The Game Progress Report #21

Posted on February 1, 2014 by James McParlane

Another video test. Playing this on a loop looking for any improvements I can make. Already have quite a few ideas to make it better.

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The Game Progress Report #20

Posted on January 19, 2014 by James McParlane

 

Sped up the video encoder by an order of magnitude.

Here are some more example encodes. Just playing with random video that I have already split out into images to put the encoder it through its paces.

Going to try it on some larger videos and work on the file/streaming format.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Game Progress Report #19

Posted on January 18, 2014 by James McParlane

Example video encoding using the hierarchical hexagon encoding.

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The Game Progress Report #18

Posted on January 16, 2014 by James McParlane

Got stuck on the train a bit longer than normal today (heatwave signal failures) and added hexagon culling to the digitizer.

So this..

13-01-2014 7-51-18 PM

Now my favourite processing from the last post looks like this (which I believe is an improvement).

16-01-2014 7-00-52 PM

If you look carefully, any sub-hexagon that does not contribute to the detail is culled, this results in an interesting effect and in the end is exactly what I was after. Some contrast is lost, but I think that’s a given seeing that I am applying an exotic ‘blur’. I’m going to generate some colour histograms later and see what spectral distortions I might be adding.

Here are some runs against some default the sample Windows ‘photos’.

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16-01-2014 6-59-49 PM 16-01-2014 6-59-31 PM

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16-01-2014 7-15-03 PM

16-01-2014 7-14-53 PM

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The Game Progress Report #17

Posted on January 15, 2014 by James McParlane

Some interesting results from the hierarchical hexagonal digitizer.

The original source image..

13-01-2014 7-51-18 PM

The closest match so far.. but a little boring.

15-01-2014 8-52-31 PM

The one I like the most – but a little dark.

15-01-2014 8-05-44 PM

They all seem to pass the squint test 🙂

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The Game Progress Report #16

Posted on January 13, 2014 by James McParlane

More work on the L-System generator/mutator/renderer.

6-01-2014 5-54-33 PM 6-01-2014 9-33-44 PM 6-01-2014 9-31-03 PM

More work on basic image display.

13-01-2014 7-51-18 PM

I can also now load hexagon patterns from Hexels via XML export files.

13-01-2014 7-52-28 PM

And the game engine can now generate hexagon bitmaps from images.

13-01-2014 7-46-30 PM

The effect I’m after with the hierarchically tessellated (regular) hexagons is going to take some more work, but it’s looking promising.

13-01-2014 7-38-17 PM

As for the Twine engine, I’m still trying to get a side project up and running to use the game’s tutorial engine which can read a subset of the Twine format. This will allow me to publish some complex Interactive Fiction.  I’m following a few leads from some Twine authors I have found online. Probably going to start a small collective of artists that can contribute to the IF production pipeline for fun and hopefully profit.

13-01-2014 8-10-24 PM

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The Game Progress Report #15

Posted on December 8, 2013 by James McParlane

Been doing some work under the hood optimising the hexagonal composition engine managed to more than quadruple the efficiency of rendering through various tricks and triangle magic and can still see plenty of room for improvement.

PSM/XNA/MonoGame don’t have good alignment Re: DrawUserIndexedPrimitives vs VertexBuffer but I seem to have coded a good compromise for now. MonoGame support is still a but patchy for PSVita but I have some patches of my own on the way.

I revamped the integration with PSVita, Xbox360, Touch Mouse and keyboard. Getting ready for some of the editing features with a hexagon selection/navigation for the main Hexagonal UI Mesh. I have a nice snappy vectoring navigation system that allows fast traversal of selections, it *feels* nice. It could still do with some tuning but works great with thumbsticks, Dpad and keyboard. 

8-12-2013 12-43-55 PM

Work on fonts and text layouts for the tutorial and and interactive fiction aspect of the engine.

8-12-2013 12-32-41 PM

Also background images for the tutorial and and interactive fiction aspect of the engine and probably for general use.

8-12-2013 1-20-43 PM

Nice to see it on the Vita too..

8-12-2013 1-42-41 PM

Next steps for the tutorial and and interactive fiction aspect is a Mass Effect style choice menu for the tutorial engine.

More work on intelligent Console hinting, hinting and auto-completion.

8-12-2013 12-30-46 PM

8-12-2013 12-34-40 PM

8-12-2013 12-51-49 PM

Dynamic Textures

8-12-2013 12-28-19 PM

Animated Textures

8-12-2013 12-29-51 PM

Compositional Textures

8-12-2013 12-33-38 PM

8-12-2013 12-39-07 PM

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The Game Progress Report #14

Posted on October 27, 2013 by James McParlane

Improved rendering model, managed to crack 60+ fps on most platforms.

Developed a culling algorithm, need to perfect it to reduce overlaps to zero which will allow me to take advantage of some nice rendering optimisations.

More work on Playstation Vita support.

15-10-2013 10-34-47 PM

Command/Help integration. This is going to be important as a lot of testing, config and resource editing will happen via the config.

27-10-2013 9-07-27 PM

Like ‘Little Big Planet’, The game is the content tool so I want a nice console that can be helpful. So i’m building in contextual help and auto-completion..

Everything is scriptable and thus testable via the console. I can simulate mouse clicks and navigation through a sequence of console commands,

27-10-2013 9-17-17 PM 27-10-2013 9-08-32 PM 27-10-2013 9-07-57 PM

 

Starting working on a fancy font rendering system for the tutorial/story mode.

Working under Windows and PS Vita.

27-10-2013 9-59-11 PM 27-10-2013 10-06-46 PM

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The Game Progress Report #13

Posted on October 15, 2013 by James McParlane

Port to PS-Vita almost complete.

I have some general mouse/touch multi-modal inputs to complete but the rendering port is almost complete.

Image

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The Game Progress Report #12

Posted on September 30, 2013 by James McParlane

This pulls together a few mini updates.

In the last few months, (apart from moving house for the first time in 11 years.)

I have…

Ported the game engine to Xbox360

22-08-2013 8-41-05 PM

iOS

4-08-2013 8-59-21 PM

OSX

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And a partial port to the PSVita.

4-09-2013 10-11-35 PM

It looks like I am going to need to do some rewiring of my core graphics scheduler both as a general optimisation and to provide support for the PSVita.

As I mentioned in previous posts I have been working on adding Twine support so that I can use Twine for tutorials. To achieve this I have written a mini JavaScript expression interpreter to support the expressions in some of the Twine macros.

So a story authored in Twine..

29-09-2013 5-43-05 PM

Which can be exported as a HTML/JavaScript via Twee using TiddlyWiki

29-09-2013 5-50-45 PM

Can have its source exported..

29-09-2013 5-38-44 PM

And can be edited in Sublime Text

29-09-2013 6-21-59 PM

Note that it has syntax highlighting because of a Sublime Text 2 syntax highlighting extension I have developed.

And auto-completion 🙂

29-09-2013 7-03-58 PM

The script can then be executed in my Twine interpreter…

29-09-2013 6-01-44 PM

Which I am now integrating with my graphics engine..

So as a bit of a side track project to test out the engine and the whole process of modern game publishing, I’m going to publish some interactive fiction using the tutorial engine.

The core Twine engine uses IOC (No mean feat on the Xbox360) so the plan is that I will be able to extend it by injecting macros and features into it from the core game engine.

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