Category Archives: Game development

A modeler with a difference.

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Houdini.A few months back I had a friend demo me a 3D software package called Houdini from Side Effects software. Houdini is used extensively in film and movie circles and not so much in game industry, (which is dominated by 3D Max, Maya and to some extent XSI;) but mostly all big blockbuster films that have those great special effects that make you go “whoo”, “wow”, “cool” are pretty much made using this software. I am not exactly sure what my friend was working on, but it seems he was working an extension for the package and wanted some opinions on a custom file format. The thing that got me interested with Houdini was the way you work with the whole thing. It’s a little bit different from your conventional modelers (Max, Maya and XSI); in Houdini you basically do everything by combining operators. To tell you the truth I am not a great 3D artist. I have done most of the art-work in the game, yet my skills leave a lot to be desired. The only modeler I have ever worked with is Blender and you probably know Blender has a notorious and sometimes flawed reputation of being very difficult to use.

Houdini take a very different approach to 3D modeling. The reason I liked it is because it’s entire flow seems to be highly logic driven or as they say it “procedural”. This is an amazing concept and you have to actually see it to understand it fully. It has an interface that looks like a hierarchy of node graphs using which you pretty much model everything. The node-graphs create a kind of construction history which allows you go back and modify previous steps in a snap. This kind of flexibility means the overall productivity given by the software is unbelievable. It allows the artist to be as creative as he wants and at the same time also allows the entire design process to be non monotonous or in other words non-linear.

I would love to have a Houdini like software for designing a game, and I mean the entire game, with composition and everything. Having seen the software at work (, and being a 3D game engine developer,) made my mind race in 1000 different directions and I could see so many possibilities with the type of “procedural” flow. The creative potential could be enormous when applied to game creation. Now that I have looked at it, my guts tell me a procedural work-flow for any game design/creation/composition software will be a step in the right direction. Another very interesting aspect of this package is reuse. Besides the obvious benefits of a procedural type of work-flow the software encourages the use, or rather, the reuse of existing solutions and designs. This might sound like something out of a computer programming book, but it’s rather more subtle. Create a work-flow once, and then reuse it for several different solutions with minimum effort. That would be a game designer’s and an artist’s dream come true.

For those interested, there is a free learning edition called Houdini Apprentice provided by Side Effects.

Apricot: The open game.

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The Apricot game was officially announced, though the talk about the game has been going on for a long time now. I had almost forgotten about it entirely till I read the story on Gamedev today. A great initiative by the Open-Source and Blender communities on the whole I must say. I am really curious on how the team integrates CS with Blender and it’s definitely something I will be watching closely, though I don’t understand the rational behind using CS when Ogre was around. I am particularly interested in Blender-CS integration since Blender is also the modeler we are using for assets in the Doofus Game (,more here,) as well. I have particularly grown fond of it especially since the new compositing and multiple UV mapping tools were introduced. Just make it look pretty nifty, something like UnrealEd 😉 .

Blender is no doubt a good 3D modeler. Baring its unconventional interface, it has all the necessary bells and whistles needed for full-fledged game development. What the Apricot team is trying to achieve is commendable and I sincerely wish the Apricot team, “The very best of Luck” and hope we get to see a great game soon. Three cheers for Apricot! Hip hip hooray…!!!

Nintendo with an interesting Operating System.

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Nintendo has released an Operating System named ES (read translated version, original Japaneses version ) under an Open Source License. What the whole idea is behind having an OS is still unclear to me. If they were planning on having an OS for their consoles, there are other more attractive alternatives like Linux. Sony has done something on these lines by having Yellow Dog Linux run on their PS3 consoles.

The website is pretty vague and doesn’t delve too deeply into what the OS is intended for, but it’s clearly something too keep and eye on. Maybe it is just some research project. Maybe the company is still toying with the idea and wants to see what the response from the community will be, who knows.

The OS itself seems pretty interesting. The kernel seems to be written in C++ and it runs natively on x86 and QEMU. They have a port of SmallTalk programming language called Squeak. I am not sure what the intension is really, will it be used for game development on that platform? I guess there must be some way to do C++ programming as well, considering it’s x86 compatible.

Some additions to yesterday’s update.

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  • I was browsing through Visual Studio express page when my interest was drawn towards a toolkit called Game Creators GDK. The interesting thing is, it integrates with the express edition of Visual C++ and thats a little bit surprising. Or maybe not; many indie and aspiring game developers do tend to use express a lot. Just out of curiosity I did download it and the package seems to be a solid beginner level package especially since it is free. If you are a budding game developer you have to check this out. It also comes with a bunch of tutorials and extensive documentation. Yes, it’s a C++ SDK but, I didn’t delve in too deep so can’t say too much about it really.
  • I missed this one yesterday; but XNA Game Studio Beta 2.0 has been released. I tried a hand at XNA a long time back, when it was first released but never really got fully into it. It still remains a mystery why MDX was discontinued in favor of XNA. Maybe XNA is more of a complete game creation toolkit rather than a wrapper over DirectX.

