Project Blitzkrieg

Check out: http://www.projectblitzkrieg.blogspot.com/

After a long time

Its been a while since I posted here. The reason being: Been very very busy. Will take too long to type about. So anyway.. enjoy eye candy. The picture demonstrates celshading

Static Library to DLL

After a day's slogging over my code for the engine's static library, I finally managed to make it a DLL. Surprisingly it was real easy exporting the classes in a DLL. Just do this...

#define DLL_EXPORT __declspec(dllexport)
#define DLL_IMPORT __declspec(dllimport) //Client view

class DLL_EXPORT
{

};

But setting up VS 2005 took a bit long. That was the most annoying part. To save you any future compilation issues, never compile your release build with a debug build dll :D. Always make sure your build configuration is correct. Apart from that, the DLL works like a charm. YAY no more complete re builds after an engine update is made.

The interview with The Hindu Newspaper

Due to requests from many friends to find the article that the Hindu Newspaper (Metro Plus Chennai) that was published about my team and I in 2005 while we were doing our 11th standard in Don Bosco, I took up the painstaking task to find the article in the Metro Plus articles archive.... so without further ado, here is the link,
Metro Plus, Chennai 20-07-2005

The best browser ever

There are many browsers out there, but the safest perhaps is the Mozilla Firefox browser. I've been using it for quite sometime now and there have been no trojans or spyware at all on my comp. Also the Firefox browser is tremendously faster than most if not all mainstream browsers. If you don't have the firefox browser, I suggest you download it. And to make matters easier, I've provided a link above, its below the page title and the search bar. Download Firefox now directly from the link above to enjoy a better browsing experience

Fiddling with Microsoft XNA

I got the Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express about 2 weeks back and it seemed pretty nice but as you would have guessed its exclusively for the C# language, which after all is a managed language. The learning curve for XNA is pretty much not steep at all and even an ordinary coder could crack out a DirectX application is just a matter of hours. Will this kind of development last? Well thats a tough question and the answer is best given by whats going to happen, but the way I look at it is that its going to be pretty beneficial to quantity but not quality. I wonder if you can make custom ASM routines in C#. The devil with all that, I'm quite sure that developing games for the XBOX 360 is going to be a very pleasant process but as a coder who's been in the trenches for quite some time, give me good old C/C++ with ASM any day.

Update to Flight Game

Finally the long awaited update to the flight action game I have been building is done. Now, the target and target queue system is ready, so you can cycle through targets using the 'B' key and if its lockable, you can fire a missile. Even if no target is locked, you can still fire missiles, but they'll probably hit nothing, so there's no point in firing them right? Apart from this, the Game code has been made more OOP and the motion blur in the engine has been made a little less expensive in terms of CPU cycles. The Heads up display (which at present is just the target display) even shows enemies that are off screen. The miniature map now is textured, and the texture's resolution is 4 times less than the original map texture's resolution.
Apart from this, the AI has been slightly improved and is now kicking arse, although I haven't written the code for the AI to launch missiles, it will be done in a day or so. Stay tuned, a download-able demo is coming soon!

Collision of the balls

Here is a flash physics simulation I built few months back when I was fiddling around with flash, conclusion: flash can yet still be powerful enough to make some really neat games with interactive physical simulations, it uses an euler integration method with step function (duh!) blah blah blah, anyway, here it is, note: you can drag the balls around

Edit: I've removed the flash from running within the blog environment due to some technical issues. Please click the below link to use this Flash Toy

click here to run the flash in a new page

Technical Demo of my Game Framework

Since there are no instructions whatsoever in the demo (wasn't meant for public release :P), here's how to use it, (the links are at the bottom of this post)

General Instructions:
* Use the menu to disable AI for a plane so that you can control it.
* C key to change the camera
* Arrow keys for flight control, uses Inverted Y control, so down arrow key Pulls up
* Control key - Increase thrust, Shift Key - Decrease thrust
* Hold M key - To disable Mouse Stick control, releasing the latter enables Mouse Stick again
* Space - Fire cannon (cannon can aim, it shoots towards the designated mouse marker)
* Collision with terrain = destruction, so watch out
* 10 shots of cannon to destroy a plane.
* Explosions have particle system
* W/A/S/D works only in free Camera (Camera 0)

Installation:
* Download and Extract to a folder
* Download DLL's and extract to folder.
* Run the application :D

Download links:
Download Demo
Download Required DLL's

Flash Air Hockey game by Me

Due to popular demand once again, I'm putting up the Flash Air Hockey game I had built just before my public exams in the 10th Standard. For some reason the controls don't respond within the blog environment, so you can always play it directly on this link,


Click here or on the image to play!

Another raytraced pic

Here's a another raytraced generated image. The specialty is that, its real high resolution (for a raytraced image) . Its dimensions are 4800 x 3600 pixels. Ofcourse you get to view the high resolution image only after you click on the below, low resolution version. This image is 17.28 Mega pixels :P
UPDATE: Dang, when I uploaded the image, it got scaled down to 1600 x 1200, oh heck, guess e-Blogger Limits the uploaded image resolution. Not fare, not fare at all, it was under 8 MB to begin with.

A raytracer I built a long time ago

Due to popular demand of the simulated photon experiments I conducted while still at high school, I have decided to post a raytraced image, which was generated by a raytracer I built while, again, still at school. Probably in my 11th grade. Well, without further ado, here it is...

A typical lecture at the MIT

Here, the professor show cases a really neat software, that not only allows you to draw vector graphics without a mouse or other pointing device, but, also recognizes such objects and has the ability to classify them. Moreover, the system even simulates such objects in a dynamic environment, read: a 2D physical dynamics simulator.

Lens Flare in my Game Engine

Here is a screen shot of my 3D game engine that I've been developing for quite some time now.

This picture shows the Lens flare feature of the game engine, with also other features, although I'm outlining the lens flare alone in this post. Will outline more features in posts to come

Moving oriented objects in 2D

This is kids stuff for even the amateur games developer,
but for all those aspirants, heres how,

Let x and y be the horizontal and vertical coordinates of your object,
let its orientation be θ.

Assuming you want to displace the oriented object by r units in the direction it is
facing, then,

x = x + r * cos(θ);
y = y + r * sin(θ);

if your using a system in which y axis positive direction faces downwards, then the solution is, (which is the case with many 2D graphics systems). A good example for such a kind of API which uses this kind of 2D graphics system is Adobe Flash, formerly known as Macromedia Flash.

x = x + r * sin(θ);
y = y + r * cos(θ);

Hope this helps, till then, Happy coding!

Experiment with E Blogger

This is my first experience at blogging, so I'm not even sure about the topic,
so for now, I'm sticking with my favorite hobby games development.

I will however be posting about physics, math and other experiments
I perform with the same afore mentioned topics. Mostly with games
development as theme though. Ofcourse most of these will deal with
simulation.