Old games and new tech

As most of you know, I primarily work with the latest tech (or at least the latest I can work with on my little Radeon 9600), and immensly enjoy working on shaders, render to texture, and other such spiffy things. And, as a Mac user, I focus on OpenGL work, keep up with the latest OpenGL news and such (Long Peaks!), etc. So, what games do I like to play? With an immense interest in the latest and greatest in crossplatform rendering, do I eagerly play the latest games with the prettiest graphics?

Eh, no, not really. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I don't own a game made after, oh, 2003-ish.

My top game at the moment? Who remembers this beauty:



Ya, it's the original Command and Conquer. Someone put it up on GGE, and I got out the old game discs to see if it still worked under Mac OS 10.4.8 (It was written back in the days of 7.5.3). I figured, what, play a couple of levels just to see if it still works, awesome if it does, meh otherwise.

Ya, just a couple of levels, sure. So now I'm about halfway through the GDI campaign...

I miss games like this. The learning curve for Command and Conquer is about 15 minutes. As far as RTSs go, it is dead simple. But it's still incredibly fun and engrossing.


Anyhow, I'm sure you're all more interested in what I'm doing with Torque than what random 12 year old game I'm playing.

Right now, I have three primary goals

1) Get all of the various features in (I'm a feature creep, I need to not feature creep, but the features are so useful they border on/are necessary)

2) Make it crossplatform and consistent. Everything should work on Mac and Windows (maybe Linux if there's anyone with a lot of experience with Linux, Torque, and OpenGL), and the code should follow the same general patterns. For example, at the moment, VBOs are tracked by a linked list, but Shaders are tracked by a Vector. Bad me!

3) Document it until I want to jump off a bridge. Then document it until I do jump off a bridge.

Here's some sample documentation, just to torment you with little morsels of information.

Material system documentation

Detailed method descriptions for mkInterior

I LOVE dOxygen.

Moving on, unless there are any complaints, I'm thinking about running a series on the various components of the "Modernization Kit": what design decisions went into them, what they can do, and other such stuff. Basically just something to help keep my thoughts a bit more organized and keep the community up to date on what I'm hoping to release. I'd put up a .plan once every two weeks or so covering a different area (Shaders, Materials, RTT, etc.).

Also, check out my ImageShack feed. I use ImageShack for just about everything, so any update on documentation, shiny new features, or whatever I happened to find cool will show up in that. You can even go back and see just about everything remotely borderline interesting I've done since September 25, 2005. In all there are over one thousand images, so... have fun.

Here are some of my favorites:

One of the earliest DRL shots. I'm not even sure the resource was released when I took this

Crazy colliding particles

Original Cg water resource on my mac

An early GLSL experiment

Fun with detail textures

This may indicate that there is a bug in the shader

Refraction is pretty

Bloom is not always your friend

Specular highlights and bloom can make a good combination. Also, look at all that refraction

Torque was probably not meant to handle that

Fun with color

It's Illumina!

Torque definitely wasn't meant to handle that

I finally read up a bit on global illumination

And Kork feels pretty

I also read an article on sub surface scattering. Hmm... sorry howie!

Spooky windmill

GUI fun

Procedurally generated normal maps which suck less

On a final note, look what was in the January 2007 edition of MacAddict



Anyone recognize that as Buccaneer?