Game Engines Blog 4

In the past couple of weeks we managed to implement a lot of new things into our prototype. The main things we added were power-ups, AI, and we implemented the Bullet Physics engine.

The bullet physics engine was fairly simple to implement and use. One thing that we need to change though is the way the environment rigid bodies are generated. When I first implemented the engine, I just wanted to get it working. So since our first level is simple enough, I just created boxes manually and set them around the map for collision. In the future we’ll probably try to create the rigid bodies based off of meshes instead of manually. Below is some of our bullet code.

Our game, Kinetic Surge, is meant to be a multiplayer game but we implemented a simple AI for demonstration purposes. The AI just moves in random directions but that's all we really need to demonstrate our main mechanics of our game.

Lastly, we a power-up system to our game. Currently we only have 1 type of power up which gives the player a 1.2x speed boost for 5 seconds. We have 2 locations on the map where the power-ups can spawn and they spawn every 30 seconds. In the future we plan on adding more power-ups, for example like invisibility. Below is a screenshot of a power-up in our prototype.

I’m currently working on my water shaders for the homework questions. I’ll probably post more about it in next weeks blog post.

Game Engines Blog 3

For the past couple of weeks we have been learning about several things related to graphics. Some of the topics I had already learned/knew about such as deferred rendering and motion blur but I did learn about some new things. One of the new things I learned was stencil buffers. Simply put, the stencil buffer is used to limit the area of rendering.The stencil buffer can be useful in many situations such as improving shadows and reflections. I plan on looking into stencil buffers but probably not during this semester. 

I upgraded my water shaders this past week. I added vertex displacement based samples from a height map.

Now all thats missing is some cool lighting and some reflections. I plan on working on that next week to get homework out of the way. I started looking into fresnel reections and I think it shouldn't be too difficult.

In terms of GDW, development has slowed down due to the approaching deadline of the homework questions. But after the MIGS trip next week, game development should continue 100%. I'm currently working on getting first-person camera controls working and after that I'll start working on some fluid character movement.