My current "WIP"

[Huehnerschaender]

Hi there,

it started with the idea to show the Asphyre community how to use Newton Game Dynamics with Asphyre...

Then I had the vision of some kind of plant-engine, which is able to draw and move much plants on a landscape.

See the current state of progress in the little video here.

The trees are currently under works, so I used just billboards in the video (which don't look that bad :) ).

Tell me what you think of it. I guess I will make a little game out of it, after the showcase for Asphyreusers is done.

Greetings,
Dirk

http://www.dino-it.de/Engine.wmv

[jasonf]

Looks like a very nice Foiliage Replicator (Torque engine term)
Your engine is looking sweet. The physics looks nice too.

Are all of the plants rendered using Billboards? Does it support mesh trees and plants?

[Huehnerschaender]

At the moment it's only the trees which are drawn using billboards. The plants are drawn 3dimensional using facings.

The trees will become 3dimensional too. The class is nearly finished. They use a 3D model for trunk and the leafs are drawn using facings then. This way the foiliage will wave in the wind, too.

3Dmeshes are no problem though.

But the amount of facings is raising enormous the more plants are on the landscape. I am now altering the landscape class, to support detailtextures. Then I can use less plants and still have a good look.

Greetings,
Dirk

[savage]

Noice, different...

Have you seen the demos for Crysis ( http://pc.ign.com/objects/694/694190.html )? If you can get something resembling that, then you can work for any game company you would care to name :).

[technomage]

Looks Good :)

keep us all posted. I am very interested in how you manage to get the vegitation working :D

[Firlefanz]

Hello,

very good work, looks very interesting! and promising...

I must try more gras in my engine and also trees with billboards I guess :)

Firle

[JernejL]

very very very nice, is it dynamic tree generator or 3d meshes? in any case, you need to use more detailed models and textures, but otherwise it is very nice!

[VilleK]

Very cool. Nice atmosphere with the fog and the wind. Have you made the graphics too?

[Traveler]

Agreed with the previous posters, its very nice. But exploding iceballs....? (j/k)

Only one tiny thing I noticed is that the grass doesnt feel like its waving in the wind. Its more like (quite noticable at 1m18s) like plants on the ocean floor.
But still, it's nitpicking really,.. my hat off to you.

[NecroDOME]

When can we exact farcry in Delphi?
Keep up the good work!

[Huehnerschaender]

Hi and thanks for this positive feedback :)

@savage: *LOL*! I am alone and only have my sparetime for this :)

@Firlefanz: In your Innominate game you can't use billboards for the trees. Billboards are always faced to the camera and your game view is dynamic, so the perspective would not fit to the surroundings. The billboard trees in the previous video were just placeholders. The new treeclass I made is ready to go (see video below).

@Delfi: Forget about the trees in the previous video (see above). The new tree class takes a 3D model for trunk and (at the moment) randomly generates positions for some leaf-facings. The leafs behave nearly like billboards, but they are facings. This way I let them face to the camera, but still am able to let them move in the wind.
Surely I need new textures... all of them are just placeholders at the moment. I plan to go into the park around the corner of my house and take some photos of real trees and plants and make the textures out of them. Should give a more realistic feel.

@VilleK: I only made some of the textures. Others are from freeware sites. But I will exchange them all (see above) to give a more athmospheric feel (when all textures come from the same source they fit together a little better I guess :) )

@Traveler: The iceballs will become grenades sometime :) I didn't had a model and no proper texture available, so sorry for the look of them :) Again, they are only placeholders.
Concerning the wind: The "wind" is just a sinwave atm. It was for testing purposes. There is no real wind source right now. Thats a thing for later (I can imagine a helicopter flying over the scene, letting the plants wave in the rotor winds...

So here is a new video of my progress from yesterday :)

I added:
- New tree class (Don't bother about the look. The trees doesn't look overwhelming, the textures and the trunk model are crappy. But the technique is ready to go).
- Waterlevel to the terrain (player can go swimming now *lol*)
- Explosions throw up dirt if they hit the landscape.
- Waterexplosions
- increased depth of view
- trees have a collision corpse now (not visible in this video, just got it ready when the video already was done.)

http://www.dino-it.de/Engine2.wmv

Greetings,
Dirk

[savage]

Excellent upgrade. Are the grenades deforming the terrain in real-time?

