Things Seen Through A Widescreen

Danny MacAskill - "Way Back Home"

2011-10-01T22:54:00.000+05:30

This is awesome.!

Spin - ASD

2011-08-12T17:37:00.004+05:30

Spin by ASD 1080p HQ HD 1st place @ Assembly 2011 (Completely realtime)

This is a must watch:

And visit deusmatic also sometime if you are bored :D for awesome free games!!!

www.deusmatic.com

Flash vs HTML5 (Strictly Gaming)

2011-08-03T15:32:00.007+05:30

Its been a while since my last post. This is due to the fact I like making games more than writing about what I've done or doing. So anyway, I started a little Flash game portal and was exploring ways to also support HTML5 games so that I could target Ipad users as well. However I ran into a number of bottlenecks, besides the fact that Mochi does not support serving ads on HTML5 (Forcing me to only show Google ads) which affected my monetization methods (Not a big deal 'cause I don't really give a rats ass about revenue atleast right now). I did however run into a NUMBER of technical bottle necks. SAFARI on the Ipad runs canvas at snail's pace. This really shot by blood pressure up a few notches because Steve Jobs said that Flash wasn't on IOS devices because it according to him drained battery power really fast and underperformed. This is absolute bollocks because Flash runs perfectly fine and better than that piece of shit browser Safari on a jailbroken Ipad and besides Flash runs perfectly on a myriad of mobile devices. Steve tell me, why can't iOS devices run what many devices run perfectly? There are a lot of flash games out there for free that are of substantially higher quality than most paid-for Apple appstore games. Anyway right now, HTML5 performs OK on browsers like firefox and chrome and even IE9 to a certain extent. But can I port some of my existing flash games to HTML5? Possibly but its just not worth it because HTML5 runs like shit on the IPAD and the only reason to make HTML5 games right now is if you wanted to target the IPAD, IPHONE etc. Flash runs perfectly fine on Windows, MacOS and Linux. I test my flash games on browsers on all these operating systems. MacOS performs the worst generally but then again even MacOS native games run crap compared to windows. (Ever tried Quake4 MacOS vs Quake4 windows?). I don't want to come off as a MS fanboy but with Windows 7 and DirectX 10/11 and the developement environment for windows, makes windows an outstanding platform followed by Linux. Linux is amazing too, atleast for programmers :D. Anyway I'm sticking to flash and oh, I almost forgot to mention. I started a little Flash Game portal and I'm enjoying developing.

Please visit http://www.deusmatic.com

P.S. This is not a shameless plug for my Flash game site thing :D What the hell I care if you think otherwise? :D

Still Alive!!!

2010-01-10T16:46:00.008+05:30

This post is to tell y'all that this blog ain't dead. And some nice games headed your way!

In the meanwhile, this is a must see,
for those who want to know what its about: Its a tribute to John Williams, and it has lyrics pertaining to STAR WARS!!!!!!!!! :D :D

Materials and Shaders

2008-04-11T17:19:00.004+05:30

For those of you implementing a material system, this may be useful. I'm going to share my experiences making my "uber" shader. Well to be honest, its not as "uber" as it sounds, but nevertherless, it gets the job done. I created 1 effect with all my per pixel lighting code. (CgFX, I'm using NVIDIA Cg). In that effect I simply made a permutation of passes for all the possible materials we'll be using in our game/engine. The scene manager binds the appropriate pass and efficiently batch renders everything. For example, if my material had a diffuse map, gloss map (specular map) and it was parallax mapped, then, I'd name my pass DGNP, D for diffuse, G for gloss, N for normal required, and P for height map (required for parallax mapping). So what you notice here is, all the letters in the pass' s name are in accordance with the ordering of the English Alphabet. This makes it easy for the scene manager to refer to materials based on letters.

Here are some screens, the FPS is pretty low because I had some processes and graphics applications running in the background.

