my ECE Dev Blog

[Prime_8]

cheers , was about time i sorted the shaders out with their script headers .

way easier to do now i have seen them .

~ was a distracted weekend .
 fighting NB/NF's  Bullet implementation .. was a real PITA


but after much fighting and smacking d' codes around we got a decent car rig built  (was way harder than it had to be . )

~ this has made me think i may need to add Newton , or my own link to  bullet or newton physics . I just need more. LOL

NF /NB has the best dx9 to 11 render engine i have seen fro it's class but some of the other parts are as TMC found to be lacking or buggy .

soo  ?  well i hound Matt to fix teh 6DOF constraint in NF   , or  make my like to bullet lib , or wrap up a newton C to C++. hmm sad  and ironic as i found NGC then NB/NF . LOL  now i am thinking of looking elsewhere for physics sim . LOL

any how here is pics of teh car rig working on one of Psionics cars , on my track . i added some lights and fage head lamps beams . LOL

[T_M_C]

Thats looks really cool prime.

Love the headlights effect.

Have you thought about using the ODE (open dynamics engine) for the physics.

It's what i use and is free.

It's not as feature packed as some of the commercial ones but it might be worth a look.

However i quite like the idea of NF / NB supporting several different physics engines.
Have you and the devs thought about that.
Arn't most of them C++ libraries anyway.

TMC

[fog]

Nice screenie

Have you thought about using the ODE (open dynamics engine) for the physics.

It's what i use and is free.

It's not as feature packed as some of the commercial ones but it might be worth a look.

However i quite like the idea of NF / NB supporting several different physics engines.
Have you and the devs thought about that.
Arn't most of them C++ libraries anyway.

There are a load of physics libraries now and I've no idea how they compare to each other for accuracy and feature set.  Very confusing

[T_M_C]

Yep, and i can't remember the name of it, but the one DB Pro supports, is the one Nvidia use on their cards.
I have hardware support for it on my Nvidia card.

TMC

[fog]

Yep, and i can't remember the name of it, but the one DB Pro supports, is the one Nvidia use on their cards.
I have hardware support for it on my Nvidia card.

Luckily AGK has Box2D built in so I don't need to make a choice about which to use. 

[Prime_8]

Havoc <<  is accellerated phys engine :

Newton looks good , ODE is noce and game friendly .
Bullet and Newton are 'real' high accuracy phy engines , and newton has gone opensource .


~ on a diff note ,  P3D now supports import of anything ASSIMP 2.0 could . and can save out to simple .x dx8 version , or .N3D

im's working on textures and animations support later , mainly needed static mesh support now . LOL

[T_M_C]

Cool.

Yeh, PhysX was the Nvidia phsyics engine i was thinking of.

I think thats fast becomming a standard.

TMC

[Prime_8]

ha forgot bout physx . lol yeah .

Well taking a small break form the other code bits that were ticking me off i revisited my importer and had some fun codinga  light GUI class.

it only makes buttons out of 9 textured screen quads  in  3x3 pattern . it quite automated .

supports layers all that fun stuff needed for a foux window system .

but for fun i bolted it on top of my now powered by ASSIMP 3.o  importer .

it can load just about anything ASSIMP3 can . but it stil needs a bit more love as I learn how ASSIMP does stuff internally .
LOl and how some file formats seem to have their own syntax for how they list texture names . LOL

pic shows  importer / viewer / GUI  all up and running .  LOL

This link may work . Public demo DL rar
if not i'll post it in a more public space .

[fog]

Neat.  FS Mode just seems to make the window disappear on this machine (cmd shell remains open).  FSE works fine though.

[Prime_8]

oh shit yeah one of the FS modes is broke .  lol oops my bad sorry .

I'll have a new patch up so to only allow the safe version .

i fixed the textures UV's to have texture offsets and rotations applied (baked into ) to the UV's of the meshes using them .
this makes things way more compatible.

I fixed a logic problem that prevented  sibling root level meshes form importing, and mostly fixing MSHP formats and others that do this .

i'm reaching a point that i need to increase the GUI to allow setting of import options .

~ i need to add  error catching as trying to load a invalid  target  == crash most of the time .  but this is a alpha demo .

and will make my good old friend .mshp  format  usable as a pipe rite into NF/ NB .
.x and .b3d loader is a diff algo that the native loader and thus can import .x and .b3d  NF fails on .

some more pics.

[T_M_C]

Thats neat Prime.

Have downloaded the demo but not tried it yet.

Great that your supporting Blitz3d's .b3d format though.

That could be very useful.   

TMC

[Prime_8]

yeah , b3d original not just blitz's  version is a great for real time.

NF's native B3D is the best I have seen outside of a blitz app.

Im building a plugin that will go into the NG store .  Aaron and I have been working on if for a while .
this ties into some other projects Aaron and I have decided to team up on . with ember being the long shot .
some fun thing in the short term .

[T_M_C]

Cool stuff Prime.  

TMC