[Huehnerschaender]

Thats a thing I really want to have.

But I need to find out how to deform the collisionmeshes of Newton first.

Deforming the heightmap is no problem, but this will just change the optics, not the physics. If I find out how to deform the Newton meshes, this is the first thing I will add to the engine. I will contact Sascha Willems about this. Maybe he can help with this.

[JernejL]

Can you ignite the plantlife ane make plants start burning? and catch on fire other plants?

[Huehnerschaender]

Should be a quite simple to add feature... but I guess the particle engine gets much to do with this feature :)

[Huehnerschaender]

http://www.dino-it.de/scr10.jpg ('http://www.dino-it.de/scr10.jpg')
http://www.dino-it.de/scr11.jpg ('http://www.dino-it.de/scr11.jpg')
http://www.dino-it.de/scr12.jpg ('http://www.dino-it.de/scr12.jpg')

Greetings,
Dirk

[chronozphere]

wow.. looks awesome.. 8)

I realy like to see a video of this:)

I also like the water texture. Is it animated??

EDIT: whoops it seems that you already posted a video :oops:

[tux]

Thats a thing I really want to have.

But I need to find out how to deform the collisionmeshes of Newton first.

Deforming the heightmap is no problem, but this will just change the optics, not the physics. If I find out how to deform the Newton meshes, this is the first thing I will add to the engine. I will contact Sascha Willems about this. Maybe he can help with this.

have you taken a look at the user collision mesh? it "might" be possible to do it with that

[Huehnerschaender]

Here is a little Techdemo of the "engine".

Walk around as usual (mouselook, AWSD) and fire with left MB.

Added
- physics to water.
- visuals to water (wave particle when crates or particles dive into water)
- particles using physics engine

Please try it out and tell me your FPS and sys specs.
I also would like to know what you think about it :)

There is no sense and no goal yet. Just walking around and shooting cannonballs.

http://www.dino-it.de/Upload.zip

Greetings,
Dirk

[WILL]

Uh oh... Iron Strike 2 is gonna be a FPS! :o

I can see it happening too... :P Or maybe it'll become a spin-off. Like 'Iron Strike: Special Operations' or something. ;)


Well I figured I'd post something, seeing as I've not posted yet. Very nice work so far Dirk!

One thing I noticed is that when you sent me those screenies, I looked at the images with the size reduced a bit it looked VERY realistic and you could hardly tell that the folliage was a rendered plane, but when I set the size to actual size, I suddenly noticed the edges of the bushes and trees.

Maybe this is something to play with to make it more realistic looking? Some kind of anti-aliasing maybe?

I honestly don't think that any 3D engines made in Pascal are close to cutting edge realisim, at least yet. Maybe you can be amoung the first? ;)

[czar]

Looks pretty good.

I got 29-33 FPS with Nvidia 7800gs and 3Hgz p4 with 1GB

Do you think you can improve speed? It may be too low at the moment - especially when you start having to do enemy AI etc

I liked the bobbing chests. The explosions are really cool.

[WILL]

Hey Dirk, I just relized that you've posted larger screenshots than you should have.

I have a widescreen so it didn't really bother me. (hence why I didn't notice) Can you reduce the size of the images (you can't do it through html tags in the post, some 'smart guy' in the phpBB team decided it was a securty risk I believe :roll:) and post a link for the full size?

Thanks Dirk, I'd do it myself normally (well actually, technically I just did :x) but phpBB no longer allows us to do so. The other option is to just use the image host site instead since original quality is kept anyhow.

[savage]

you can't do it through html tags in the post, some 'smart guy' in the phpBB team decided it was a securty risk I believe :roll:

I've already resized the images to 640x480 using HTML code.

[Firlefanz]

I'll try at home, screens look very good. (videos too)

How did you make the videos? Fraps?

Firlefanz

[Huehnerschaender]

Thank you Dom.

@Czar:
This is just the current state. Consider it as an Alpha of an incomplete engine :) There is much space for optimizations, especially the terrain drops down framerate. But I have some optimizations already in mind.

