Broken Computers, world records, and LBP2

I haven't been so active lately since my computer died. :( I've also been snowed in constantly so couldn't drive it to the shop for repairs, but rest assured, I will be updating regularly again in no time.

If anyone was watching or attending the IGN gaming world record event at the sony styles store, you might have seen me there! IT was great meeting everyone there and awesome witnessing the records being shattered.

I'm also almost done with my first entry into retail LittleBigPlanet 2 ... it's going to be special. :)

Foof Engine - Cheese Kung Fu, Grapes of Wrath, and cel shading!

All sorts of things going on in this update... first of all, I decide to try to give the cheese some melee moves. Yup.. MELEE MOVES! He can punch and kick and smack up a few 'nanners and... newcomers! A grape enemy that if in pursuit of Mr. Cheese will throw a grape grenade every few seconds. He also emits some grapes that go squishy when you kill him.

Also put in a rudimentary cel shading technique. Very rudimentary, first of all it clamps all lighting in bands and sort of checks for contrast in depth or normals to decide what an edge is. I sort of hacked it together independently, I'm sure there are better filters out there to find edges, but whatever! For now it works!

Also very interesting is my improved animation system... support for multiple tracks in my foof 3D format! Smooth blending between animations! Having separate bones play separate animations! Hoorah! Still needs LOADS of work.

Killer Pineapples! Foof Engine turret ish functionality...

It's been a few days since I've updated hasn't it? Well, here are a few tasty new updates: Yes, you see right. That's a killer pineapple!

So what's new here? Well, I added some functionality for one object ot be able to track another. And what else can be more perfect to test than than pineapple turrets? NOTHING!

I also made it so the little meaty gibs leave a bloodstain on the ground when they hit it. Nothing major, no new functionality there engine-wise, just kind of cool.

VIDEO HERE : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRvHW3LsDZ0

By the Broccoli in my hand...

Yes you see right. That is a flying saucer fighting a giant broccoli.

Video here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsAVcQAfC3s

What's new? Well I finally figured out what was wrong with my directional shadowmapping... embarrassing, really. I didn't realize that in orthogonal projection the z is already clamped between 0 and 1, I kept trying to divide it further by Z far... oops!

The decals are painted using a way I kind of theorized on my own, still needs work. Basically, a billboard quad is rendered and then we figure out the distance to the pixel behind it to figure out the tex coords and all that jazz. I will explain it more coherently when I have it perfected.

The bonus of this is no monkeying around with copying geometry, finding tex coords, etc. nonsense... this gives us seamless decals across all static geometry. FUN!

Foof Engine - Flying Saucers, Env Mapping, also pew pew

UFOs hate bananas

Well, I decided to work on this thing more. First of all, I changed my skybox. First it was just a cube with a sky texture being drawn before everything else. Now it's sampling a cubemap based on the eye vector, it looks much smoother, the cube distorts funny. There is also a sun that correlates to a Sun Direction variable, so it will always appear correctly in the sky and can move around dynamically. I'll show that when I have a good directional shadowmapping implementation.

Since I already have a cubemap for the sky, I can just sample it on other things to give a reflection effect. Didn't take long to implement that.

Also showing collisions between spheres and terrain (the fireballs). This is probably the first "AI" I ever actually created, if it counts... the bananas just kind of run around in circles until you shoot them and they blow up into chunks of bologna. There is no physics, they just start out flying forward in a random direction and pitch continuously downward until they disappear, I think it works well enough.

Just the pyramids and the skybox: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPR0gZpDNsw&feature=related

Pew pew, banana shoot out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwTYsc8uSUg