Genesis Device Engine Project Looking For New Members

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Hi all,

First let me introduce myself a bit. I’m Luuk van Venrooij, 23 years old from the Netherlands. Currently I’m in my last few months of getting my degree in computer science. I do par time work as a database programmer for a small company. In my free time I enjoy mountain biking, hiking, hanging with friends and of course game programming?.

For 2 years I’ve been working on and off on a 3d game engine project called Genesis Device. Inspired by games like Battlefield 2, Far Cry and Oblivion I wanted to create an engine capable of rendering large outdoor worlds with the best possible graphics for next generation hardware. Here is a list of the main features so far:

- Class based engine structure written in Object Pascal. Using Turbo Delphi as development environment (http://turboexplorer.com/delphi).
- Opengl Renderer which supports the latest OpenGL 2.0 extensions (Framebuffers, Occlusion Queries, GL Shader Language etc )
- 64 bit render buffer for post processing effects like HDR and bloom effects
- Heightmap based terrain
- Own triangle strip based mesh format for building and such on the terrain
- Quadtree and Octree for the scene management. Quadtree for the terrain and Octree for the meshes. Horizon culling is used to remove Quadtree and Octree nodes that aren’t visible with the current viewpoint.
- Debug and error handling systems. Include things like logging of events and a console for debugging.
- Environment stuff like water, skydome, sunflares.
- Support for dds, tga, png, bmp and jpg for textures
- Input using direct input
- MeshImporter with dfm ( http://www.delgine.com ), obj and 3ds support
- MapEditor to create maps (in progress)
- MapViewer to inspect the maps.
- Importer for terrains made in l3dt ( http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/ ).
- And some more features that are not listed?

Here is also a list of screenshots which should give an idea of the current state.

http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/2913/demo1ve1.th.jpg (http://img299.imageshack.us/my.php?image=demo1ve1.jpg)
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/4215/demo2ca5.th.jpg (http://img85.imageshack.us/my.php?image=demo2ca5.jpg)
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/6540/demo3kt5.th.jpg (http://img85.imageshack.us/my.php?image=demo3kt5.jpg)
http://img482.imageshack.us/img482/1767/demo4nu2.th.jpg (http://img482.imageshack.us/my.php?image=demo4nu2.jpg)
http://img482.imageshack.us/img482/4963/demo5ez3.th.jpg (http://img482.imageshack.us/my.php?image=demo5ez3.jpg)
http://img485.imageshack.us/img485/1623/demo6ij5.th.jpg (http://img485.imageshack.us/my.php?image=demo6ij5.jpg)
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/1420/mapeditorfc6.th.jpg (http://img85.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mapeditorfc6.jpg)
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/2273/mapviewerfp5.th.jpg (http://img85.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mapviewerfp5.jpg)
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/8039/meshimporterzz8.th.jpg (http://img85.imageshack.us/my.php?image=meshimporterzz8.jpg)

Since a few months a friend of mine and I have been making plans to actually create a realistic online fps game called Silent Operations using my engine. I’m the only programmer on the engine so far and since I have only about 10 hours a week to do some coding the engine progress is to slow to actually accomplish something. That’s why I’m looking for new members who want to join. If you have any of the following skills and willing to help on this free open source game engine and later on the actual game itself contact me:

- Experience in Object Pascal and Delphi (Pre)
- Experience in OpenGL/GLSL ( For Graphics)
- Experience in OpenAL ( For Sound )
- Experience in Newton ( For Physics )
- Experience with network programming
- Experience with the Delphi VCL ( For tools )
- General game/engine programming experience

Some demo /code stuff would be nice if you can supply it.

You can contact me at: LuukvanVenrooij@GenesisDevice.net
The engine website: http://www.GenesisDevice.net (old and outdated needs a revamp?)
Silent Operations website: http://www.silentoperationsgame.com/

If you are an artist who wants to help out on the game content drop a line on the Silent Operations forum.

[NecroDOME]

Looks nice.

I'm also creating my own 3D engine. Also I started a year or 2 ago with my engine.
You may take a look at my site: http://necrodome.homeftp.net

Greets from The Netherlands :)

ps. I would like to see a demo on how fast the engine is running. Some tech demo...