@Will:
Sorry for the big screenies :)
The realistic look is a thing I am working on. It depends much on some things which I am currently testing out.
As there is:
- the quality of the textures (I am making a bunch of new textures in the park (this weekend I will take a long walk with my kids through the park to get some good photos :) ))
- The positioning of the facings. What you have seen so far is all randomly generated and placed plants and trees. The plants are just a set of symmetric ordered facings, which of course doesn't look very realistic. So I am working on a technique to place "fields of grass" instead of just a grass plant for example. In a "vegetation field" there will be e.g. 100 facings placed with random angles in a narrow area. This will give a more realistic look then. It also may speed up things a bit, because right now every plant is an instance of a plant class.
- The trees: The current model is more than crap. Also the textures are ugly. When I have better ones I start to design trees with manually positioned facings, so that the facing don't overlap or swift in the air without a branch. Atm it is all randomly generated, which gives some not so beautiful results.
- Once I get the landscape rendered faster, I can make it a little smoother and rounder. I also will add rocks and such stuff, which will give a more realistic look. Atm there aren't detail textures for landscap, which will be added as soon as possible.

All this will make the look much more realistic.

As I already mentioned, this is just a techdemo, no demo of visual perfection.

This project is just a sample for the Asphyre community how to do special things. When I released it there, I will add the new features to get a real game engine one time.

Greetings,
Dirk

[Huehnerschaender]

Hi Firle,

yes, the videos are made using Fraps and then compressed with Windows Movie Maker.

Greetings,
Dirk

[savage]

It's a pity you're not using OpenGL, since we are starting to make some head-way into getting MacOS X support working.

[NecroDOME]

I tried the demo, It looks quit good.

FPS >35

Within the water the fps raised to 75!

GeForce 6800 (SLI was diabled)

[savage]

I got 15 FPS on my work machine, info as follows...


Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator Driver Report


Report Date: 11/17/2006
Report Time[hr:mm:ss]: 12:28:54
Driver Version: 6.14.10.4543
Operating System: Windows XP* Professional, Service Pack 2 (5.1.2600)
Default Language: English
DirectX* Version: 9.0
Physical Memory: 1015 MB
Minimum Graphics Memory: 8 MB
Maximum Graphics Memory: 128 MB
Graphics Memory in Use: 11 MB
Processor: x86
Processor Speed: 3194 MHZ
Vendor ID: 8086
Device ID: 2582
Device Revision: 04


* Accelerator Information *

Accelerator in Use: Intel(R) 82915G/GV/910GL Express Chipset Family
Video BIOS: 3329
Current Graphics Mode: 1440 by 900 True Color (75 Hz)

[jdarling]

Well on my crappy Dell Inspiron 4100 I got about 8-10 FPS. Not really "playable" but it was enough that I got the jist. Looked really nice and I have to say, that if this isn't optimized yet, then its quite impressive to get that high a frame rate on this dog.

So you don't have to google:
CPU: 1.2 Ghz PIII
Mem: 384MB
GPU: ATI Mobility Radeon (running standard Windows XP drivers)
OS: Windows XP SP 2

[technomage]

I got 70+ FPS on my Athlon 3800+ with a Ge Force 7800 GT and 1 Gig of Ram, it goes up to 190 on just water. :D

I would love to see the code for this, Dirk fancy giving me a hand with InfiniteSpace-online :wink: My planets will need to have plants and trees on them :)

[Huehnerschaender]

i will add some inline documentation and then i'll upload it with source.

after that i'll start to add my ideas i have in mind.

you might be glad to hear that the "field of grass" class is nearly finished and will be included.

expect the upload this weekend.

greetings,
dirk

[Huehnerschaender]

"GrassField" class is finished.

Below are 2 screenshots, where you take a look at the visuals using those grassfields.

I am quite satisfied :) 22 FPS with more than 60000 plants on the landscape...

http://www.dino-it.de/grass.jpg ('http://www.dino-it.de/grass.jpg')
http://www.dino-it.de/grass2.jpg ('http://www.dino-it.de/grass2.jpg')

[WILL]

Hey tried it sometime earlier this week and forgot to post my own results.

I got it bouncing back and forthe between 11 and 16 FPS *shrug*

I consider my system pretty decent by all standards considered.

