Life goes on
Posted on November 10, 2005
| Sascha
One of the bigger things that have been finished was the Direct X .X fileloader. After creating some complex objects and scenes and importing them into the PlayGround, I noticed that lighting wasn’t looking like it should and so I added a small debug-function to the X-loader for outputting the vertex normals into the vertex color to see if normals were loaded correct. And guess what? I forgot to multiply the normals by the rotation part of the meshes’ matrix, which caused them to point into wrong directions.
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Porting the NewtonPlayGround
Posted on October 10, 2005
| Sascha
Porting small demos (like the SDL-Newton demos) is something trivial, but porting such a big application like the NewtonPlayGround is a rather hard and also time-consuming task, so I’ll have to put some thoughts into this before making decissions that I later on may regret. Porting it to other OS’es than Win32 was initially not on my list, but Dominique Louis pointed out that I should use SDL to start with porting, but sadly that’s not the only thing that needs to be done.
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Springtime
Posted on October 5, 2005
| Sascha
…is gladly over as I prefer winter. But the title is there to describe the latest addition to the NewtonPlayGround, namely Springs. Implementing them was rather easy, and I took my informations on springforces from this article. Right now there are only unlimited springs in, but I also plan on implementing limited springs. If you’re interested, you can see a video of the newly added springs here (1.75 MBytes, WMV). Depending on how you use them they give some nice, unpredictable (at least for humans) results that make for some great fun.
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Cel Shading
Posted on October 3, 2005
| Sascha
Some time back I already did two demos on cel-shading, which is an easy to implement technique to give a whole scene a comic-like look. It’s especially good-looking on scenes that aren’t too complex and incoroprate mainly basic primitives. So I decided to put this render mode into the NewtonPlayGround : As you can see when comparing the two shots (Well, in case you didn’t realize it : the left one has cel-shading on, the right one not) cel-shading really gives that scene some unique and interesting touch.
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Newton's new Vehicle Container
Posted on September 29, 2005
| Sascha
It has long been promised and finally it’s gonna happen : Newton’s overhauled vehicle container is on the way. And luckily I’m an SDK developer, so I already have access to the new beta SDK and implemented it directly into my current build of the NewtonPlayGround. And with one word : awesome. The container prior to 1.35 was not only inflexible but also very hard to configure. Creating vehicles with a stiff suspension was almost impossible and getting a vehicle to react the way you wanted it to react often took hours of testing and tweaking.
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NewtonPlayGround again and Dawn of War Addon
Posted on September 23, 2005
| Sascha
So yesterday I finally finished getting motorized and limited joints to work in my NewtonPlayGround. This means that hinges and universals can now not only be motorized but they also can be limited and the motor then will change it’s direction after one of the limits is reached. This is especially interesting for creating complexer walkers which e.g. have a walk cycle. So on a quick test I put together a humanoid walker that almost walks on two legs using those motorized and limited joints.
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It's walking
Posted on September 19, 2005
| Sascha
As a follow-up to my last post where I showed you a first version of a more complex walker I was building using the newly implemented features for my PlayGround I now have a video (WMV, 2.7 MBytes) of a more simple walker walking around.
Due to a bug in the current beta of Newton, the legs of the other more complex walker won’t work as supposed, so I just created this more simple walker and will start getting the other one to walk as soon as this bug is corrected (Julio, the main head behind NGD already is working on it.
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What I'm currently working on
Posted on September 14, 2005
| Sascha
I had some hours to spare recently, so I decided to put in some new features into my NewtonPlayGround. Some of you know that tool, it’s an app for showing off what the Newton Game Dynamics engine is capable off. It allows the user to create it’s own scene (even very complex ones) and play around with them, save them and even pass them around. The version currently in the makings will be released shortly after NGD 1.
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Growing up with and shaping up an API
Posted on September 7, 2005
| Sascha
This is something I wanted to get out for some time now : When I first found out about the Newton Game Dynamics SDK it was a fresh physics SDK around the block and much stuff was lacking (although it already was very impressive in terms of how it calculated physics). So I saw an opportunity to not only create demos and stuff for a very new API, but also to help shaping up and evolving with that API.
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