Cubic Interpolation

I have been working on a new waypoint system. The old one which actually used "points" did not work out for smooth navigation. For tracks with a curvy street it was necessary to place a whole lot of points for every turn, which is bad for a racing game that intends to use many curves. So I read myself into calculating Bézier Curves to create a suitable navigation system and this is what it turned out to be:

The yellow lines ar the tangents for the bezier curve. Every waypoint has four tangents which are connected in this image, that means they work as if the point had two tangents, but it is also possible to disconnect them. The dashed line is the auto calculated middle line of the street.

Then I included this system into the editor:

At the moment I try to make the AI work with the new system.

greetings

SPARKLING (no pun intended)

Hey,

I tested the selfmade engine for performance und such things, and it is even slower than the Irrlicht built-in engine :-( Because I already have to be careful of what  to pack into Magnon to not decrease performance to much I decided to instead use SPARK: A free OpenGL based particle engine wich has already been wrapped for Irrlicht. SPARK is faster than the built-in and provides much more features. However, it does not permit dynamically attatching emitters to particles (at least not yet :-P) but that's ok. The implementation for Magnon is almost complete, then the cars can have fancy dust trails and water splashes. But also fire, lighting, rain, snow, you name it. Just a matter of how much particles can be calculated without draining too much of the FPS.

Anyway, here's a pic:

You can see sparks, a thunder cloud, a tornado and some aurora-like effect.

greetings

Heyho,

I have been working on a particle engineand created a little scene that fits the date:

Everything is configured before the programm's mainloop, after that I only use the update and render functions of the system. I am still busy implementing affectors and different emitters, once that is done I will show more effects.  

Greetings & Happy New Year!

Gource

Hi,

not much text this time, just a movie:

I found this nice programm called Gource. It creates an animation from the log of an svn repository. This is the log of Magnon.

Pushing the Buttons, Flipping the Switches

Stop, Menutime!
While it was taking hours to do some gui in funracer, because I hardcoded everything myself, I now use CEGUI, which is an awesome skinable gui. Until now I have only focused on making it usable, rather than looking good. I am using a skin that is included within the CEGUI sdk. It's all grey'n'grey, yet.
Still, here are some screenshots:

The map selection menu

and this is the car menu. The menus for video-, audio- and controloptions are also fully usable.

I am still waiting for that correct motor setup for the cars, but the other programmer has started his bachelor studies, so his time is limited - again.

greetings

Along the way

Things are going well so far, I implemented rudimentary AI and waypoints. Turns out better than expected. I also finished the LoD system completly. (Yea, I said I finished it before, but you know, bugfixes and stuff takes time) Implementing the loading routine for Cars is almost finished, too. Only the shaders are missing, which is not a high priority right now. I will continue by implementing the other objects you need for a map and finally a loading routine. Coupled with the AI I could already call it a racing game. Plus most of the classes and other programming stuff is the same or at least very similar with the car handling, so most work would be copying code and make that work somehow.

After that the rest should be menu- and managementcode. The boring stuff you know, but who wants a console operated 3d racing game? (Not offending unix cracks of experts of course)

Enough code talk, graphics are another topic. However, there will be no screenshot this time. Myself being busy coding for magnon, for a competition and for my job, I have had no time to create 3d content and the modeller has not much time either since he started going to school again.

So when the gamecode is finished I suppose we have to start a content creation session.

greetings

Some boring tech going on

Hey!

I said I would change the system and I did. A few adjustments here and there and I can finally concentrate on things that really _show_ the progress.
The only thing I can do now is showing debug output to prove I did something. You can see the speed of the tires (green lines) and the stabilizer (orange/teal lines) and you would see the gravity and spring lines if the car were not covering them.
All in all it was a  lot of headache to calculate all the matrices and apply the forces correctly. 

(Yay loopings!)

Also some more feedback would be nice, I know someone is reading this blog (analytics)! We always appreciate positve ("Yay cool project") and constructive ("Yo models suck") comments ;)

greetings