17/02/2025
Greetings fellow enthusiasts! I know many of you were waiting for some updates. Apologies for being silent for quite some time. I landed a strategic decision, to focus on development.
Today I have small but informative news. In the last year I have been invested in a entirely new renderer from ground up. I am now reaching to the stages, where I am finally rendering geometry with physics. The 3D renderer is at a academic stage, it thoroughly renders the geometry on the screen with proper perspective projection and accurate arithmetics, which showcases some general capabilities. A lot is actually going on in the background of the application. Such as TGA texture loading, OBJ model loading, physics engine integration with complete geometry interaction (static scenes and dynamic props are collidable), ini file parsing for essential configuration and now finally some fairly generic vehicle physics. All this is now written and carefully designed in C++ with OpenGL driver directly. At the moment the rendering engine supports free-space traversal with a form of a flight camera, a tracking camera, that points to the target object and most importantly a follow camera that is essential for most gameplay cases. I am extremely satisfied with this milestone, since I am now able to express my logics in a visible manner with the custom 3D rendering engine, without third party libraries. I would like to also point out, that all of my research and development so far has been based around the materials of Stanford University, Newcastle University and UC Santa Barbara. Many of the resources are extensive and informative and have crafted the path to my latest project. A custom renderer with physics capabilites.
- ~25k triangle mesh for the vehicle collider (extremely accurate)
- ~100k triangle mesh for the scene collider
- collider wireframe & point rendering
- on screen text printing (currently quite slow)
- generic 3D renderer with vertex lighting
The current use case is for the debug renderer. Since it does no image compression the output image is very sharp and a great way to detect issues early. Thanks to its minimalistic nature, its a powerhouse for a experienced developer (easy to navigate, guaranteed to work and only add the required features). Simply add your content, edit the config file, launch the application and it runs!
Alot will change from this point on, so I decided to share some progress.
I have attached a few screenshots to. Have a wonderful day!
-Ravel
