Unfortunately I think that's a bit over my skills (i.e. OpenGL 1.1 without extensions nor shaders is my top skill right now). Also I'm quite focused in Allegro.pas that needs a lot of work too (I think it is limiting my skills, but I promised I'll do it, so I must do it).
Anyway I like to see a professional engine written in (Object) Pascal. We had Gamecask but unfortunately it looks a bit dead now.
I really like to help but I don't know how.Please let us know when you have something.
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Even opinions and moral support are welcome and most definitely Allegro.pas is a worthy project to maintainyour commitment is recognized and admired! After all these years I think one of the most important skills to have when programming is dedication.
Gamecask looked great, GLScene based if I remember correctly - the level of integration with physics and the capability of the editor looked first class and the sheer amount of graphics resources available to the developers must of required some serious art skills too. I'd love to talk to the developers to understand their timetable - get any opinions or advice they might have.
I know that building my own engine and components was going to seriously slow me down rather than using GLScene but I had two motivating factors - firstly I wanted to learn how everything worked and the best way to do that is to code it yourself.
Secondly I wasn't happy with GLScene - no criticism at all - it's a great suite of components and a skilled developer can do a lot with it - I just didn't personally like the level of abstractions and general structure - I felt that that sacrificing some flexibility for higher level abstractions would of made it way more accessible and yield better performance/less class soup.
So Jink in terms of design and intent started out as a client/server focused alternative to GLScene that assumes you're going to be making games. Along with an editor and dedicated resource formats it lets you do that faster.
Let me stress that I highly recommend GLScene - it's absolutely brilliant and can do everything you want to do
Major kudos goes to the Cast II engine and its developer also - it was using and experimenting with Cast that gave birth to this engine and I owe much of my design to Cast - still fantastic and highly recommended (http://www.casteng.com/casteng/)
Last edited by phibermon; 08-09-2016 at 09:48 AM.
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.
Quite impressive. I myself also develop my own engine. Good way to learn graphics APIs and to improve ones coding. Will use this as an example of what can be achieved with Pascal
Existence is pain
Originally Posted by phibermon
Even opinions and moral support are welcome and most definitely Allegro.pas is a worthy project to maintainYou make me blush...
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Oh pshhh credit where credit is due
UPDATE :
I've setup my hackintosh again - ElCapitan has proven to be a nightmare to get working with my graphics card - in the end I had to create a custom NVCAP (a series of hex values that is queried at a low level to determine what outputs are available on a card and the priority of those outputs for use as the primary display) but now it's working. I've also setup a Mavericks install on another drive - worked instantly - go figure.
Anyway - the important point is that previous support was coded on Mountain Lion back when the maximum supported GL version was 3.2 and very buggy support at that!
Since Mavericks, OSX has supported GL4.1 (a rather laughable performance from Apple given they're still no further and they've JUST released the brand new 'Sierra') which means with the occasional alternate render-path, all engine functionality (heavy use of tessellation for Terrain rendering and my currently in development planet rendering) is working on OSX
I don't have ATI hardware except in a laptop and I'm not getting OSX running on an AMD chip any time soon so if anybody out there is running OSX with ATI hardware and would provide testing - I'd appriciate it!
Linux support is just fine with official Nvidia drivers for Linux as well as Mesa - not tried ATI or Intel cards on that platform however but can't see it being a problem - maybe some GLSL bugs that the more forgiving Nvidia drivers have allowed me to miss.
IOS and Android support are a complete mess - not really interested in spending a week or two researching the latest IOS hoops to jump through in order to support Iphones etc and I've only got GLES 2.0 support on my available android device which isn't all that great - but I've got some basic stuff compiled and running on Android 4.4 and 6.0.
For now I'm dropping IOS and Android support but will maintain the basics so it can be spun up at a later date.
Finally I've looked into Vulkan support and it's well within my grasp - unfortunately Nvidia have refused to support Fermi chips! so no way to test - lets hope ATI have been kinder and supported the chip in my laptop
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All in all it's looking good - I've closed off all current bugs and I'm well on the way to having the planet renderer up and running - so many different techniques to experiment with!
I've massively improved the portal rendering - I'm using it to cheat rendering through windows and the such on my spaceship - from inside or outside - Basically rather than spend aaaaages creating an interior and exterior design and a performance sapping culling mechanism to support the sparse layout - I'm just using a BSP scheme for the ship internals, roughly matching the shape of a ship model in the space renderer - then I slap a portal in the BSP level and one on the exterior ship and BOOM - I avoid tons of work both performance wise and 3D modelling wise - so what if the inside is actually bigger than the outside? unless you've got a tape measure you can't tell - so I simply won't add one
To test this I'm currently flying Quake1 deathmatch level 2 (the greatest map of all time) across a terrain while on the outside it's a cube - Dr Who eat your heart out.
