Steffanp's C and C# programming blog

College project

2008-10-05T13:49:00.002+01:00

The development of Nordic Realms is currently on hold. I have just started collage (studying computer science), and need to spend most of my time on another project. It is a remote desktop system that hopefully will turn into a school project. I am focusing on two things to make this application better then the other ones on the market:

It has to work across different platforms: Windows (XP/Vista), Linux, MacOS X, Solaris and maybe Unix
It has to be very easy to use. 95% of the remote desktop systems i have tried where extremely hard to setup.

The project is coming along very well. The application can take control over Windows and Linux machines, but it is very slow and unstable. Here is a screenshot of the application, where i have taken control over my own computer. As you can see, it generates a "Tunnel effect".

Working on Nordic Realms 0.3.0

2008-07-09T03:01:00.005+01:00

I have decided not to release any more patches for the Nordic Realms tech-demo (version 0.2.x). I am currently working on the first playable (well.. Somewhat playable) version of the game (0.3.0). It will feature things like a skill system, one playable class (Warrior), a great amount of items, more NPC's, more quests, improved networking, much improved GUI, geo-mipmapping and more animations. A great 3D-artis has joined the team, but because we lack a 2D-artist, development of version 0.3.0 will go somewhat slow. Especially pixel art will be needed, so if you have experience in crafting small images, send us an email.

Nordic Realms version 0.2.1 Tech-demo released!

2008-06-28T15:34:00.001+01:00

I have released the first official version of the game. It is a tech-demo, so it will only give you an idea of how the final game will look. Hurry to the website and download it.

Since this is the first release, i have little knowledge of how the game will perform on different computers, so i would like everyone to take "The benchmark test". This test can be started by executing the game launcher, clicking "Options", and then clicking "Benchmark system". The result of the test will automatically be sent to our server.

If you find a bug in the game, please write a bug report on the forum (Crash bugs will automatically be reported to our server).

Geo-mipmapping, texture-mipmapping and animation

2008-06-20T16:22:00.002+01:00

I have currently been working on geo-mipmapping and texture-mipmapping. This is important if you want to view great distances of terrain, without using a lot of processing power. As you can see in the video bellow, this feature is not complete yet. You can switch between low level terrain and height level terrain, but this does not happen automatically, and you can only have one detail level at a time. This problem will be fixed soon. I have finally managed to get my animations to work in XNA. In the start i used Blender to animate our models, but i had a very hard time getting the animations to play in XNA. Now i use XSI MOD tool, and getting animations to play in XNA is a lot easier. Enjoy this video showing LOD (Geo-mipmapping and texture-mipmapping) and animation:

Nordic Realms video - XNA MMORPG

2008-05-11T19:53:00.006+01:00

As you know i have been working on a game called Nordic Realms (website: www.sfponline.dk). I have not invested a whole lot of time into it yet, but i am getting closer to a serious release. There is still a lot of technical stuff that needs to be done, before i can implement story and role-playing game play. The game already support a lot of things like Battle system, Quest system, NPC system so making a playable release in the next month is not unrealistic. I had made a small "tech preview release", but i removed it again since it was "illegal". Apparently you can't make an MMORPG without the permission of the Danish state (i live in Denmark). Well enjoy this video from the game. The screen "blinks" a bit, but that is just the recording software.

Announcing Nordic Realms

2008-04-01T19:26:00.006+01:00

Hi. I have been trying to create a little online RPG with my game engine (Peoples SDK), and the result is pretty good. You can't do much in the game, but so far i have mostly focused on graphics. I have created a quick website for the game (http://www.sfponline.dk), so that you can check some of the screenshots. I don't have a working demo yet, so you can only enjoy the screen's.

Peoples SDK screenshots

2008-02-21T06:27:00.013Z

Hi again.

Half a year ago, i was working on an MMO engine, which turned out to be quite good. However, in the past months i have not had time to develop it further, but now things have changed. I have improved and expanded the engine so that it now supports better terrain rendering, better material system, AI and much more. I am also renaming the engine to Peoples SDK, since it can be used for much more then just MMO's, and it is not just cold bin libraries anymore, it also contains programs like a world editor and a patch manager. I am now releasing a little eye-candy from the engine, so you can see what kind of graphics it supports. The first three screenshots are with directional lighting, and the last is with dynamic lighting:

Btw. i am tired of using the terrain textures from remiers site, so if you have some nice terrain textures you would like to share, please send them to my e-mail (steffan88@gmail.com).

3D model collision

2008-01-09T17:11:00.000Z

For a long time, 3D collision has been the biggest problem I have faced in the field of game development. XNA comes with the BoundingBox and BoundingSphere classes that provide a very fast collision solution. However, these classes do not give you very accurate collision detection when applied to 3D models, because they do not check each triangle in the model.

The solution to this problem is writing a CollisionMesh class. This class will be will be used to check Model vs. Model collision, using the model’s triangles.

However, the kind of collision checking is very costly, so it is important to minimize the amount of times we use this method. We can do this by using the BoundingBox class, to check if two models are even close to each other. If model1 and model2’s bounding boxes don’t collide, there is no reason to make the very costly triangle collision test.

Also, it is a good idea to use a low-poly version of you 3D model for collision testing, depending on how accurate your collision needs to be.

For a concrete example of this collision theory, download this sample. Here is a short walkthrough, on how to use the CollisionMesh class:

Creating a CollisionMesh is very simple:

Model MyModel = Content.Load<Model>("MyModel");
CollisionMesh collisionMesh;
collisionMesh = CollisionMesh.FromModel(MyModel, Vector3.Zero, Vector3.Zero);
CollisionMesh.RefreshMatrix();

After this, use the following code to check if a movment with the movmentVector, will result in a collision:

Vector3 movmentVector = new Vector3(1,0,0);
bool result = collisionMesh.Move(movmentVector, otherCollisionMesh);
collisionMesh.RefreshMatrix();

Making a Real Time Strategy game

2007-12-19T12:24:00.001Z

I am currently making an RTS from scratch using visual C# 2005 and XNA GSE 2.0. I will be sharing some of the experience I get while working on this project, so if you are interested in RTS development, you should check out this blog. Here is a list of things that will be talking about in my blog, but don’t be surprised if other things pop out.

Advanced world editor
Binary level format

Terrain rendering

Terrain culling

3D modelling

Unit AI

Dynamic 3D Path finding

Networking (using System.Net)

This is not an “RTS ONLY” blog, so you might see other XNA related stuff as well. If you are new to XNA and C#, I can recommend Riemers XNA tutorials, XNA creators club (They have great code samples) and Ziggyware (for the latest XNA news)