Seif

is 644 but still getting problems. Checked the forum but seems to be a common problem with the webhosting. you get what you pay for with free webhosting :/
uploaded to another host now. let me know if it still gives you trouble.

kinuthia

Hello all. Can some one please tell me how to post a new thread in this forum.
Thanks.

MisterPoppy

Wow Seif! I gotta tell you REALLY nice work!!

What field are you taking classes in? Computer Science?

mrynit

very nice indeed! might want to work on getting the camera smoother. it seems very jerky moving around. any change you will be releasing source?

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Seif

Yeah the issue of the jerky camera is due to two reasons, the first being the low framerate I encountered when using software to capture the footage, and the second being more poor ability to control the view using Arrow keys .

I will be Adjusting the camera over the next few weeks, mainly using different method to calculate rotation which will give me better more efficient control of the camera . Also improve the mouse support with the view, I have one or two issues with it at current.
I also intend to make a third person style camera which will remain targeted and will follow a node in the scene.

I may try and get these done before i post up the source

mrynit

here is a slew of questions for you that should server as a guide to other programmers who want to try 3D

what did you use for making the models and textures?
did you do this project by your self?
how long has this taken you?
have you gotten any help form other people/ resources?
what IDE did you use?
what OS was it made on?
have you tried use it on other OSes?
what was your level of experience and knowledge of programming when you started this project?

feel free to ad any other topics

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Seif

1). The models were made using Autodesk Maya, some were made by me, but most were made by my girlfriend, who is a 3D Animator. This was largely due to a time restriction. The application is available as a free personal learning edition version, which provides all the required tools to make such models. A good free open source alternative would be blender. However, I have no idea how to use that particular application. The files of which were exported to .OBJ file format.

2). All of the project shown is completely my own work, however one did use the openGL Utility Toolset (GLUT), for creating the window and handling key input. The code has been written however, with the intention of being able to be implemented with win32, wxWidgets and SDL applications.

3). The project itself took about 4 months on and off. As I started off with no knowledge of 3D graphics before hand, during my time out of class I read up about scene management, vectors, etc and began to make basic data structures that would help me out later in the project. I also decided to look at a simple file format that one could use to model items in a 3D application, and can then use in my openGL scene. The .OBJ file format was chosen, as it provides easy to read text data of static mesh geometry. This was a bit tedious as I was spending a long time debugging for memory leaks and bugs with nothing to show for it, but it was rewarding in the end. By the time I learned a good wealth of OpenGL, It took a day to getting objects visualized on the screen, which made it all worth while. From there I made rapid progress.

4). The only help I recieved was on here querying about a phantom memory leak, which Dawei kindly prompted me on. Actual resources i used were the Red and Blue Book mentioned earlier. For the loading of the OBJ file, I searched for an OBJ File Specification on google, which came up with what I needed. For the loading of TGA ( and now BMP files ), I found the file specifications In a book I hired from the library. However I eventually found information about the file types much more accurate and up to date by finding information on the internet.

5-7). The project was made using visual studio 2005 express edition, and under windows XP / vista operating systems. It is windows specific at the moment, however I believe it is possible to use glut for Linux.

8). My level of programming is hard to say. As I have only started programming using C++ for about two years now. However, I would no longer class myself as a noobie.

Further comments I will add.

Difficulties - Memory Management when loading the geometry was a complete nightmare, but really brushed up my C++ skills. Transparency. I spent hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong with semi transparent objects as I couldnt see the objects on the other side. the lesson was to ensure you draw all other objects first, and the items that are to be transparent last!. Finally, regarding an issue with texture loading that i posted in the forums, double check the size of your structs, I found that sometimes my compiler was rounding up the bytes, so I was therefore writing in too much data, and was therefore corrupting my image data.

Recommendations - 3D maths is essential. Don't even look at the OpenGL API until you are at least comfortable with vectors. once your comfortable with 3D maths and concepts of how lighting techniques work, the API one uses for rendering, really doesn't matter.

mrynit

1. what hardware did you run/test your engine on?
2. what version of openGL did you use?
3. how hard would it be to make a game with the engine?
4. do you have any bench marks like FPS, Vertexes, Polygons
5. have you or will you implement texturing?

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Seif

Hi, sorry been away this past week. Fair ill today so apologies for any poor grammar, etc.

1. I've currently ran it on a 3Ghz Pentium 4 system with a radeon 9800 pro, and a laptop turion64 x2 1.6ghz, nvidia go6100. both with 1GB of ram, Desktop using XP, and laptop on vista home premium.

2. Not sure what version on openGL. Latest version was used on my laptop, and a slightly older one was used on my desktop.

3. Depends really. At current its more of a rendering engine, with no physics functions etc. Simple games could be made quite easily i guess if you were an experienced programmer. Geometry can be loaded and added to the scene within 2 lines of code. Theres a lot of stuff that should ideally be abstracted and made easier for the end user in its current state.

4. The room with the old geezer had about 30k polys, probably rendering about 50k polys overall as I am drawing the old man twice. runs comfortably on my main system at 30fps. A bit slower on my laptop, about 15-20. There is probably a million things i could do to optimize it in the future.

5. Yep I've used texturing. these can be loaded procedurally or from an MTL file. My texture class currently supports 24 and 32bit TGA and BMP uncompressed. Will expand on these in the future.
Will also be looking at implementing other texture mapping techniques in the future.

jan1024188

Nice work

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