Real time water demo

2008-04-08T15:20:00.006+05:30

This is a real time water demo. The waves are all layered normal mapped layers. It is based on the GPU Gems 2 article by Tiago Sousa (Crytek), titled, "Generic Refraction Simulation". The shader I wrote has a few modifications and added support for geometric waves. Anyway, see the video,

The Galaxy GeForce 8600GT Factory OC

2008-04-04T14:09:00.008+05:30

This post is dedicated towards my trusty GeForce 8600GT manufactured by Galaxy and is factory over clocked (OC). I bought this graphics card about a year and a half ago, of course, relative to the time I posted this post. Now this card has been going strong for all this time and its time I talked about it. I bought it in Chennai, India, at that time for about Rs. 9000 which is rougly $226 (USD). Which I think was a reasonable price for the time. The core clock is about 600 MHz, but what I'd like to add is "DON'T SEE SPECS". Use card specifications as a guideline, but, for the ultimate test of truth I'd suggest to run a game or two, with the graphics card/motherboard combination (motherboard is very influential in performance) or even better run a program you made that used a lot of shaders (That is if your a graphics engineer). Here are some test results for a few games, with this card and the ASUS M2N E-SLI motherboard. These aren't extensive results, just the frame rates. All games were tested on the highest possible settings with only resolution and anti aliasing varying. The frame rates were recorded using Fraps (http://www.fraps.com/). All frame rates are approximate.

Game: Doom 3

FPS: 84
Resolution: 1280x1024
Antialiasing: 2x

Game: Need for Speed: Most Wanted

FPS: 79
Resolution: 1280x1024
Antialiasing: 4x

Game: S.T.A.L.K.E.R

FPS: 39
Resolution: 1280x1024
Antialiasing: On (Unknown/Not sure/Don't remember)

Game: FarCry

FPS: 109
Resolution: 1280x1024
Antialiasing: 2x

Game: Crysis (Very High Setting)

FPS: 18
Resolution: 800x600
Antialiasing: 0x

Game: Crysis (Very High Setting)

FPS: 15
Resolution: 800x600
Antialiasing: 2x

Game: Crysis (Very High Setting)

FPS: 4 - 7
Resolution: 800x600
Antialiasing: 16x

Thats about it for now, I may post more about more games, such as Gears of War, Medal of Honour: Airborne etc. Pretty old for now, but good nonetheless.

Right now, if your a poor teenager, you can probably buy this card for about 104 USD, atleast here in India.

The card manufacturer site is: http://www.galaxytech.com/

Experiments with SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion)

2008-04-03T18:19:00.006+05:30

Its been a real long time since I last posted. So I thought I'd post something. I've been experimenting with the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO). The fancy name that was used in Martin Mittring's (Crytek) presentation "Finding Next Gen – CryEngine 2" presented at Siggraph 2007. For those of you who've had the privilege of having played Crysis on the Very High or High settings would notice some immensely cool shading on all the geometry, even though there might not have been more than 1 light in the scene. This is thanks to a crude approximation of an approximation. (Since Ambient Occlusion is in itself an approximation to the indirect lighting problem). This is called Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and is a dynamic Ambient Occlusion method which doesn't need pre processing.

I implemented SSAO in the game engine I'm working on and the results were good, but not as spectacular as I expected. I used 2 color attachments (2 render targets for those more familiar with directX) for the initial rendering of the scene. The second color attachment I used for storing ModelView transformed direction vectors to each pixel on the screen (Eye space normalized eye vectors) and in the alpha component I stored the ModelView distance. Now whats to note here is, SSAO is not only dynamic but also is applied as a post process to the scene. So you can probably add it to your HDR/DOF pass. Just recover the 3D point at that pixel and then compare it with some 3D points around that point in a hemisphere. Then apply noise.

Inigo of RGBA demoscene group explains in this page: http://rgba.scenesp.org/iq/computer/articles/ssao/ssao.htm

But for some reason his method didn't work directly for me. For example the projection he performs in his loop for the 32 hemisphere 3D points a multiplication with

vec2(.75,1.0); but I found that (.78,1.0); works precisely. Well for me atleast.
You can always try using a gaussian blurred scene texture as a replacement for the 32
iterations. It worked as well as the SSAO in Crysis but with thick white borders.
Anyway, onto screens,

Without SSAO:


With SSAO:



SSAO Contribution to the scene looks like this:



Hope this was useful, I'll probably put some screens and details about my uber
per pixel lighting shader next time, or may be some OMNI directional light sources
that cast shadows. Its pretty old, and even my implementation was done a long time
ago.

