Blog for Bill Vee at GarageGames.com

DayOfWar Six Degrees Of Freedom Camera System

Bill Vee — 2008-05-31T00:01:39+00:00

This is a video of the new six degrees of freedom camera system I created for the game.

One of the main concepts of DayOfWar is changing the way we think about up and down.
Because of this the standard camera would not do for my game.
This new six degrees of freedom camera system , or 6DOF for short, meets many needs for my game that the original could not.
In the video the structures as well as the player are near the equator and are basically on there sides.
Placement of in game objects are difficult with the standard camera in these situations.
With the new 6DOF system any angle is possible.

At the press of a button the camera can auto "level" itself to the strongest gravity source.

The camera can pan , tilt , roll and move forward , back , left , right , up and down relative it's current orientation.
The 6DOF camera is added to the game exactly the same way as the standard camera.
While in game just press "alt + V" to toggle between player and 6DOF camera.

The 6DOF camera doesn't suffer from gimbal lock like the standard camera would if you simple removed the pitch restrictions.

DayOfWar Player Controls

Bill Vee — 2008-05-26T23:21:17+00:00

Just a small update showing off player controls.

Player movement 1
Player movement 2

I had to create a new player class to accomplish all the features I needed for my game.
The main thing I needed was a player that could orient itself to an arbitrary gravity point.
The new player class has replaced the old collision code and now uses a capsule instead of a box.
As you can see the capsule works very well.

My class supports all the functions of the original , move animations , damage , weapons , inventory , movement , jetting , etc ...

I had most of this coding done when 1.7.0 came out and I had to make a couple of changes to upgrade to the new version.

I am pretty happy with the results.

In the video with the ships ,when they explode the debris created is falling in the z-plane.
It is on my todo list.

DayOfWar more Asteroids

Bill Vee — 2008-05-08T03:51:11+00:00

I made a couple of more videos of some asteroids I have been working on.
The extremely odd shaped asteroid doesn't have a gravity zone yet because its a little hard to replicate one for it for obvious reasons.

All the asteroids are standard atlas files the have been process with the six side cube effect I talked about in a earlier plan and can be loaded with any version of TGEA.

Asteroid1
Asteroid2

DayOfWar Moons/Asteroids

Bill Vee — 2008-05-05T03:04:56+00:00

I was going to release a video like this about a week ago but it took me until now to figure out why my space ship code was crashing in 1.7.0.

In case anyone else has this problem upgrading from 1.0.3 to 1.7.0 try increasing your integration level in the vehicles datablock.
In my case I had to double it.

As for the video it shows one of the key concepts of DayOfWar , independent gravity.

Both moons have there own gravity.
The gravity is very realistic.

The video doesn't show this but.
RigidShape based objects can be put into orbit.
I found that out by accident.
I was moving a planet around and forgot there was a wheeled vehicle on it before I moved it and was amazed to see it fling itself around the planet.
It made three complete orbits before crashing back down to the planet and ,because I had it set for collision damage, it exploded when it hit the planet.

I will get some videos of this later and post them.

DayOfWar Oceans

Bill Vee — 2008-04-28T01:01:25+00:00

I have been working on this for a while but have now got far enough to show off the oceans rendering.

Video.
Pics.
The videos shows that the player can interact with the "WaterSphere" just like the waterblock.

It still needs a little work on the shader.
Right now the reflect part of the shader is disabled till I can smooth out some issues.
The main problem with it right now is I can't get it to reflect properly around the sphere.

This is based off the waterblock and I will likely release it as a resource as soon as I can get the reflect figured out.
Shaders are not my strong point.

I am using this spherical code as the bases for a multi cloud and atmosphere layer as well.
My goal is to be able to get a atmospheric scattering effect going.

DayOfWar SixSidedSpheres 2nd try

Bill Vee — 2008-04-07T04:21:57+00:00

OK I got bored and a little mad so I decided to try the post again.

My approach is similar to the way Spore appears to do planets.

You take six heightfields and create a cube with them.

This is a unfolded cube. Each square is a heightfield.

Where 1 is the north pole and 6 is the south pole.
And 2 3 4 and 5 are regoins around the equator.
As should be apparent you have to wrap the terrains in a very special way or you will have visible seams.
Square 1's left side needs to wrap with square 2's top and 1's right side needs to wrap with 5's top and so on.

Now doing something like taking each heightfield and applying a spherical distortion will give you a bulged square that will give you a sphere with large gaps.

What is needed is to take the heightfield and project them from a center point.

The next set of images show how this specially projected atlas terrain is not square.

This is a picture of the planet with all six atlas terrains configured like a cube.

This shows the same planet with the top terrain moved up a little to show how they fit together.

