Blog for Shaun Vantuil at GarageGames.com

Watch your Head

Shaun Vantuil — 2007-02-28T02:35:45+00:00

I've put my GLSL project aside indefinitely. Partly because I just wanted to see how hard it would be to do (moderate difficulty for a noob like me), and partly because of Alex's Modernization Kit.

Instead I started a new project, one that will hopefully add a new dynamic to the gaming experience in Torque. Head tracking is nothing new, and I think a few people in the Garage Games community have done some development with the TrackIR system.

Essentially, this is a wrapper DLL that I put together with the help of NaturalPoint. It's mostly plug-n-play into Torque. All thats needed is to add a couple files into your project, add a call to initialize it, and apply the data into whatever you want. Not bad for a noob, especially one with no DLL experience. :)

Google Video of the starter.racing implementation.

I need to cleanup the code a bit, document it, and get approval from NaturalPoint. Then I think this will be a resource... pretty soon. :)

GLSL and... stuff

Shaun Vantuil — 2007-01-03T22:45:43+00:00

Projects come and go like the weather in Edmonton. I tend to dream up things and never come close to accomplishing anything. I've been playing with Torque off and on since the first release more or less, but have never actually done much of anything. I'm not the sharpest of minds, thats for certain. And I don't know a whole heck of a lot about programming. In fact, everything I've learned has been from hacking apart code snippets and opensource and seeing what does what.

I finally got GLSL working. Well, I got it working about 2-3 weeks ago, I just havent made time to write about it. It works. It loads the GLSL .vert and .frag files, compiles, links, and executes. It loads from a few lines that go into the render code of the object in question, and my little shader manager/loader does the rest. It's ugly as Sin, but it works. :) Now I just need to make the shader itself work so my water doesnt look like something my cat brought up.

The future of this little project is uncertain. I would like to add some more features such as an in-game editor or at least a way of dynamically loading the shader script so that I can edit in a seperate text editor and see my results in Torque. I would also like to get the compile logs to actually display rather than crash me to desktop. :-/

Other projects/potential headaches I am considering? Well... my hovertank game is moving forward, albeit at a molasses slow pace. I was looking at some code for SOAR terrain. I doubt I'll do anything with it though. Um... atmospheric light scattering... I may still attempt this with my GLSL implementation. And the big one: TrackIR support.

BIG thanks to Alex Scarborough for pointing me to a few websites that got me on the right track for GLSL. They seemed overwhelming at first, but once I stared at it long enough and figured out what to ignore and what not to ignore, it started to come together. Now, I know Alex is working on a big kick-ass re-written version of his implementation with lots of bells and whistles for possible release... I will stick to my own for the time being.

Sunday Feb 3 23:55

Shaun Vantuil — 2002-02-03T23:55:55+00:00

Getting the ball rolling, though ever-so-slowly.

After several months of not-a-heck-of-alot(tm), Im finally getting the ball rolling a little on Horizon: Armored Elite.

Horizon:AE is a sci-fi tank combat game, set to the same online scale as was Starsiege: Tribes. Players will be able to build their tanks from the ground up, by choosing drivetrain (hover, wheeled, tracked), chassis (drivetrain size - light, medium, heavy), body style/size (armor rating, radar profile, etc), turret (speed vs capacity), and weapons. Players will then be able to save, and share their designs with their teams, based on mission roles etc.

Imagine if you will, two light hover tanks with chainguns, and rocket pods, playing mid-field defense, while a heavy-tracked behemoth lumbers over the hill armed with scatter-mortars and UGT's (under-ground torpedos).

So far, I've been working mostly on getting the tanks spawning w/ turrets (no weapons yet), some GUI, and of course the website (need a host). I'd like to get the wheeled vehicles working properly, but until I get a better understanding of the math involved with integration, etc, I'll just settle with using the hover class to get turrets, weapons etc mounted. I'd also like to have AVI playback re-implemented (GG disabled it because there is no streaming in the audio libs yet), so I can implement some GUI ideas.

Well, thats is for now.

deRost - derost_@hotmail.com

Wednesday Sep 19 11:12

Shaun Vantuil — 2001-09-19T11:12:30+00:00

Where does one start?

With so much to do, where does one start? Our game is more or less going to be a sci-fi tank sim, but the vehicle physics are screwed at the moment. Wheeled vehicles are un-driveable at higher speeds, and now Im having troubles with the hover vehicles. And since I am so poor at math/physics I wouldn't even know where to start. I wonder if anyone else is working on fixing the physics code? I read a thread about this, and TimG said that Dynamix screwed the code when he left.

Well, I figure I'll start working on other things for now then. I'm currently working on some aspects of the interface (although Im sure alot of that will change as the game progresses). I'm also working on the mission editor, but Im having problems now with the terraformer not loading my texture .dml's or textures. Are .dml's even working? I know some of it has to do with the hard coded paths, but Im working on those. LabRat posted a nice list in the bugs forum a while back, so I'll look into those.

I guess if I get this working, I'll get started on some player scripting, such as spawning AS a tank instead of a player, and try doing some basics there. I heard that the projectile code is fubar/non-existant in this release. Bummer. :P

Im going to be taking a math course at GameInstitute.com soon I think. I'll need that if I wanna even LOOK at the physics code.

As for everything else... Im keping the Jeep until spring. By then I should have enough paid off that selling it will be easier. But I'm looking for a better job also. I just got a call from an electrical company, so Im gonna call back for an interview right now. :) Wish me luck.

[Hk]deRost
"Blarf to the people!"

Wednesday Aug 15 17:53

Shaun Vantuil — 2001-08-15T17:53:33+00:00

Well V12 has been released, and we still haven't purchased it. Im still trying to get the other team members to cash in.

Other than not having the engine in our hands, things are going well. We have been working almost non-stop on game concept, and planning that out. We have so many ideas for the game right now, some of which see,m to contradict others. So we'll have to do some heavy duty sorting. But we have plenty of time. We need to get the engine first, and start working on basic things first, before we can dive into the nitty-gritty.

Im trying to sell my Jeep. It's a 2001 Jeep Wrangler TJ 4.0l, and man it is costing me. Financing, insurance and gas alone are costing me $800-$1,000 Canadian per month, and it's not like my job pays THAT well. I just do network cabling. Oh well. I think it's my other debts that are killing me. Credit cards, etc. Bleh. :-P

BTW, if anyone in western Canada wants to buy a Jeep, or anyone in north america wants to buy a stereo... let me know. :) I'll be selling the stereo (amps, subs, deck, etc) on EBay so... eh.