Apart from the above algorithm, I did implement SSAO with extremely good results
(similar to Crysis and twice as fast) with a gaussian texture obtained from my
bloom pass. But unfortunately I got some ugly artifacts on the border (Outlines).
If anybody manages to fix this, please tell me!

Here are some images of SSAO which uses the Gaussian texture.

I used this equation:
AmbientOcclusion(x,y) = 255 + GaussianAverage(x,y,sigma) - PixelValue(x,y)

Project Blitzkrieg

2007-10-24T12:10:00.000+05:30

Check out: http://www.projectblitzkrieg.blogspot.com/

After a long time

2007-08-12T21:19:00.000+05:30

Its been a while since I posted here. The reason being: Been very very busy. Will take too long to type about. So anyway.. enjoy eye candy. The picture demonstrates celshading

Static Library to DLL

2007-04-03T15:11:00.000+05:30

After a day's slogging over my code for the engine's static library, I finally managed to make it a DLL. Surprisingly it was real easy exporting the classes in a DLL. Just do this...

#define DLL_EXPORT __declspec(dllexport)
#define DLL_IMPORT __declspec(dllimport) //Client view

class DLL_EXPORT
{

};

But setting up VS 2005 took a bit long. That was the most annoying part. To save you any future compilation issues, never compile your release build with a debug build dll :D. Always make sure your build configuration is correct. Apart from that, the DLL works like a charm. YAY no more complete re builds after an engine update is made.

The interview with The Hindu Newspaper

2007-03-04T02:13:00.000+05:30

Due to requests from many friends to find the article that the Hindu Newspaper (Metro Plus Chennai) that was published about my team and I in 2005 while we were doing our 11th standard in Don Bosco, I took up the painstaking task to find the article in the Metro Plus articles archive.... so without further ado, here is the link,
Metro Plus, Chennai 20-07-2005

The best browser ever

2007-02-27T11:04:00.000+05:30

There are many browsers out there, but the safest perhaps is the Mozilla Firefox browser. I've been using it for quite sometime now and there have been no trojans or spyware at all on my comp. Also the Firefox browser is tremendously faster than most if not all mainstream browsers. If you don't have the firefox browser, I suggest you download it. And to make matters easier, I've provided a link above, its below the page title and the search bar. Download Firefox now directly from the link above to enjoy a better browsing experience

Fiddling with Microsoft XNA

2007-02-24T19:31:00.000+05:30

I got the Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express about 2 weeks back and it seemed pretty nice but as you would have guessed its exclusively for the C# language, which after all is a managed language. The learning curve for XNA is pretty much not steep at all and even an ordinary coder could crack out a DirectX application is just a matter of hours. Will this kind of development last? Well thats a tough question and the answer is best given by whats going to happen, but the way I look at it is that its going to be pretty beneficial to quantity but not quality. I wonder if you can make custom ASM routines in C#. The devil with all that, I'm quite sure that developing games for the XBOX 360 is going to be a very pleasant process but as a coder who's been in the trenches for quite some time, give me good old C/C++ with ASM any day.

Update to Flight Game

2007-02-19T00:23:00.000+05:30

Finally the long awaited update to the flight action game I have been building is done. Now, the target and target queue system is ready, so you can cycle through targets using the 'B' key and if its lockable, you can fire a missile. Even if no target is locked, you can still fire missiles, but they'll probably hit nothing, so there's no point in firing them right? Apart from this, the Game code has been made more OOP and the motion blur in the engine has been made a little less expensive in terms of CPU cycles. The Heads up display (which at present is just the target display) even shows enemies that are off screen. The miniature map now is textured, and the texture's resolution is 4 times less than the original map texture's resolution.
Apart from this, the AI has been slightly improved and is now kicking arse, although I haven't written the code for the AI to launch missiles, it will be done in a day or so. Stay tuned, a download-able demo is coming soon!