Toshiba Satellite M70
Celeron M 1.6 GHz w/ 512MB RAM
ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M (http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/viewreport.php?report=1597)
Windows XP

[czar]

The grass looks way cool.

[chronozphere]

The grass looks way cool.

I totally agree :D It looks very realistic;)

I'm anxious to see the source :razz:

BTW: Did you made the textures yourself?? i really like to know how you made'em.. or where you downloaded them. :)

[Huehnerschaender]

I am currently including a "zoning" function in the grassfields, which will hopefully gain some more FPS even with very big grassfields (eg you may want to have a whole grassy level, so you assign a grassfield which covers the whole level, but you definetely don't want to cycle through each grass plant every frame).

It's not completely finished yet. I need to sort the textures within the fields for Direct3D rendering purposes (otherwise it slows down the whole thing dramatically).

When this is included I will upload. Unfortunately today I have some other things to do, so don't be angry if it will last until tomorrow.

Concerning the textures. They are from various sources. I made some myself (trees, some plants, smoke, explosions), the ground is from Nocturne Texture Pack (free), the water is from a free texture pack. The background is from a quick google panorama search, and one or two plants are ripped off from Gothic 3. So not everything is fully legal and I cannot just say "Do with it what you like". It's just for a showcase. But if you are interested in special textures, then let me know and I can tell you they are free, from me or whatever. If they are my creation you can use them as you want of course.

I want at least exchange the textures ripped from Gothic 3, because I don't feel good using them. So expect the wheat and the grass changing soon. I just used them to have a placeholder during developement.

The way I do "realistic looking" textures is the following.
Go outside with you Digicam, make photos of what you need (a single plant, a branch from a tree, a wall, whatever). Go home, make the texture seamless if you need to cover it a tiled area (eg floor) or mask the Alpha channel to let only the wanted parts be visible.

You just need to know how to use your photo-editing-software. Thats all.

Greetings,
Dirk

[NecroDOME]

I realy like the grass you created!!! Nice work!
A little queation about makeing texture seamless: how you do that with fotoshop?

[Huehnerschaender]

The trick I use is very good for textures like grass, sand etc... everything without a special muster.

For example:

- Make a photo of pebbles from top view (spread your feet and make it and take care no one else is watching you *lol*).
- cut off a quadratic area you want to use as a texture.
- tile the image in the middle vertically
- move the left part to the right and the right part to the left. This way the texture is seamless right and left, but looks crappy in the middle.
- now use the clone tool to erase the bad look in the middle.
- After that cut off the image horizontally.
- Move top part to bottom and bottom part to top.
- Use clone tool to erase the dirty line in the middle

Thats it in short words... Just need some practice and then it's very easy.

[Traveler]

Alternatively, look up the offset filter and enter values 1/2 the size of your image. Then remove the seem like how Dirk says and you're set, too.

In regards to the screenshots, they look mighty nice! Can't wait for the next version to appear. :)

[NecroDOME]

Thanks 4 the seamless tip :)

[savage]

Dirk, maybe you should hook up with these guys - http://genesisdevice.net/ another Object Pascal game engine aiming to be like Far Cry/Crysis

[NecroDOME]

Yeah, but he doesn't have grass :P (yet)

[Huehnerschaender]

Dom,

I don't have the intention do make something huge out of it. It was just a test for me and if anyone is interested in it, the source is available (I think it will be uploaded today evening on afterwarp.net).

The thing those guys are doing look great! In fact, I need a good terrain rendering routine. Also the water looks very interesting. But what I did here is Direct3D and he uses OpenGL. I absolutely have no experience with openGL.

In addition to that, I am very limited in time... Family and job have priority. What I do in "game programming" is just sparetime when the kids are in bed or I am bored. Joining a project makes me liable to it and assumes I am spending time on it regularly. Know what I mean? :)

Greetings,
Dirk :)

[Huehnerschaender]

Here is the first release including source code and a binary demo.

Greetings,
Dirk

http://www.afterwarp.net/forum/showthread.php?p=5551#post5551

[Traveler]

You definitely are the man!

[Venomizer]

Here is the first release including source code and a binary demo.

Greetings,
Dirk

http://www.afterwarp.net/forum/showthread.php?p=5551#post5551 Your website doesnt work i get a site not available or url doesnt exist :S confuses me your site dont work...