CAST II v 0.96 Released

[Mirage]

CAST II engine version 0.96 has been released.


http://www.casteng.com/screens/Trees1_sm.jpg (http://www.casteng.com/screens/Trees1.jpg)

Main new features: directional light sources with shadows, Delphi 2009 compatibility.
Unfortunately, the dll's from DirectX 8 SDK for Delphi are incompatible with D2009 so no D3DX or Direct X error details under Delphi 2009.

For shadows simple shadow maps are used. PSSM planned in the future releases. Shadow detail level can be switched as landscape and megatexture detail level with 1/2/3 keys.

Fixed an annoing problem with black landscape in Land demo.
Timer class was completely rewritten.
And other improvements.

Downloads (http://www.casteng.com/downloads.shtml)

Looking forward for feedback.:)

[chronozphere]

Cool.. That screenshot looks great. It's really vivid :yes: ;)

I don't have time to take a close look at the demo though. Might do that tomorrow. 8)

Keep it up.

[freedelphi]

Great work!

[WILL]

Very impressive! I can only imagine what you'd come up with if there was another PGD Annual. :P

[czar]

Hi

I ran your "Megatextured landscape demo" and what I see is trees, an animal and black where the landscape should be. i.e. the landscape is not being rendered.

I have recent nvidia drivers with nvidia 9600 video card, 512MB ram, directx 9.0c in windows XP.

[Wizard]

Hi, I also downloaded and tested your landscape demo but it's the same as czar indicated. I can see the animal, trees and sky but not the landscape - - it's black ???

Using Vista Ultimate.

[NecroDOME]

Impressive :)

2 questions:
1) What lighting technique do you use?
2) How did you do the shadows on the terrain? Extrude the geometry or render shadows to a texture with perspective correction?

Keep up the good work!!

[Traveler]

That looks great!
You are now front page news ;)

[Mirage]

Traveler, thanks.:)
czar, Wizard: Guys, did you followed the instructions described in readme_land.txt which comes with the demo?
Megatexture included with the demo (landbig.jp2) but as a highly compressed jp2 file which the engine can not read yet, so you should decode it first using your picture viewing software. I use Brennigs.
The instructions:
* open landbig.jp2 in any viewer with Jpeg2000 support
* save it as mega.bmp in the same folder
* delete mega.dat if exists

NecroDOME:
1. The landscape is lit using a big normal map and a small detail normal map. Other objects are using a simple FFP-based shading.
2. A classic shadow map technique used for shadows. I.e. through render to shadow texture.

WILL: It would be good to have a compo this year. ;)

[Wizard]

czar, Wizard: Guys, did you followed the instructions described in readme_land.txt which comes with the demo?


Nope :-[

Decoded with Nero Snap Viewer and it works perfectly. Excellent job! 8) It looks amazing ;D

[madwoody]

It really looks good Mirage. Great work :)

[Mirage]

Thanks. :)

[Mirage]

A small update:
An image conversion utility (imgcnv.exe) has been included with the engine as well as with Land demo.
To use the default landbig.jp2 image as megatexture just run the "init.bat" file and the image will be converted automatically.
The utility's source code is included in full SDK package (http://www.casteng.com/download/CAST2SDK.zip).
Thanks to Galfar for his amazing Vampyre Imaging Library (http://imaginglib.sourceforge.net).;)

[Mirage]

The engine has been updated.
Main new feature is .X model format support with skeletal animation.
Now CAST II supports skeletal animation.

Other objects can be attached to bones. To do this an object of class TSkeletalDummy should be created and "Base item" and "Bone index" properties set. Then all child objects will be attached to a chosen bone. A sample model with particle (fire) emitter attached to it can be found in default scene in .

This feature allows for example to put a weapon in a character's hands.

Download (http://www.casteng.com/downloads.shtml)

[WILL]

Thats excellent. Any new media to show off the new features? :)

[Mirage]

It's hard to show how animation works on screenshots.:)
A video should work but I don't try to make one yet.