NEW Spacescape gets HDR, OSX and more

Version 0.5 of Spacescape has been released -  Download it!

If you were waiting for Spacescape to run on OSX, your wait is over! Not only is it over, Spacescape got some requested features that are really cool.

v0.5 FEATURE LIST

• Support for OSX
• HDR mode for working in high dynamic range and exporting 32bit per channel .exr or .dds skybox images.  Also allows for using HDR billboards (.exr)
• Import billboard data file to manually specify billboard positions, brightness, distance and  colour
• More export options! Export now adds support for UNREAL (3d cube map with correct rotations and .dds output), UNITY (correct naming), SOURCE (correct naming and .tga output)
• Debug box option for those trying to determine the orientation of the exported skybox faces for importing into a different engine
• Converted billboard file field to support a browse button so you can choose any file on your computer instead of having to put them in the media/materials/textures folder

About this HDR thing..

You can thank the good folks at NVidia Demos for financing the addition for a recent demo they released!  You can see part of the Spacescape generated HDR starfield with actual star values, positions, brightness values, colours and some generated nebulas around 6:54.

It's really cool, but for most games you'll probably stick with non-HDR because you just don't need the extra data.  HDR skyboxes are cool when you want to accurately adjust the exposure in your game for, say, a daytime scene when the stars are not visible because the atmosphere is so bright, and then as night comes and the atmosphere is no longer bright the stars become visible.  Keep in mind a few things:

1. Use HDR billboards in .exr format or the outlines of your billboard stars will get too blown out as you adjust the exposure.  Some sample .exr billboards are included in the app or you can make your own in Gimp or Photoshop.
2. Use the new HDR Power field to push most of your stars into the background if you are using randomly generated star positions, otherwise use a data file.
3. If you use a data file to specify star data, the input is a csv file that requires an X, Y, Z, ABSMAG, and DISTANCE.  All these values are based on actual star data and there is a sample data.csv file with a few constellations in it in the Files section of project.  You can also find a massive star database at http://www.astronexus.com/hyg
4. Use HDR Multiplier to make background stars and nebulas really faint and near stars bright
5. A good range for HDR brightness values is between 0 and 10, even though the colour values for stars is from 0 to 255, when in HDR mode those numbers are actually converted to the 0 to 1 range then the HDR power function is applied and the result is multiplied by the HDR multiplier.

There's lots left to do

And that's an understatement.   Spacescape is nothing like the final tool I want it to be. I want to implement a simple mode for non-wizards, and a skybox library - a way to share skyboxes from within the app amongst many other things.  I'd also like improve the way layer masks work and possibly add terrain and planets!

Kickstarter?

To add all the features I want would take a lot of time.  I was only able to add in these recent features because Nvidia was able to help pay for those hours.  So I'm considering putting up a kickstarter or indiegogo project to get the other features funded.  Maybe nobody will notice? On the other hand, Spacescape has been downloaded 41,000 times since I posted it in 2010.

3D Puzzle Game "PZL" Released!

Back in, oh, last year I threw together a game for Ludum Dare 26 called "Puzzle Cube" that was built entirely on Ogre3D.   Shortly after, I ported that game to iOS and showed it to a friend who really encouraged me to develop it into a full-on mobile game with levels, scores, and everything. Since then I've made 30 code commits and added a bunch of features and levels and released it on the iTunes Store  under the official name PZL.  Dayum.

"IT'S LIKE SOME KINDA FRIKIN MAZE"

Well actually, in PZL you control a glowing blue orb that starts at the base of the puzzle tower.  Each level of the tower can be rotated so you can move the blue orb up till you reach the end of the level - and eventually the top of the tower.  Along the way you'll discover tunnels through the puzzle, prizes, and monsters to evade.

The Journey.

So how did a game that started out looking like this:

Ludum Dare 26 - PuzzleCube

Get to this?

First of all, porting to an iOS mobile device when you start out with a Windows build isn't a walk in the park.  In Windows your render loop is probably some endless while loop or frame listener.  On iOS you have an Objective C app that sets up a CADisplayLink callback on a frame interval.  The callback then manually instructs Ogre to renderOneFrame.  Then there's the matter of getting input from the keyboard, touch input, outputting audio, not to mention any kind of networking or saving to disk you might need - ouch!

Let's talk bout some of those -

Ogre3D

I used the OgreDemoApp/OgreFramework for iOS as a base so I had to refactor my initialization code so it worked with the OgreFramework.  I had to pass down some things like the scene manager, camera and window handle to my main game class.  I also decided to make my Game class a singleton mainly referenced through the OgreFramework so I could easily pass down frame render events and input events from OIS, but I probably could have architected it all differently and merged my main game class with the OgreDemoApp class.   The downside of merging would have been that I would have a lot more code in that merged class that wouldn't get used on say the Windows version.

