First Update

May 13, 2012 at 23:57 (My Projects, Simurgh)

I should study for my finals but I’m way too excited for my game project so I couldn’t resist working on it. I mostly spent this two weeks on learning the C4′s toolchain. Some of the reviews(they could be outdated though) on the net were critizing C4 about the quality of its tools but my experience with them was pretty good actually. It took me 2-3 days to master the world and material editors. I imported the model pack I bought last year from dexsoft and bought a dragon model for the game prototype. On the code side I could definitely see the benefit of source code access. I don’t really like reading long documentations, so I just opened the debugger and inspected the engine and demo codes step-by-step. The code is very clean and easy to understand but I will have some hard time getting used to starting function names with uppercase letters :)

On the gameplay ideas, I did some drastic changes. First of all, the game will be(at least initially) multiplayer only. Main reason for this is I have an easily bored personality and I’m not sure I can work on the same project for years :) And by making it multiplayer I can focus more on main gameplay elements like control system and fighting mechanics. Adding this to having a multiplayer ready engine, it became an obvious choice.

I’m thinking of merging some ideas from my prototype mobile game Wu. So each player will control a shape-changer flying creature and these shapes will be related to main elements from mythologies. So while being chased by an angry fire-breathing creature, you can change your creature to water element, turn back and extinguish the poor guy :) But I can’t be sure if it’s a good idea before doing some playtesting of course.

For controls, I will be using something like Freelancer’s keyboard-mouse combination. It was a nice example for a flight game but I didn’t saw it being used on another game. Dogfighter is another one of my inspirations on gameplay side but I didn’t decide yet if the theme will be casual like that game or more serious like Skyrim.

So I worked on the foundations of main game code and did some camera work. Even it is too early to release a screenshot, I can’t resist the temptation so here’s one from the first build:

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Using an Engine

May 2, 2012 at 20:16 (My Projects, Sheqerpare, Simurgh, Technical)

Creating a game engine is a lot of fun, probably my favourite programming subject. Creating data structures, implementing clever algorithms, doing optimizations that will gain even just some microseconds are really cool stuff for me and many programmers out there. But for a non-hobby game project, going without a battle-tested code will set you backwards at least for a year. Altough I’m officially a student, I no longer see myself as one(I just attend to exams). And since I quit the only job in my country that I want to work on(Engine Programmer at Taleworlds), the only thing I can do to make a living in the near future is being an independent game developer. I have some cool ideas for a game project and to achieve that goal, I decided to license the C4 Engine instead of using my own. But even it’s in much early stages, I like my work that I did on the last 3 months. So I decided to open-source it with zlib license and work on it in my free time. Here’s the bitbucket.org link: Click

So why did I choose C4 Engine? First of all, it gives you whole engine code for a relatively low price($250). So if I decide to modify the engine side, it won’t be a problem. And even it’s not using bleeding edge GPU capabilities, it has a very well designed code by a known person(Eric Lengyel) in the industry. It has a very nice voxel-based terrain system that will be very helpful for me. It is a multiplatform engine, currently supporting Windows and Mac. But Linux support will be coming too in the next release which is an important thing for me. Linux gamers may not be very much in numbers but if you make a decent game on Linux platform, the community will embrace you very quickly. And when you think the fact of native Steam for Linux is announced, I can say it will be a viable gaming platform in the future.

My finals will be finished in two weeks. After that, I’ll be working day and night on my project. I hope I’ll be successful :)

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Terrain Test

April 29, 2012 at 02:11 (My Projects, Sheqerpare, Simurgh, Technical)

When you think about a free-flight game, the most important thing graphics-wise would probably be the terrain rendering. I did some research about terrain algorithms and decided on the “Chunked LOD Algorithm”. It is very efficient and not very hard to implement. And since my target platform is OpenGL 3.3, using “vertex texture fetch” and generating the terrain on the GPU gave me even more performance. Here’s the result:

And some info about the algorithm from its author:

http://tulrich.com/geekstuff/chunklod.html

I’m using a GPU variant of Chunked LOD. More info on this is available on the book “Game Programming Gems 6″.