[savage]

Hi Luuk,
Welcome to PGD. Your engine looks very interesting indeed. I have upgraded your post to a news item, so that it appears on the news page.

Have you thought of making your engine more cross-platform, maybe using FreePascal for the engine and Delphi/Kylix for the editors. We have had some success in porting some games from Win32/Linux to MacOS X recently using FreePascal.

You might also look at what is going on on this thread - http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/viewtopic.php?t=3804 as Dirk is working on something similar in the Far Cry/Crysis sense.

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Thanx for the great comments so far and of course ending up on the news page.

@NecroDOME
I`ve actually looked at your engine earlier today. Looks real nice. Loved the editor and the scripting features. I`am working on a little demo of my engine that Ill post online in the next few days. THe engine is designed for next gen hardware. My devsystem is a gf6800 with 256 mb. It runs the engine very wel. About 80 fps with al the systems fully open. BTW I saw you went to fonty`s, me 2 :D. Hope to be done in January :). What a small world we live in.

@savage
Thanks for putting me up on the newspage :D, appreciate that. I`ve been experimenting with FreePascal a year back or so. But I found delphi to be supperior to it. Asspecialy since it has a free version since a few months. For now I dont have any plans of porting to any other OS since there is still a lot to be done on the engine. Checked the link and the vegitation looks awsome on his demo. Iam waiting for the release of the planta vegitation engine. It has a free to use licence and the demo movie looks awsome.

[Traveler]

Wow, some very impressive screenshots you've got there.

Please do keep us posted about any future updates!

[NecroDOME]

sweet... which Fontys location? Eindhoven? I hope to be done somewhere June...

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Jupz also eindhoven :D

[technomage]

Nice work Luuk :D

The terrain is very impressive.

[JernejL]

For 2 years I’ve been working on and off on a 3d game engine project called Genesis Device.

- Class based engine structure written in Object Pascal. Using Turbo Delphi as development environment (http://turboexplorer.com/delphi).

I don't think turbo delphi was around for 2 years :P

Aniway, i am an expert in openal, and wrote a very nice audio library (see my signature). so i may help you with implementing audio.

I have experience with newton as well (i created a very well behaving character controller), particle system etc, opengl, vcl, etc.. all but networking.

if you want a good story, i can give you help with that as well.

[WILL]

:clap: Very, very nice guys! Keep up the good work and please keep us posted as things progress.

Object Pascal needs a cutting edge 'hit' at some point and you guys are on a roll so.... break a leg. ;) (or neck, or arm or some other 3D high def. object :P)

[Luuk van Venrooij]

@All, thanks again for al the nice comment :D

@Delfi
Before Turbo Delphi I used Delphi 7. The link to your audio lib isnt working :( . But is sound like you have pretty much everything I`am looking for in a partner in "crime" to help me out with this project :D. If your intressed in contributing we should talk sometime. Do you have msn or some other "chatlike" program :) ? You can mail to LuukvanVenrooij@genesisdevice.net.

Ive uploaded a 36 MB demo so you can ckeck out the engine so far. You can download it here (Yes I hate this kind of sites to but I had no chose from the location Iam this week :) ):

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RAKB98Y3

Please read the readme.txt to avoid me getting a lot of mail about things I already explained in the readme. :D

Updated with the system requirements before people donwload something they cant even run:)

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

I haven’t had much chance to test it on other systems. The system requirements
listed below are just an estimation. It will probably run on lesser machines.
The requirements with an * behind it mean they are a must.

CPU: 1.5 Ghz
RAM: 512 Mb
Video Card: NVidia GeForce 6600, ATI Radeon 9600 or better
Full Opengl 2.0 support (*)
128 mb of video memory (*)
OS: Windows XP service pack 2

[NecroDOME]

Nice terrain engine.
One thing you should change, when the first dialog pop's (where you can select Window, Render, Input etc.), it's half visible on my TV. Center it the the screen in stead of the desktop.

[JernejL]

@Delfi
Before Turbo Delphi I used Delphi 7. The ]LuukvanVenrooij@genesisdevice.net[/email].

