Denmark on the horizon

On 29 of August at 7:30 am, I will be on a plane to Copenhagen in Denmark. For five months I will be studding at Aalborg University Copenhagen at faculty of Medialogy. Here in Poland I would start my semester in October, but in Denmark they are starting earlier - in September, so they have stolen one month of my holydays.. I will not stop working on my game. In fact now I will be working on laptop, so I could program during lectures ;). By the way, I'm really happy of my game engine, it turned to be easy to use and quite powerful. I'm definitely going to use it for my next games. I like the way how I implemented scenegraph. My previous implementations were based on the idea that every type of object had it's own scene node, for example MeshSceneNode, LightSceneNode, etc.. this time I have only one generic scene node which contains SceneObject. SceneObject can implement interfaces such as IDrawable, ISelectable, IUpdateable and so on :). For now I think that this is the best scenegraph implementation I come so far.

Camera improvement and new GUI stuff

Today I have finished adding new functionality to my camera. I'm really proud of this new feature :). When I select a planet from list or by directly clicking on it, the camera rotates around ship to show selected planet in center of screen :). Speaking of list.. I have fully working list view :). Selecting a planet also displays it's data in the information area, as you can see on screen :). In the upper left corner you can see "fly to planet" button. This is my next task to do.

Some GUI stuff

I've created some simple, but powerful gui system. Right now I have text buttons, buttons with images and text area what automatically warps text to new line and supports scrolling. Oh did I mention that I have my own cursor too?;) . GUI is implemented using Molly Rocket's Immediate GUI technique.

Drop down of FPS is because of not frustum culled planets - easy to fix in future :)

Randomness.

I'm losing my momentum of adding new features to my game.. Since a day or two (or three) I haven't added anything significant to the project. I'm striving to make myself working on some code, as a result GAWIN has gained random names generator for purposes such as naming celestial bodies. Tracking camera as I call it, is also implemented. It's centered on spaceship (a sphere right now) and you can rotate your view anyway you like. No zooming, though, I will implement it later. I have also some design plans for gui stuff. Right now I'm working on random generation of solar systems. It just generates random sized planets, but I want it to take also into account how far a planet is from the sun (to generate it's size and type of surface). After that I will probably work on gui.

Project GAWIN : 5 August

I have implemented TextSceneNode class, now I can have descriptions of planets or spaceships floating near them on the screen. I'm thinking what to do next.. should I go for gui system, random solar system generator stuff, or maybe should I implement some basic functionality of spaceships?

Recently I have discovered a blog of someone who is just like me creating the same type of game, using the same technology - Java. Well he is even in my age :P. Hmm, a friendly competition? Cooperation? All I know that he has working gui stuff, so I have better get back to work ;) Here is a link to his work : Solariad

Project GAWIN : 3 August

This day is sponsored by :
- billboards : you can see one which represents "selection" of planet
- skybox

Meanwhile my friend is working on frustum culling. Oh, yes I'm not doing this alone anymore. Remember when I said that my friend wanted to participate in development? Well, she is participating :) (yes SHE ;) ). She have implemented materials and lights already.

GAWIN : New update

This is the latest version of my game. My engine's new features are selection via OpenGL's selection buffer and support for materials. Hmm maybe I will open-source my engine someday :). What do you think? Is anyone interested in another java based game engine?