Saturday, Jul 03, 2004

Textures: clearing out my browser tabs

I've had these texture-related sites open in tabs for far too long. The list:

_U N D U L A T I O N _
"Most of the textures here were created for the UT modification Real Tournament..."

t e x t u r e s
These are where to get the infamous HFX sets.

Speedy's textures
More stuff housed at planetquake.com.

JCHQ - Textures
"These collections of textures are greatly dominated by images found on the internet, rather than being the result of me sticking my head into some drawing program. In some situations, I merely collected a coherent series of textures already dedicated for use in 3D games, only here they weren't packaged in a .wad file."

Free Textures
"free seamless textures,all textures can be used for commercial and non commercial use"

The Bighouse
"So, in an effort to spread the use of custom textures from just an elite few mappers to the mapping masses as a whole, I provide this library of custom textures for your use. So for the love of god, please use them."

The Texture Studio - Free Textures For You and You!
" This site is officially closed. Everything is still available however. There is only one change. These textures are now totally free, period. I don't care where you use 'em, commercial or not. Go nuts. Just give me credit, please. "

The Wadfather - Grand Re-Opening Soon!
"The Wadfather will return in the very near future with a slick new interface and *gasp* brand new content!"

Friday, Mar 19, 2004

Answer: Blocky terrain w/ pure grayscale heightmaps

I wondered why heightfields I produced with Bryce5 were "blocky" when compared to the terrains that are included as part of the source package.

I found the spot in the source code, and now I understand why.

The relevant chunk of code is Terraformer::loadGreyscale() found in engine/editor/terraformer.cc.

The relevant computation is:

for (S32 y=0; y<blockSize; y++)
for (S32 x=0; x<blockSize; x++)
{
U8 *rgb = bmp->getAddress(x,(blockSize-1)-y);
// compute the luminance of each RGB
dst->val(x, y) = ((F32)rgb[0]) * (0.299f/256.0f) +
((F32)rgb[1]) * (0.587f/256.0f) +
((F32)rgb[2]) * (0.114f/256.0f);
}

What this means is that if you use a pure 256-level grayscale heightfield, you'll be losing (roughly) 2/3 of the precision that the terrain renderer supports.

I haven't yet figured out how to best generate 24-bit color terrains in Bryce5 that will look right in-game. I suspect that I should make my heightmap the normal way, but rather than export the greyscale bitmap from Bryce's terrain editor, I should "colorize" the terrain with pure-ambient materials, no shadows, render from the top view at 256x256, and then convert the image.

I'll have to think about this a bit...

Monday, Mar 15, 2004

a handfull of nice textures

I don't know what it says (the page isn't in English), but there are a few nice textures here.

Mr. Furniture's 3D models & Textures

Mr. Cad has a bunch of free/non-free models with a definite "interior theme." You can find them here.

Some semi-useable building textures

You can find them here. Most have some serious skew, but it looks like they could be the base of some workable textures.

Friday, Mar 12, 2004

SpiralGraphics "Genetica"

Genetica looks like a great procedural texture maker from SprialGraphics.

I tried the demo, and the presets are quite nifty. I could see how this would be somewhat easier to use than, say, perverting Bryce 5's procedural texture editor into your workflow.

I wish there was a Mac version...

Toob's Tiled Textures

Another collection of high-quality textures: Toob's Tiled Textures.

I like the look of this stuff, too.

3000 Seamless Textures from Texturemonk.com

While searching the web for free textures that I could use to get me started, I kept bumping into Texturemonk.

Their stuff looks pretty good, and it looks like a good deal.

Pandromeda's MojoWorld Generator

I had forgotten about Pandromeda's MojoWorld Generator. It was written (I think) by one of the guys that brought Bryce to life.

So that's another $249 to spend...

DigitalFlux Entertainment's mapExporter

It looks like you can now purchase DigitalFlux Entertainment's mapExporter. It's an exporter for gameSpace 1.5.

It might be worth it to blow $269 on gamespace and another $20 on the exporter from DigitalFlux to avoid having to use QuArK... Hmmm...

Some Free 3D Models

I stumbled across a free model collection at ACKNEX Unlimited. Looks like they have some free textures too.

Thursday, Feb 26, 2004

Milkshape Animation Sequence Helper

"MASH is a tool designed to make a difficult job easy for Milkshape modellers working with the Torque engine. It allows you to work on animations seperately to the main model as long as the skeleton does not change. You can build and perfect your individiual sequences as seperate files based on your original skeleton then once you're ready, you can bundle them altogether into a single milkshape file."

Radiosity for Torque interiors

TGERad appears to be a post-processing tool for performing better lighting calculations on .map files (perhaps on .dif?).