Ive uploaded a 36 MB demo so you can ckeck out the engine so far. You can download it here (Yes I hate this kind of sites to but I had no chose from the location Iam this week :) ):


oh yeah, pgd changed forum url a few weeks ago, and the links go broken, maybe the pgd team could go and run a script on database to fix the urls?

i tried adding that address to msn, but says it has no account registered with it, do you use another address for msn?

megaupoad keeps saying all download slots are taken for my country, i guess it is BS and they want me to download their toolbar, which i don't want to see anywhere near my computer. if anybody can download it, post up a link, i'll make a mirror as well. but if this is a opensource project, you could put up a sourceforge page, and host it there.

[tanffn]

megaupoad keeps saying all download slots are taken for my country
I got the same message.. can you try to use a different hosting service?

[XTRiZ]

here you can find it until he got it posted on another site.

http://www.xtriangle.com/Genesis%20Device%20Engine%20Demo%2021-11-06.zip

Rgrds,
Peter

[JSoftware]

Very nice engine but I was very disappointed in the loading time. I took it for a spin at very low settings. It took 5 minutes and 20 seconds to load the demo map :shock:

I also noted that your water looks fine most of the time but the edges look like you are cutting too much of your terrain geometry when rendering that to a texture

But that's a minor nitpick when compared to the loading time :wink:

Edit: ah first read the readme now :P

[Luuk van Venrooij]

@NecroDOME
Thank for the comment will look into that :D.

@Delfi
At Luuk_van_Venrooij AT progrock DOT com. Thats my msn adres:)

@XTRiZ
Thanks for hosting the demo appriciate it. A friend of mine will put it up on another link in 24 hours:).

[Luuk van Venrooij]

@JSoftware
You probebly set the texture detail to low. That for now resizes the textures on runtime, which is very slow.

[JernejL]

as promised:

http://www.gtatools.com/temp/genesis%20device%20engine%20demo%2021-11-06.zip

[savage]

here you can find it until he got it posted on another site.

http://www.xtriangle.com/Genesis%20Device%20Engine%20Demo%2021-11-06.zip

Rgrds,
Peter

I made the clicky, more clicky.

[JernejL]

I made the clicky, more clicky.

try my link..

[savage]

[quote="Delfi"]
try my ]

yep yours seems to work as well. Or am I missing something?

[JernejL]

oh, sorry, i thought you meant the other link didn't work..

[technomage]

I just tested the demo, and it flys on my 7800 GT. the water looks v nice.

the terrain looks really detailed. how did you accomplish that effect?

[Luuk van Venrooij]

The terrain rendering is inspired by the new megatexture technology used in the latest doom 3 engine for terrain. This basicly uses a 32k x 32k texture for the entire terrain that is uber compressed. I use a 16k x 16k texture which is also compressed till about 60 mb. TO add a bit more detail I use a single light detail texture to give it some more bumps and such.

[savage]

It works really well on my 7600 GT as well. How did you do the water effect. Very nice indeed.

[WILL]

Hey, tried it out myself on my Radeon XPRESS M200 (http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/viewreport.php?report=1597). As far as I know, I'm not using the Catalyst drivers, but instead the ones that come with my laptop installation for my Toshiba Satellite M70.

It crashes just after I see it at 97% where I get this error.

"Access violation at address 6931E8A3 in module 'atioglxx.dll'. Write of address 00000024."

Could it be simply that my card does not support something you are trying to do specifically in hardware? Maybe a hardware function feature test in your loader would be useful in this case. You can test for cases where you will have to offer software solutions for cards that do not support a specific function.

Keep up the good work though. I hope to be abel to run it sometime down the road. ;)

[Huehnerschaender]

It works well on my P4 HT 2,8 Ghz, X800 Pro 256, 1GB Ram, too.

But I was a little disappointed about the loading times, too. When changing the settings to some LESS specs, the loading times increased up to about 10 minutes! I was expecting faster loading with less details.

But as you already mentioned, this is a result of recalculating textures etc. A final release may have those things precalculated.

The water effect is nice, but it would be better if it was animated.

I don't really know how you did it, but I guess you use a mirrored rendering of the scene as texture and combine it with a rippled texture. Maybe it would be enough to use an animated texture for rippling effect.

Sometimes the camera wents under the terrain, which lets me see that the water texture isn't precalculated. It looks like you render the terrain to a rendertarget-texture and draw it on that tesselated water texture. So this must be done in realtime and though it shouldn't be a problem to use an animated texture instead. It would do much for realism!