Also, I had to remove all the OgreBites tray code and the majority of the camera manipulation so my game could control it instead.

Audio

Things got a bit hairy when I needed to expose some things to C++ code that were only available in Objective C, namely audio, keyboard input and session data (stored in NSUserDefaults).

I chose to use the SimpleAudioEngine for audio which comes from CocosDenshion (Cocos2D also uses this).  It's a really simple audio player that easily handles background and event audio.  So how do you access an Objective C class from inside game code which is written in C++?

What I did was create a GameAudio Objective C class:

The implementation file for GameAudio (named GameAudio.mm) has my functions that call the SimpleAudioEngine class like so:

To call those GameAudio functions from C++ I provide another header file called GameAudioInterface.h with headers for the functions in GameAudio.mm

Keyboard Input

WARNING HAX.  I created a GameKeyboard Objective C class with an invisible UITextField added to the main UIWindow.


Inside the implementation file I provided functions to show/hide the keyboard and called functions in my main game code when a key was pressed.  Because the game code used OIS I had to map every character to the OIS equivalent. YUCK.


Lastly, I exposed the keyboard show/hide functions in a header included in the C++ game code called

Hopefully that code saves somebody some time.

Other  Objective-C Stuff n' Thangs

OK besides audio and keyboard libraries I used NSUserDefaults to save some basic settings and the excellent Scoreoid API for saving player scores.  For those who are unaware, Scoreoid lets you save scores for free using their platform agnostic API so this means if I port the game to Android I can access the same score data in the future.

Lastly, I implemented the Chartboost SDK to serve ads.

Technology Used

Graphics Engine: Ogre3D
GUI: Gorilla
Input: OIS
Audio: SimpleAudioEngine (CocosDenshion)
Scores: Scoreoid
Animation: CppTweener
Network: AFNetworking


That pretty much about sums things up as far as the development goes.  I do plan on adding some more gameplay elements in the future if the game has enough of an audience to warrant updates.

You can download PZL via the iTunes App Store on your mobile device or click the link here:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pzl/id812626888

Thanks and enjoy!

Introducting Spacescape! A Space Skybox Creator.

Spacescape is a tool that uses Ogre to create / generate space scene skyboxes. The way it works is a camera sits inside a number of user defined layers / shells. Each layer can be a bunch of point sprites ( for stars), or a noise field (for nebulas/haze etc.) You can define how many stars you want and the color based on distance. In the screenshots I'm posting there are 7 layers. 3 of the layers are regular blue/white stars, 1 is a few red stars, 2 layers are ridged fbm noise of different colours and the 3rd layer is regular fbm noise used as a mask to make stars cluster by darkening regions of space.

This has been a really fun tool to make and I still have a lot left to do like the GUI. At present it reads in xml config files or you can use the plugin api to manipulate the skybox via code. Did I mention this will be an Ogre plugin too? I plan on releasing the plugin and tool as soon as I get a GUI and finish refactoring the save to file code.

How it works

Making a bunch of point sprites is easy. I use an Ogre::ManualObject for that with pointSprites enabled on the material.

For making the haze I create an inverted unit sphere and use a glsl shader on it that implements fbm and ridged fbm noise using Perlin's improved noise (not simplex noise). Lintfordpickle at britonia-game.com has a good explanation with code samples about how fbm and ridged fbm noise work

To create the skyboxes I just create a camera with FOV set to 90degrees and render to texture the six images of the skybox. I have it set up to render to texture the mipmap levels too, so if a user wants to save a dds file with mipmaps they can, or they can just save out the six individual images. With the Ogre plugin it will also be possible to not save out the file but just tell the plugin to create a skybox with a given config file and use it in your own application.


Here's some more images (click to enlarge - you'll need to in order to see the stars better):







A note about dithering:
I've had a tough time figuring out what to do about gradient banding with dark colors in the space backgrounds. Without some kind of dithering or noise the gradient is very obvious. You can see the banding clearly in all the videos and screenshots I've posted prior to this post. The skybox I was using before was generated with blender and spiced up in photoshop, but there was no dithering on the haze so it's really ugly. To get around this with Spacescape, I provide the option to dither a noise layer by a controllable amount and this seems to make the banding issue go away.

The plan is to use this plugin in MyFirstPlanet to let users design their own space skyboxes easily too.

Hopefully, I'll have a demo and some source code posted in the next week or so.