After 7 complete rewrites of my planet code here is what I have.
I have 3 different ways to achieve the spherical cubes from above.

The first is a custom importer that is used to create a atlas file with the correct projection.
This one is 100% done and has the benefit of creating atlas files that can be loaded by any version of TGEA with no code modification

The second is a runtime converter that takes a standard atlas file and applies the projection at load time.
This one is 95% done. I am still having some issues with re projecting the bounds for each chunk due to the way the atlas file stores them in the file.

And the best for last.
A atlas derived class that takes all six heightfields and creates a single Spherical Cube based CLOD terrain system. It has all the advantages of clipmapping, paged terrain, blended terrain and is able to load/create lightmaps in game.
This one is about 65% done.

If you would like to test the first example you can download the file from here.

DayOfWar SixSidedSpheres

Bill Vee — 2008-04-07T01:25:15+00:00

Great just spent 2 hours typing in a blog and the website just trashed it when I submitted it.

Live and learn I guess.

It is to late at night right now to start over. I will type it again tomorrow.

Teaser
TGEA 1.0.3 compatible Spherical Terrain.

DayOfWar is a Finalist.

Bill Vee — 2008-02-22T15:58:14+00:00

This announcement puts the game in the running with 4 other games.

CannonBattle
Trash: Wasted Earth
Grudgematch
Switching Gears/Survival
Affectworks

Congrats to the other developers.

My money is on Switching Gears.

As for my game I have released a new video showing off vehicle in vehicle dynamics.
What this means is smaller vehicle can ride inside of larger vehicles.
A lot of collision code had to be changed to allow this kind of interaction.

Now all vehicles , land and flying , exhibits this behavior when inside another vehicle.
Thanks to Ramen's original code that sent me down the right track.

This aspect as well as spherical terrains is the core of what my game will be like.

Large medium and small ships/vehicles interacting with small moons and asteroids while maintaining the FPS feel.

More videos to come.

DayOfWar demo submitted to InstantAction game contest

Bill Vee — 2008-02-10T23:36:44+00:00

I pulled two all nighters in a row to get it done.
I also released some videos of the demo on the DayOfWar website.
One game play and the other is a rollout of some of the vehicles.
This doesn't mean I am close to releasing the game. I just wanted to get into the contest so what I submitted is a demo that demonstrates some of the key features of my game.

Namely the spherical terrain code.

It is a simple level with 2 small bases on a spherical terrain , moon, about 30 miles in diameter.
The player and the vehicles react to the terrain as if the gravity is in the center of the moon.
In the demo the are 3 vehicles, a dropship , a scoutship and a jeep with a mounted turret.

The dropship and scoutship can leave the moon completely and fly off into space.

I will release a public demo at a later date.

I released a resource for the portal code seen in the videos as well.

DayOfWar Interior Portal Render Test

Bill Vee — 2008-01-27T22:04:50+00:00

This is kind of a justification to my earlier pain killer induced blog/rant about portals.

What I needed was to have interiors with large open doors with most of the interior to be in or under the terrain for hanger type structure. The problem as many know is the terrain will render inside of the interior if viewed from outside the interior looking in and ruin the effect. After searching the site for an answer I finally settled on this.
This video is a small test I created to show it off.

Now that fixes the appearance but objects will still collide with the terrain.
Not a problem.
Consider the following code

datablock TriggerData(TerrainMaskTrigger)
{
   // The period is value is used to control how often the console
   // onTriggerTick callback is called while there are any objects
   // in the trigger.  The default value is 100 MS.
   tickPeriodMS = 100; // 1 Sec
};

function TerrainMaskTrigger::onEnterTrigger(%this,%trigger,%obj)
{
   Parent::onEnterTrigger(%this,%trigger,%obj);
   error("%con1.className= "@%obj.getClassName());
   if(%obj.getClassName() $= "Player" | %obj.getClassName() $= "FlyingVehicle")
   {
   %obj.setMaskNoTerrain();
   }
   }

function TerrainMaskTrigger::onLeaveTrigger(%this,%trigger,%obj)
{
   Parent::onEnterTrigger(%this,%trigger,%obj);
   if(%obj.getClassName() $= "Player" | %obj.getClassName() $= "FlyingVehicle")
   {
   %obj.setMaskNormal();
   }
}

This is the script for a trigger that basically changes the collisionmask to remove the legacy and atlas terrains from the mask.
Arrange the trigger around the terrian inside the interior and as the player steps into the trigger it "turns" off terrain collision and when it leaves it "turns" it back on.

The setMaskNoTerrain and setMaskNormal function are ConsoleMethods added to the the player and FlyingVehicle classes that handle the turning off and on of the terrain collision.

Some more work is needed but you get the idea.

If the community finds this useful I could post a resource for it.