Anyhow, very nice project. Looks very promising to me. I am doing some investigations in terrain rendering myself atm and I know that the understanding of those things is quite easy, but the implementation I find quite hard.

Greetings,
Dirk

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Again thanx for the comments everyone.

@WILL
THis is verry strange since I test if all the right extensions are available @ startup. IF this isnt the case it just quits. Could you mail me the log please?


@Huehnerschaender
Loading times is explaned in the readme, still need to get the mipmaploading of the dds textures fixed. For water it would be easy to use animated textures. If you can supplie a good high res sequence it would be in there in a matter of minutes :D. I am not an artist and this was the best way to test the water.

[WILL]

Hey Luuk, just sent you a PM with the contents of the log file.

[Luuk van Venrooij]

@Will
Looked @ the log and you reason it crashes is it gives an Frame Buffer Object error. This is a bug in the ATI driver which I already reported to ATI and should be fixed in the latest catalyst drivers. Installing these will probebly fix the problem. :)

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Also notices the problem with the compiling of the shader. ATI drivers are so picky when it comes to GLSL syntax :S. ATI + OpenGL = basicly trouble if you ask me:)

[JernejL]

Also notices the problem with the compiling of the shader. ATI drivers are so picky when it comes to GLSL syntax :S. ATI + OpenGL = basicly trouble if you ask me:)

Actually, i managed to create some shaders which only compiled properly on ati cards :P Most of the bugs i had in my engine when running under ati drivers were actually my fault, doing things wrong with opengl and not the other way round.. Ati's drivers aren't that bad.. they work pretty well imo.

[Luuk van Venrooij]

The problem is the syntax. ATI doesnt compile some contructions wel that should work if you read the glsl guidelines. Never had any of these problems with NVidia.

And ATI drivers are just bad when it comes to opengl. When Doom 3 was released they had not updated the ogl driver for 2 years :?

[WILL]

Wow this thing is a beast. I've managed to get my hands on a fairly high-end system to test it out and it still needs more juice. :)

System Specs:
Pentium 4 3GHz w/ 1 GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 6200(256MB, AGP 8x and OpenGL 2.0.1)

The card was new to the Delphi3D GLInfo Hardware registry so I can't link you the full card specs, but I'll PM the log file to you. I also made sure I send a report to the site though. :D

Tested with Default Settings @

640x480x32bit: 18-36 FPS
1024x768x32bit: 9-16 FPS
1280x1024x32bit: 5-18 FPS

Tested with Highest Possible Settings @ 1024x768: 2-5 FPS (3 FPS average)


Of course the FPS would soar whenever you looked straight up, but I didn't count that in these figures so you'd get an idea of how it performed on the terrain and not the skybox rendering. ;)

[Luuk van Venrooij]

The systemspecs are next gen. The minimun when done should be the high end versions of the nvidia gf6xxx series 6600 and 6800 ) and the high end version for the ATi Xxxx series (X800 I believe). A gf6200 is a pretty slow card :D

Here is a link of the planta vegitation engine Iam going to use. Hopefully Ill get a prerelease version to play arround with. THe movies look awsome:D

http://www.fluidinteractive.com/graphics/planta/

[NecroDOME]

Wow... it looks very impressive... Trees remind me on the Oblivion game.

[savage]

I liked the look of it initially, but as I watched it more and more the *popping* effect as it switched level of detail on the leaves really started annoying me. I used to hate that effect as well on old car racing games where the mountains or other things in he distance would magically pop into view. I would be nice if the guys from Crytek released info on how they have done their vegetation system.

Not sure if this is usefull to anyone, but it might be worth a read - http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/ecosys/ecosys.pdf

[JernejL]

If you want truly realistic vegetation, pack some real plant seeds with the game :D

</bad_joke>

[Luuk van Venrooij]

@savage
I hate that popping effect to. Thats why I dont use any fancy LOD in my terrain rendering. Just plain quadtree culling with horizon occlusing culling. The nodes are rendered as triangle strips. I`ve asked them about it and it`s variable. So depending on your system speed you should be able to regulate the lod. Basicly the same as with Speedtree does in oblivion. Old pc lots of popping, new pc less popping, uber pc no popping enz:D.