimizeandallocate call anymore, in fact, it is less than optimal since it still uses the IB-VB pairing model. In terms of VB space it might be more optimal however, when you have a lot of VBs deleted and reinstantiated it can clean up any loose gaps. - Terrain can be saved and loaded now, along with gametile data. - Next feature is the skybox, and maybe fixing some of the painting tile algorithms. July 30, 12:02 pm( 3 hrs ) - Found out the problem with texture saving. The textures weren't being created
in D3DPOOL_MANAGED. You can't lock DEFAULT pool textures, thus the function
calls were failing.
July 29, 11:10 pm ( 4 hrs or so ) - Added load save functionaliy of tilesets. Added a new terrain layer that is linearly interpolated with the tileset layer. Some bugs when saving tileset, D3DXSaveSurfaceToFile fails! Gotta figure that out tomorrow. Haven't had any crashes lately..I'm confused. July 27, 10:19 pm ( 3 hrs or so ) - Ok, memory bashing when locking and moving vertices happens a LOT now. I think
I have pinpointed the problem to the FullLockAndLoad() function, as with it
disabled, I don't seem to get the crashing. The crashing always happens in
conjunction with a move vertices and happens in the AVLNode class, which is
weird why it happens there unless it's allocated right after vertices. Need to
clean this up! July 24, 6:55 pm ~3-4 hrs - Still no memory bashing. Fixed the program to run on Steven's computer using
software vertex processing! What fun. Well that seemed to fix render target
renders!! And I just found out why it hasn't been rendering in hardware!!#! A
precision error in software allows it to bypass zclipping, where in hardware
1.0 is always == 1.0. I set the z depth of the quads to .5 and they now render
in hardware as well. What a weird bug! Well next on my list is to finish the
terrain material painting feature. It's almost done, all the tiles have been
generated and all I have to do is make sure they are used properly. The
textures are being generated correctly. July 20, 11;50pm ~3-4 hrs - haven't had memory bashing on my machine, but it crashes way too often on
other people's machine so I have to start making logging work or something!
July 19, 9:43 pm ~3-4 hrs - I think the memory bashing is fixed. All I did was change a few pointer to
BYTE from CasperVertex. Hopefully we don't get anymore bashing.
July 19, 2004, 12:01am ~3-4 hrs - lots of memory leaks and memory bashing. It might be in the vertexbuffer lock
and load function or it also might be in the general VB pointer manipulation.
This happens mostly when you select a terrain vertex and try moving it around
---Previous, quite a lot of man hours Finished basic optimized rendering engine capable of drawing optimized VBs fast to the screen. |