Category Archives: Engine Development

Large Mesh Files

I decided to re-write the mesh load and save routines used by the engine. They were previously using a recursive algorithm, which quickly caused the stack to fill up on larger models with deep hierarchies. Running into a stack overflow … Continue reading

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Collision and Response

I’ve been hard at work implementing new intersection tests, and dealing with collision and response algorithms. Pretty tough stuff to make work correctly and smoothly under all circumstances! I’m basically breaking up an area into distinct height levels, then doing … Continue reading

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Animation Controller Scaling

Turns out I wasn’t extracting scaling properly in my 3ds Max exporter plug-in. For one thing, if the local transformation included any scaling, it could cause NAN problems to arise while converting the matrix rotations into quaternions for the keyframed … Continue reading

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Networking Code

I finally feel the game’s network code is very stable. I found a pretty major bug on Christmas day that would cause file downloads to randomly stall. It had been nagging me for a while. Of course, this severely hurt … Continue reading

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Game Server Avatar Updates

The game server finally properly handles avatar update messages. Basically, all avatars are grouped into small areas. These areas align with the land block grid system used by the terrain renderer. As a player moves in and out of a … Continue reading

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Animation System

I was planning on adding a chest that can be opened into Been There Game. However, I discovered that my keyframed animation system was not working totally correct. To deal with rotations that don’t happen around the object’s center, I … Continue reading

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Multithreaded Orion Engine

I’ve been working on making the Orion Engine more thread-safe. It’s desirable to be able to load a scene, while another is currently rendering. It turns out Direct3D 9 is not ‘thread-safe’. If you attempted to use our previous version … Continue reading

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Terrain Scene Management

The new terrain scene management features are working great! I’ve invested a lot of time and hard work to make this happen. I can now finally knock this huge milestone off the list. The custom client and server architecture is … Continue reading

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Large Scale Terrain Grid

I’ve been working on some of the scene management features for Been There Game. Mostly, I’ve been working on terrain optimization. I currently have a ROAM algorithm that works very well. It renders a one square mile chunk of land … Continue reading

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Game Client Testing

Still testing the Been There game client. I’m currently working on a minor bug that has been bothering me for a while. Other than that, things are still working out pretty well. I added a new feature to the game … Continue reading

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