WarmTart

kps please contact me

kps. I got a mail from you but not sure what is going on. please contact me again.

thanks

what I`m working on at the moment

a couple of pics

added a couple of pics of my terrain demo

Terrain demo

please try out the Terrain Demo If people like it, I will continue to develop it and make it into a fully playable game... possibly with multi-player

you can play here . . or view the details here

New Game demo

I`ve made a game/demo using Slick2D and I quite like it. Please take a look and tell me what you think. Play as Applet here or download the webstart here

sometimes the slick library is updated and the applet stops working. if so try the webstart, it should always work

Slick - It really is.

I`m falling in love with Slick2D. Its looking like a really nice and easy way to code 2D Java OpenGL games. Take a look at the site and see some of the awsome things they are coming up with. I wont bother you with any of my little tests at the moment as they don't currently do Slick any justice. But keep checking back, I`m gonna try to make something decent. And if that networking code turns out to be as good as the rest, and they can take care of collision detection for me...... why would I bother to use anything else :)

new laptop

I`ve gone and bought a new laptop from ebay. Hopefully it will arrive soon and I can put my plan for world donimation in place.

What is this amazing plan you ask ?

well, I want to continue with my LWJGL stuff and I plan to get into applets. Might use slick or i might just make a few applets of my own. Either way, hopefully I`ll be up and running again soon.

Lack of updates

The site has not been updated for ages, this is mainly due to the fact that although I am getting plenty of hits each day, I am getting no feedback whatsoever. OK so the LWJGL guys I have met in the IRC chatroom have been very kind and dutifully looked at each update, but the people from all over the world who are finding this humble little site via their search engines are simply coming along, reading my stuff and leaving. I can only assume that they are not finding my content of any use to them.
Well, maybe one day I will stop feeling so bitter and twisted and decide to carry on with my pathetic attempts to make the world a slightly better place through the medium of Java. Until then, see you around and thanks for reading :)

What have I been doing for the last week ???

As it currently stands, the terain demo is rendering a relatively nice terrain in a 1024*1024 point square. As I am rendering triangles, this equates to trying to render 2,093,058 (lets just call it 2 million) triangles on each render() cycle. Obviously this is too many to get any decent frame rate out of, so What can I do? Well, I started off with a little frustum culling.

Frustum culling is a great idea but it has it`s downs as well as it`s ups. you draw less polygons but you have to do quite a few checks to see which polygons you want to draw. What I am currently doing, is to split my terrain into chunks of 32*32 points giving me 1024 checks to make for each frame. This means that we may end up only drawing a half or a quarter of our polygons, but the app is making a fair number of checks in order to do this. More logically, I should probably use a quadtree and lower the number of checks that are needed.

Quadtrees are easy enough to understand (I`ve read a fair few tutorials about them), but in my opinion they aren`t too easy to implement. I have been lucky enough that Woogley went through the awful code I had and tried to help me out but finally decided to start from scratch and ended up giving me a nice, working, quadtree algo. Now, I supose, my task is to work out how to use it to reduce the number of frustum checks i am doing.

So, after i`ve lowered the number of quads to draw by optimising my frustum checks, whats next? Logic tells me that the next thing to look at is LOD (Level of Detail).

LOD comes in many shapes and sizes, brands and flavours, but deciding which to use has been my most recent nightmare. I still havent made a decision as I have come to the decision that I simply dont know enough to know which is best/easiest to implement. So what Have I done? my terrain demo is currently using the simplest, and least effective method of LOD, distance based LOD. What I`m currently doing is calculating the distance from the camera of each of my 32*32 chunks of terrain and rendering it based on this: all chunks less than 100 points away, I render all triangles: chunks less than 200 points away, I render every other triangle:less that 300 points away, render every 4th triangle:less than 400 points away, render every 8th triangle. OK, it lowers the number of quads drawn and it doesnt look too bad. but it simply isnt good enough.

I dont know of any other ways to improve performance, so I`m going to spend some time looking into these 2 issues until I can get them improved.

comments and suggestions on either Frustum culling, quadtrees or LOD very welcome. (as long as you dont get too technical, my brain is the size of a pea).

Terrain demo enters the 4th dimension

The latest update adds sound to the Terrain demo.

Gotta love the effect of the machine-gun mode paintball gun.

Hmmmm also, I`ve added a few little features to help with people with slower computers Appel. The demo will check your framerate and if your computer is pathetic, it will kill all the trees. If this still doesnt help out enough, I`ll add some code to kill off enemies 1 by 1 untill you can walk about normally(dont forget, you can press K to kill all the trees and enemies at will).