Collision of the balls

2007-02-11T22:55:00.000+05:30

Here is a flash physics simulation I built few months back when I was fiddling around with flash, conclusion: flash can yet still be powerful enough to make some really neat games with interactive physical simulations, it uses an euler integration method with step function (duh!) blah blah blah, anyway, here it is, note: you can drag the balls around

Edit: I've removed the flash from running within the blog environment due to some technical issues. Please click the below link to use this Flash Toy

click here to run the flash in a new page

Technical Demo of my Game Framework

2007-02-11T12:31:00.000+05:30

Since there are no instructions whatsoever in the demo (wasn't meant for public release :P), here's how to use it, (the links are at the bottom of this post)

General Instructions:
* Use the menu to disable AI for a plane so that you can control it.
* C key to change the camera
* Arrow keys for flight control, uses Inverted Y control, so down arrow key Pulls up
* Control key - Increase thrust, Shift Key - Decrease thrust
* Hold M key - To disable Mouse Stick control, releasing the latter enables Mouse Stick again
* Space - Fire cannon (cannon can aim, it shoots towards the designated mouse marker)
* Collision with terrain = destruction, so watch out
* 10 shots of cannon to destroy a plane.
* Explosions have particle system
* W/A/S/D works only in free Camera (Camera 0)

Installation:
* Download and Extract to a folder
* Download DLL's and extract to folder.
* Run the application :D

Download links:
Download Demo
Download Required DLL's

Flash Air Hockey game by Me

2007-02-10T11:58:00.000+05:30

Due to popular demand once again, I'm putting up the Flash Air Hockey game I had built just before my public exams in the 10th Standard. For some reason the controls don't respond within the blog environment, so you can always play it directly on this link,

Click here or on the image to play!

Another raytraced pic

2007-02-10T11:10:00.000+05:30

Here's a another raytraced generated image. The specialty is that, its real high resolution (for a raytraced image) . Its dimensions are 4800 x 3600 pixels. Ofcourse you get to view the high resolution image only after you click on the below, low resolution version. This image is 17.28 Mega pixels :P
UPDATE: Dang, when I uploaded the image, it got scaled down to 1600 x 1200, oh heck, guess e-Blogger Limits the uploaded image resolution. Not fare, not fare at all, it was under 8 MB to begin with.

A raytracer I built a long time ago

2007-02-10T10:47:00.000+05:30

Due to popular demand of the simulated photon experiments I conducted while still at high school, I have decided to post a raytraced image, which was generated by a raytracer I built while, again, still at school. Probably in my 11th grade. Well, without further ado, here it is...

A typical lecture at the MIT

2007-02-10T10:40:00.000+05:30

Here, the professor show cases a really neat software, that not only allows you to draw vector graphics without a mouse or other pointing device, but, also recognizes such objects and has the ability to classify them. Moreover, the system even simulates such objects in a dynamic environment, read: a 2D physical dynamics simulator.

Lens Flare in my Game Engine

2007-02-09T15:03:00.000+05:30

Here is a screen shot of my 3D game engine that I've been developing for quite some time now.

This picture shows the Lens flare feature of the game engine, with also other features, although I'm outlining the lens flare alone in this post. Will outline more features in posts to come

Moving oriented objects in 2D

2007-02-09T14:21:00.000+05:30

This is kids stuff for even the amateur games developer,
but for all those aspirants, heres how,

Let x and y be the horizontal and vertical coordinates of your object,
let its orientation be θ.

Assuming you want to displace the oriented object by r units in the direction it is
facing, then,

x = x + r * cos(θ);
y = y + r * sin(θ);

if your using a system in which y axis positive direction faces downwards, then the solution is, (which is the case with many 2D graphics systems). A good example for such a kind of API which uses this kind of 2D graphics system is Adobe Flash, formerly known as Macromedia Flash.

x = x + r * sin(θ);
y = y + r * cos(θ);

Hope this helps, till then, Happy coding!

Experiment with E Blogger

2007-02-09T12:49:00.000+05:30

This is my first experience at blogging, so I'm not even sure about the topic,
so for now, I'm sticking with my favorite hobby games development.

I will however be posting about physics, math and other experiments
I perform with the same afore mentioned topics. Mostly with games
development as theme though. Ofcourse most of these will deal with
simulation.