Thursday, Feb 05, 2004

arcade-style 2D/3D shooter mods for Torque

I wanted to try to make a simple 2D or 3D style arcade game (think asteroids3d, or noiz2sa, or IKARUGA, or demonstar), but it seems that out-of-the-box torque doesn't do quite what I want. This post documents the list of things I need to study to get a grip on what I want to do.

Shapes, Items, NPC's and Bots

The article entitled "Moveable, Destroyable, Mission Area Aware ITEMS" at garagegames.com presents as simple set of changes (and recent, too!) to the Projectile and Item classes so that you can shoot at and destroy items.

"Object moving along path" describes a new object named "DynamicShape" that allows objects to move along a path (spline/linear & one-shot or looping), and handle path and animation triggering.

"How to get silly bots into a level" is a short tutorial that may be terribly out of date (from Feb 16, 2002), but contains some good reference material.

Zero-G and Space

"Dynamic and Individualized Gravity" by Chris Evans.

"Space Environment code" by Wendell Brown.

I tried removing the terrain block, and that more or less worked and the player fell as expected. Unfortunately, the mission editor barfs badly when saving a mission that does not contain a terrain.

Players, Vechicles, Etc.

There's still lots of reading material to sift through and get a handle on.

Commentary

There's a great deal to like about Torque...

I'm having some difficulty trying to find the right taxonomy for these things:

  • environmentals (trees, rocks, animals, buildings),
  • particles
  • power-ups
  • projectiles
  • dynamic environmentals (moving cars, asteroids)
  • bots
  • players

Trying not to think about what these things are, but rather what they do is probably more productive.

Examples:

environmentals inhibit other entities from being within the same volume, the volume they occupy is usually fixed, and they cannot be damaged. They could be animated and moving in place (ie, a flag on a flag pole).

particles are often used in ways that mimic (to some extent) moving environmentals. They react with portions of the environment.

power-ups allow other entities to occupy the same volume, they cannot be damaged, and trigger a response when some kinds of entities attempt to occupy their volume.

projectiles deliver an attribute (often "damage") when colliding with other entities. Projectiles generally do not interact with other projectiles. One example of where a projectile could interact with a another projectile is the case of, say, an anti-missle-missle could destroy an inbound missle. Question: if a railgun shoots down an inbound rocket, is it the same thing? One could make projectiles out of particles.

dynamic environmentals move through the environment by simulated physics, by plan, or by path. The can be prevented from occupying the same volume as other entities, and they can deliver and possibly accept damage. Consider it a "super-projectile" -- and that the spinning rocks in classic asteroids really are more like projectiles than environmentals.

bots imply a potetially higher-order behaviour controlling a dynamic environmental.

Perhaps, then, the way to think about all of this with respect to Torque's abstractions, is to make two new entities: "power-up", and a generic dynamic object.

My brain is still swirling from reading so many of the articles (many I did not reference here).

Sunday, Feb 01, 2004

Why the sudden activity?

Well, I had too many browser windows open, and I needed to save off the information somewhere. I also needed to be able to get to the info from a several systems, so just putting the links in my browser bookmark window wouldn't cut it. Add to that some guilt for not having written anything here for months, and you get a flurry of updates.

Note: I've been having problems with both the CPU heatsink and the 2.5" notebook drive on this tiny box. I wonder how long it will still run. Perhaps its time to retire the beast.

renderosity.com has a large pile of links to free stuff as well (objects, textures, Bryce materials, etc.).

3D Lapidary has links to DXF models of gemstones. Cool stuff for that Bejeweled clone...

3dlinks.com maintains a huge pile of 3D-related links, including a list of free 3D objects.

I knew I could make tileable textures with Bryce, but the article from powerpix.net entitled "Create Web/Background Textures In Bryce" is about as straightforward as it gets.

There are a few good tricks referenced in the Bryce tutorial section at www.3dcafe.com. Plenty of free models in various formats, too.

Starshatter has some great visuals. Have a look at some screenshots.

Photos of my blinky LED box

As before, I've found a few photos of my blinky LED box taken by other attendees of the PDXLAN.

From jesse.net-addicts.net.

This article from the GarageGames forums has a pointer to some sample code for creating a 3D DTS and Terrain object GUI items.

Informative.

This article is an easy to read example of using the free version of LithUnwrap (download) to texture map a simple spaceship model.

Note: the newer shareware version of LithUnwrap is now called Ultimate Unwrap 3D.

From their web page: "Your low-cost source for high-quality 3D models for 3D Studio Max."

These really do look like great models for the price. Most, however, have very high poly counts, and may not be suitable for realtime use without some rework.

Check it out at www.10dollarmodels.com.

Thursday, Aug 14, 2003

Drew sent me a link to this -- I remember garagegames.com had one last year. I should go this year. October 10-12, 2003, in Eugene. Early registration cutoff ($150.00 before) is 9/19/2003 ($195 after).