Squareys.Blog();

Hobby Game-Developer and CG-Artist with Blender 2.5

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Moved To My Website

Hey there! If you’re still hanging around, I am now daily blogging over on https://blog.squareys.de/ See you there! Jonathan.

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Squareys.Block(); turned 5 today! I guess this blog is now literally only about these...

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QtCreator + Clang (mingw) + Ninja?

1. Install mingw-clang like this: http://blog.johannesmp.com/2015/09/01/installing-clang-on-windows-pt3/

2. Install QtCreator 4.0.0

3. Download ninja binary and throw it into mingw32/bin

4. Start QtCreator and add a new compiler with “Compiler path” “C:\msys64\mingw32\bin\clang.exe”

5. Add a new Kit in QtCreator: Select just created compiler, select CMake Generator “CodeBlocks - Ninja”. Possibly set “CMake configuration to

``` CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER:STRING=clang++

CMAKE_C_COMPILER:STRING=clang

CMAKE_MAKE_EXECUTABLE:STRING=ninja

```

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Vhite Rabbit

Hello everybody!

Once again it has been ages since by last post. Literally.

Two posts ago, I posted about Vhite Rabbit. And here again, some shameless promotion!

I am working on a in house game engine and a demo for it. Everything virtual reality. I have a small team of artists and developers by my side and it’s really really fun how things are coming along.

I might post here every now and then (maybe as “regularly” as usual ;) ), but where you really want to go to get some news is here: Vhite Rabbit Facebook page.

Hope to see you there.

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You find that these functions are slow. That's normal.

From: https://www.opengl.org/wiki/Common_Mistakes#glGetFloatv_glGetBooleanv_glGetDoublev_glGetIntegerv

I am sorry, Oculus. But I'm not going to use you SDK Rendering and will invest another 30-60 hrs trying to replicate the ovr distortion myself.

Oculus SDK OpenGL Rendering saves most states of gl twice every frame. I didn't count, but I'm guessing that is at least 25 glGet calls per eye per frame. That's 75 * 2 * 25 = 3750 glGet calls per second, if you want to think about it that way.

I guess doing the distortion rendering myself will take alot of effort, but once it's done, I hope it will be superior in performance.

Please don't get me wrong, though: I don't think it's bad, that Oculus saves and restores states before and after doing it's gl calls. I just don't want to accept the performance loss this brings for me, also, they did forget some flags, which I would have to manually save and restore to fix my rendering with Irrlicht. 

I just don't know how or if "Direct to Rift" mode will be implementable this way. I'll tell you once I found out.

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What I have been up to.

Today I was surprised to be reminded of my tumblr blog beeing three years old now. I guess this is a good excuse to write about what I have been doing and not blogging about the last year.

Obviously I have been studying, which may have helped the inactivity alot. But also, I gathered a small team of 15 people (including me), 2D/3D artists, coders, producers/sounddesigners, and even a story writer. I wrote more than 10k lines of code for an awesome gameengine, component based in an unconventional way, but a very neat structure indeed.

We call ourselfes "Vhite Rabbit", abbreviated VR, which already says what we do ;) We have the Oculus Rift DK1 and ordered DK2 already. The engine already supports the first and the latter will require not more than maybe 5-10 lines of code. 

Honestly, getting Oculus SDK 0.3.2 rendering to work with Irrlicht required some dirty hacks, but at least it works and it works great!

If you want to follow our progress, we are currently just starting up again (most of us study, so this turns out to be more of a vacation project), but here are some links:

https://twitter.com/VhiteRabbitVR

https://www.facebook.com/VhiteRabbit

Our current project is to get a demo of the engine and our capabilities running.

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Amazing. The last year may have been the most inactive of them all.

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Quick Tip #1

In C++, compiling with MinGW-gcc:

When including headers from within a namespace, gcc output goes wild.

Don't.

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Oculus Rift - Impressions

Today I got the chance to try the Oculus Rift for the first time thanks to my University. I am very enthusiastic about VR and have been following News on Oculus Rift ever since they started on Kickstarter. So here my impressions:

First Thing I noticed was that the head mounted display was amazingly light, it looks alot heavier than it actually is.

Movement in the Rift gives you a little motion sickness at first, although it was just a slightly weird feeling in my stomach. Everything is pixely at the moment still and latency was higher than usual on what I tried, because the demo was running in the wrong mode (I didn't realize that in time), therefore also running on a ridiculously large screen.

Also, I did have black borders right and left, due to the settings not beeing adjusted to me. All in all, I guess I didn't get the full experience, it was awesome nevertheless. The stereo vision is amazing and everything looks awesome. The longer you play, the more you get emersed and forget at least a bit that you are in a virtual world. 

Walking up and down stairs the first time is like beeing on a rollercoaster. 

Things like a falling leaf or a butterfly suddenly get pretty interesting, while you would ignore such things in non-vr games. :D

I am really looking forward to the HD DevKit which I am definitely going to get.

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EpicRay: Multi-Threaded Rendering

Recently I added multi-threaded rendering support to my open source java raycasting game engine. 

The last few weeks, I was pretty busy with university stuff. If I did anything else, I optimized EpicRay. After the drop to 8fps (due to floor and ceiling textures), I optimized the rendering to go up to about 15 fps. 

This is on 800x600 resolution by the way and very system dependant, as well as dependant on how many other things are going on the computer aswell (obviously).

How much multi-threading helped in terms of framerate was actually a big surprise. I now have 60fps for world rendering (no sprite rendering implemented yet). 

EpicRay is still epic :)

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EpicRay now has correct floor and ceiling texturing! Will push to github in a few secs.

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Pywiiuse

In the last 7 days I was busy creating a Python 3.3 wrapper for the wiiuse library. 

You can now use wiimotes in Blender 2.6! :D

Check out it's Github repository here: https://github.com/Squareys/pywiiuse

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Epic Ray Floor Rendering

I did some work on Epic Ray today. I refractored the rendering system to how it was meant originally (most of the code was make-shift, just to have something on the screen). Also, there is a depthbuffer now :)

EpicRay now supports floor and ceiling color rendering (no textures just of yet), and the implementation of masked wall textures and fog are now possible! :)

As a remider: the project is open source and can be downloaded from GitHub here.

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Squareys.Blog(); turned 2 today!

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Happy Birthday, Blog!

Today my Blog turned 2! 

I'm working on a Lego Parkour II Animation by the way, so expect some content for this week ;)

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Ninjarun Preview video to show you the animations and stuff...

.. and that there actually is a game ;P

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Ninjarun Animations

After I had decided to do sprite sheets after all (of an animation generated with blender), I did 4 animations and included them into the game. 

I now have a run, takeoff/jump, fall and die animation which look rather neat! 

I will be able to show you some time. But before I'd like to do the shop and menu first.