Caanoo / WIZ Wiz Game Engine

[torpor]

I wanna know when we are going to see this engine in use, and whether you're going to open-source it for us to start building a new era of Pandora-specific titles!

 

[kurtkz]

@torpor: I'll post a new demo as soon as I have something worthwhile to show - at the moment I'm adding UI elements. Once that's done I'll add a fiew built-in particle emitters and then create a proper demo showcasing all the features. I'm also working on a game project for the app store with traylorpark. Unfortunately I don't think I'm going to open-source the engine as quite a bit of work has gone into it already. If there's enough interest in it I'll probably license it for commercial use and provide some sort of free licensing for personal use.

 

[traylorpark]

I wanna know when we are going to see this engine in use, and whether you're going to open-source it for us to start building a new era of Pandora-specific titles!

Particle emitters should be really cool to! Certainly can think of a couple uses for that.

and I'll also be opening up an art process thread for some of the stuff I'll be doing in this game and engine, pretty soon. For those who are interested in the 3D side of development.

 

[kurtkz]

@traylor: The particle system component is complete, I just need to write the particle emitters. I'll see if I can write a particle emitter editor so that you can create your own ones as you see fit.

I've managed to create the core GUI components for the engine:

- panels
- buttons
- sliders
- check boxes
- radio buttons

I don't think I'll be adding to this list as I doubt anything more complex than this is needed.

Cheers
Kurt

 

[kurtkz]

Hey all,

just another small update - I've received an updated level from traylorpark and have tested it with physics - at the moment the framerate is a bit low (10-15fps), but everything works as it should and I think we have a solid basis for the game. Hopefully Peter will start a new thread here somewhere so you can track the wonderful progress he's making.

Cheers
Kurt

 

[crow_riot]

eagerly awaiting traylorparks thread

any words about the games theme or should i just sit and wait?

 

[kurtkz]

D'oh! A bug in the renderer was causing the slowdown. Now that it's fixed, the demo level renders at full framerate (locked to 30FPS) without physics. With physics enabled, the level fluctuates between 16-30FPS and hovers around 24FPS. Time to add the game logic!

@crow_riot: Uhm, I think Peter should explain the concept to you since he came up with it. I think it's a novel take on an old genre

Cheers
Kurt

 

[kurtkz]

Hey all,

just another small update - I added blob shadows to the engine. You define a blob shadow for an entity by specifying the texture to use, the minimum and maximum dimensions of the shadow and the distance attenuation. The engine then traces a ray from the light source through the entity to determine the surface to use for orientating and displaying the blob shadow. All told I only get a 1-3FPS performance hit when using 1 blob shadow in a 4500 triangle level and it looks almost perfect Next step, camera occlusion!

Cheers
Kurt

 

[traylorpark]

Hey all,

just another small update - I added blob shadows to the engine. You define a blob shadow for an entity by specifying the texture to use, the minimum and maximum dimensions of the shadow and the distance attenuation. The engine then traces a ray from the light source through the entity to determine the surface to use for orientating and displaying the blob shadow. All told I only get a 1-3FPS performance hit when using 1 blob shadow in a 4500 triangle level and it looks almost perfect Next step, camera occlusion!

Cheers
Kurt

now that is awesome

 

[kurtkz]

Hehe, thanks Peter. I decided on blob shadows because I can't do shadow mapping or shadow volumes on the Wiz. At some point I'll try a variation of projective texturing to do full scene shadows. Not sure how fast that'll be though.

 

[kurtkz]

aaand another small update - camera occlusion detection works! when object occludes a focal point (another mesh) the occluder is removed from the render list so the camera view is unobstructed.

 

[kurtkz]

Alrighty, time for another update:

- optimized font rendering (batching)
- optimized sprite rendering (batching)

Cheers
Kurt

 

[torpor]

Getting very exciting!

ETA of arrival of first public demo?

 

[kurtkz]

@torpor: I'm really not sure - I don't have a scene that shows off the engine yet...Well, I DO, but it's the game Peter and I are working on I'll post a video in his dev log thread when it's ready though.

 

[kurtkz]

Another day, another optimization - improved the caching for 2D/3D rendering, yielding a 5 - 10FPS increase. The game is averaging between 21-30FPS (using 60FPs as a limit) doing 2D + 3D rendering (27 sprites, 5 text, +-4500 triangles), camera occlusion culling and physics.

 

[sbock]

I don't know if you're interested in this sort of performance increase but have you tried notaz RAM timings tweak?

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/wiz.cgi?0,0,0,0,8,154

I noticed up to 5 fps more (25 to 30) using this tweak with GL Quake. I'm curios if it would help your engine too and how much.

 

[kurtkz]

@sbock: Thanks for that, I haven't checked it yet, but I will. Do I just run the script to adjust the RAM timings?

 

[sbock]

Yeah, exactly. Here's an example for Quake:

#!/bin/sh

./pollux_set 'ram_timings=2,9,4,1,1,1,1'
./glquake
sync

cd /usr/gp2x/
exec /usr/gp2x/gp2xmenu

 

[kurtkz]

Cool, I'll test it out later and let you guys know the results tomorrow morning.

 

[crow_riot]

are u using floating point in your engine or do you have a fixed point library working in the background? using the latter might also increase performance