new release of gametools (1.6.0).
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This small project was a test to ensure I could delegate per-pixel process to a pixel shader. I had to map the video on a model, use an orthographic projection, and make sure the shader will properly be applied to pixels in the video. However, once I was done with the video mapping procedure, I couldn’t resist to map the video on a funnier model than the quad I was using. So here is my perturbated landscape, with a live video stream coming from a locally connected webcam. |
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When working on the Teapotware, we tried to separate the rendering from the world/scene design. We ended with a plugin based system that allowed the same scene to be rendered with Direct3D, OpenGL, or even sub-flavored renderers. The picture shows a simple scene (with only one object and one light) rendered with the our Direct3D – Toon rendering plugin. |
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At the engineering school, I worked on a raytracing renderer. It worked well, but it was full-software (not HW accelerated), and as a result, pretty slow. A couple of years later, I came up with a new idea: things could be partly accelerated with OpenGL: instead of calculating all the rays at once, the idea was to trace only a subset, and let opengl interpolate the colors between the rays. Then, once the scene/camera is still, the intermediate rays are traced, improving the quality of the overall render.
As you can see, there is no antialiasing, and the scene is not particularly impressive (a mirror on the back, a partially reflexive sphere, and a mat box). However, this is realtime. Nowadays, it could be even easier with GPGPU, but I coded this years ago, when the only thing I could use was PS 2.0. |
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I worked on this project while I was in Japan, as a freelancer. The idea was to provide a tutorial-like app, with a set of constraints: a maze was described in a file, and a maze crawler (the white shpere) had to follow a path to collect objects in the maze at a given speed. |
I also opened the source of a couple of those projects, and thanks to the teapotware, it was impressively clear and lightweight. For instance, the whole videomapped landscape project contains less than 180 lines of code.
I’ve recently (about 2 month ago) decided to remove the dust of the teapotware. There are things that can clearly be improved (the memory manager for instance), and even the design of some classes/interfaces can be discussed. On the other hand, the purpose of the library remains the same: to provide a robust crossplatform library applied to multimedia. I’m afraid I can’t give any release date yet (my weekends are pretty short these days), but it shouldn’t take that long.
A short post to announce the new homepage of teapot-studio. It’ll be a better place than here to propose and talk about the tools we develop. The website still needs a bit of fixing, but it should be done soon.
Kudos to Emeline for the design and the integration (responsive design, no less!). I’ll soon move every download links there, so you’d better check it out if you’re interested in gametools or SLS.
On the technical point of view, I deployed a CDN to enhance the performances of the website. It’s a bit overkill for a small website such as this one, but it was the occasion to get used to AWS CloudFront. And it indeed improves the performances. (the actual server is still available with org.teapot-studio.com). DNS settings were a bit touchy, but it seems to work well.
More about it soon!
TexturesPack is a set of ready-to-use diffuse textures, particularly convenient for games. The idea is to provide the widest set of textures for indie game developers, in order to reduce the time spent to search for textures.
All textures are 512×512 and seamless. And as usual, we are really looking for your feedback. Do not hesitate to ask for more textures.
An online sampler is available here:HERE
This product set is released with a “Pay What You Want” license model.
If you decide to acquire a license, you will pay what you think it’s worth. The download instructions will be sent to your email address. (it may take a couple of days). The paypal donation system is what fit the best this model. Donations below 1 euros will be considered as sponsoring, and will not grant you a license.
Months after the initial release of gametools, I am very pleased to announce the release of the 1.5 version.
What changed? Not much, but a lot in the same time. The biggest modification was in the XNB support. Files are now parsed directly, not loaded in an XNA app to extract things. As a result, many limitations of the 1.0 version were fixed. (loading an asset on a different platform or with different profile for instance). It changed a lot the architecture of GXView. GXView is more stable, and a wider selection of XNB is viewable.
SpriteFont and Audio can now be previewed/extracted! And I expect to be able to load/extract 3D models and cubemaps really soon.
HMEdit can now generate normal maps (here above). So the tool is not only dedicated to landscape generation, but can help you to create good looking materials.
And ScreenBuddy can now batch-create thumbnails. (Useful to create thumbnails out of a folder containing images, or to generate websites thumbnails)
The licensing terms did not change, nor the download page. I want to warmly thank every donator. It really helped to keep this project alive, and I hope you will like this new version.
The download page: here