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New Project

April 29, 2012 at 02:01 (My Projects, Sheqerpare, Simurgh)

Wow, it’s been a year since the last post. After making that demo, I got the job I wanted from Taleworlds and worked there as an Engine Programmer for 7 months. It was very entertaining and educating process but I had some personal problems(not related to work) and had to return Istanbul.

I’ll try to finish my school for a while. And since I have a lot of free time because of it, I thought “Why I’m not trying to make an indie game like Taleworlds did?”. I know Mount&Blade is a big exception among many indie projects but even if I fail or even get bored, at least it will become a nice demo for my future job applications.

The game’s codename is Simurgh. I’m thinking of some kind of sandbox god-game where you control your avatar which is a flying dragon-like creature. While it sounds really weird, I got some interesting ideas about gameplay. The development process will be open like Wolfire’s Overgrowth. I worked 3 months on the engine side to this day but couldn’t do any gameplay programming yet. The game will be on Windows, Mac and Linux. I’m using “OpenGL 3.x” for graphics and “Bullet” for physics.

This is pretty much it, let’s see what happens in time :)

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Status of the Demo

May 24, 2011 at 19:57 (My Projects, Rendekar, Technical)

I added many things to my demo including HDR tonemapping, bloom, motion blur, better terrain textures, better material processing etc. Here’s the video:

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Demo’s Current Status

May 14, 2011 at 22:52 (My Projects, Rendekar, Technical)

I added Shadow Mapping, edited the scene with some new models and fixed many bugs. Link of the demo is the same as before. Here’s a video of it running:

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Rendekar Engine

May 3, 2011 at 23:01 (My Projects, Rendekar, Technical)

I had enough of stupid schools and want to get a job in the game industry. For that, I started working on a demo that uses Microsoft’s DirectX 10. I’ll use it on my job applications. Since my first choice is Taleworlds(which is the most succesful gaming company in my country), I decided the main theme of the demo would be a medieval village. The demo’s engine currently has some standard features like an FPS camera, terrain rendering based on heightmaps, per-pixel lighting, fogging etc. and some interesting stuff such as a special binary model format(I made a converter from Wavefront’s .obj to my .rms format) and GPU based particle system. Hoping to finish it in a month. Here‘s the current state of it(you need this as well) and a screenshot:
Rendekar Engine Test

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Wu Xing – Progress

March 14, 2011 at 22:43 (My Projects, Wu Xing)

Altough I couldn’t finish it properly, I made some progress on my game. First of all, I changed its name to Wu Xing, since garage.maemo.org doesn’t support project names with less than 4 characters. And I released an alpha version on Maemo Garage. It lacks lighting, sound, particle effects and advanced menus right now. I’m thinking some additional gameplay elements but I’m a bit bored from it and now trying to learn DirectX 10 again. You can try the game if you have an N900:
Link

Here’s a screenshot from it:
Wu Xing March 2011

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Wu

November 22, 2010 at 03:26 (My Projects, Wu Xing)

Wu is my new casual game. Altough I’m developing it primarily for touch-screen environments, I’m developing a desktop version too. It is basically played by using five traditional Chinese elements on balls that are made from those elements. I got a very simple prototype working as for now. As I make progress, I’ll update this blog about my achievements. I’m hoping it will become a fun and addictive game. Here’s a screenshot for its current state:

Wu - First Prototype

You can try the Windows version if you like:
Link

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OBJ Mesh Loader

October 20, 2010 at 23:13 (My Projects)

I needed an “easy to code for” but useful 3D mesh format for my game and decided on the Wavefront’s OBJ and its material counterpart MTL. It was a bit harder than it looked but I could finish it succesfully. I tested it with .obj’s and .mtl’s that are exported from Milkshape3D and Wings3D and it was succesful. Here it is, use it however you like :D :
Link

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