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Developing my game by using the Engine and tools as designed is helping to refine both for the task - really looking forward to releasing some stuff so I can finally get some feedback and hopefully see it used!
Stay frosty.
Last edited by phibermon; 23-09-2016 at 10:11 PM.
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.
I would love to try but the last time I tried installing OSX on my computer it field due the fact that I'm also using AMD based CPU and based on information I managed to find on the web OSX suposingly doesn't work on AMD based CPU's. Os if you have any information about how to set up OSX on my computer I'm willing to try.
Unless this is a newer laptop I wouldn't be so optimistic. Laptop graphics drivers are unfortunately always falling behind especially those from AMD. That is the reason why I have been using unofficial drivers for my laptop graphics card. I did recently revert back to official ones since I'm no longer gaming on laptop and thus I'm more concerned by stability than performance. And unofficial drivers weren't know for rock solid stability.Finally I've looked into Vulkan support and it's well within my grasp - unfortunately Nvidia have refused to support Fermi chips! so no way to test - lets hope ATI have been kinder and supported the chip in my laptop
That is a great idea. I have seen it in several games and I was amazed how good it works.
Now combine this with a multi-world physics and you can enjoy seeing havoc happening inside the ship when it is hit by a powerful weapon or collides with something.
It is definitely possible but there's a lot of factors - support for your hard disk controller, graphics etc etc - there's some kexts that disable or emulate Intel specific extensions on AMD chips but it doesn't look like a common method, if you make the attempt I recommend aiming for a 'mavericks' install - has the GL4.1 support of later releases but has been out longer so you're more likely to find maverick specific quirks/patches online.
You're quite right - no Vulkan support from AMD on my hardware - GCN cards only (given the actual chip generations that fall either side of the line at least some of their restrictions are artificial rather than technical limitations of the hardware - but can't really blame them for pushing for newer gear - although 2+ years feels like a con on their part)
I'm guessing it's a common approach as it seemed so obvious - I had already worked on culling from one region type into another as my original design allowed regions to be embedded into others (so voxels inside a terrain allowing you to dig into the ground etc) but I thought one day "Well BSP schemes call for totally closed geometry to generate the tree - so I'm going to need some kind of portal if I want to combine them with other regions"That is a great idea. I have seen it in several games and I was amazed how good it works.
Now combine this with a multi-world physics and you can enjoy seeing havoc happening inside the ship when it is hit by a powerful weapon or collides with something.
Then I felt like a total idiot because I was a few steps away from portals for nearly everything - an excellent tool - no engine should be without!
I'm still having issues with culling from inside voxel regions, IE a random shaped cave mouth with multiple cavities looking out onto a planet. I'm currently using a stencil style approach combined with culling against the viewing frustum but it could be optimized more.
Games such as space engineers and star-made must have a technique for this but it's hard to find any information - I'm guessing an algorithm that constructs geometry from 'holes' in the voxel chunks that's used for more optimal culling or portal generation.
I'm guessing it's safe to rule out raster based techniques for constructing portals as we'd be dealing with some expensive image processing that will require a g-buffer to be rendered first.
camera frustum with a boost from stenciling is ok for now but I have to render things such as tesselated patches at full resolution as it would be too expensive to process the image for each patch to see if it's totally masked off (patches could be heavily deformed by height maps etc) so I only get to discard fragments :\
EDIT : oh yes sorry!
Or I could go one step further and take the ship axis into account or even 'sample' forces at several points and blend the applied force vector between these points for any given object - have some artificial artificial gravity on a ring space station for example.
Or a blasted hole in the side of the ship could generate forces to 'suck' objects through the hole portal into outer-space - which would be very cool - surely some game already does that by now.
Last edited by phibermon; 29-09-2016 at 01:04 PM.
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.
I guess you probably missed it but Ken Software actually decided to provide access to full source code of Space Engineers
http://blog.marekrosa.org/2015/05/sp...access_40.html
http://www.spaceengineersgame.com/mo...urce-code.html
All to increase sales. They weren't the first to use such approach as I have seen it in an older game whose name I can't remember.EDIT : oh yes sorry!
What is strange to me is that such feature is pretty rarely used in space sims.
Yes that is if you are using your own physics engine. But if you are using some other physics engine which does not support multi-world physics simulation like older versions of PhysX for instance then implementing of something like this can be quite difficult.
Also you need to consider the fact that inside your ship you would probably want to have much higher precision of physics simulation than for your ship.
In Space Engineers blasting hole or opening a door of a pressurized compartment will generate force that will push you outward if you are close but nothing dramatic. Not sure if it affects other items (don't play it a lot lately).
About a year ago I have seen a video of a tech demonstration for a game where opening and airlock could literally such things (characters, furniture, etc) out of it. Unfortunately I don't remember its name. I'm really interested to know about how much progress has been done on it since then.
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