Some recent news updates.

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I generally have such an entry every 2-3 months so here goes.

  • Visual Studio 2008 is here!
    Microsoft recently released Visual Studio 2008 along with the Express editions. If you are like me then head on down there and start downloading the express editions, like now!
  • Delayed but good news from AMD/ATI:
    AMD (and ATI) has/have announced the availability of the HD 3870 and 3850 range of graphics cards, widely believed to be an answer to NVIDIA’s 8800 GT and GTS range of GPUs. They are based on ATI’s new RV670 graphics chip. Just how much of a challenge will they be to the 8800 has yet too be seen, but I am guessing we could be seeing stiff competition here. Read details of the spec here and here.

    In other news, very recently AMD also released the Phenom Quad core processor, X4 and the 7940FX chipset. Again to early to say how things pan out. More details here and here.

  • Updates from NVIDIA:
    As you know NVIDIA released Cg 2.0 Beta recently. Along with that two other releases from NVIDIA just rencently; 1) PerfHUD 5.1 and, 2) though I am not working on Cuda, I know some of you are, you can grab the Cuda 1.1 beta.
  • Disappointment in the OpenGL camp.
    As announced recently OpenGL 3.0 specification is delayed due to…. oh well, lets start that again; It seems OpenGL 3.0 has had some last minute changes and the specification release was put on hold. Let me not say anything further, I don’t like getting hate mails.

Selecting a scripting engine – Part 3.

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Some more RnD on scripting languages. This is the 3rd part of the series, the first 2 parts [1] and [2]. I generally do all the RnD on this when I take time away from working on the current game or I am generally bored or stuck on a bug somewhere. This time I focused on Python again and also tried something with Squirrel. Both are very different languages and each one has different challenges to overcome. I also took a dig at something I haven’t touch before and that is C#, yes, as a scripting language.

Python:
Python is general is very good as an extension language. You could bind all your code with python and then use only python to code your entire game. Python is clearly designed as heavy duty application development language and embedding it is not what is recommended. While you could very well do so, I found it to be rater clunky and non-intuitive, that’s not to say it can’t be done. So I focused primarily on “extending” and not “embedding” while working with python. There is no real advantage or disadvantage to either method, but I rather want to carry the O2 engine in the direction of “extending” too keep the engine accessible to people who have no, or limited knowledge of C++.

This time I focused on Boost.Python more than SWIG. I haven’t benchmarked anything as yet, but I guess any overhead via bindings would mean a small (, or minuscule) decrease in speed. That doesn’t really bother me since most of the heavy duty calculation stuff will be done in the C++ libraries anyways. However what bothers me is the maintenance and scalability of the binding code. Any binding code is difficult and uninteresting work. It is something that I know programmers will hate to do and it is something that will have to be done time and again as and when the engine scales. Another thing is time. It takes ridiculously large amount of time to write large portions of binding code. That is where I think Boost.Python edges out slightly over SWIG, hello to the Py++ bindings code generator!

Apparently the code generator parses C++ code to GCC-XML and then uses the XML to generate the bindings. It seems too good to be true, but that is what it does. To be fair I have only tried a very small program with it and I have no clue about larger programs. I might try something larger with Py++ this weekend, again, maybe. However, larger projects like PythonOgre already successfully use it so I don’t think it will be too much of a problem with the O2Engine. Check out the next in the series for that.

Squirrel:
Squirrel is a lightweight language, much lighter than Python and supports all modern programming features. “Squirrel is a high level imperative/OO programming language, designed to be a powerful scripting tool that fits in the size, memory bandwidth, and real-time requirements of applications like games.” I experimented a lot with squirrel for the past couple of weeks. The language is cool, there are no two opinions to that. It is all what they say it is and more. It tastes like an embeddable language but I am sure it will do an equally good job at extension. In someways it is a lot better than python. For one it is designed to be embeddable while python is not. It has a much smaller memory footprint and, even though I have no numbers to prove, it must be faster than, or at least equal in speed to python.

The big negative part of this language is it’s bindings. Seeing the binding code will make you cringe! It is hopelessly complicated, almost impossible to understand at times. Binding even a small piece of code with about 5 classes took me over and hour, and those classes were not even extensive. I hate to think what will happen while integrating a heavily templatized game engine! For some reason the bindings have to be integrated into classes themselves and even if you did bypass that, it is not clean at all. A lot of glue code needs to be put in, too much I think. While there are binding systems like SQPlus and jkBind, bindings in Squirrel are non trivial. jkBind is particularly interesting and easier than SQPlus, but even then it misses out on functionality that is critical to extending any language. Scaling any such binding system on a large live project having multiple developers will be a nightmare.

If the binding systems were improved, Squirrel would have been my choice hands down. Having said that, I am currently not discounting any language outright. Choosing a scripting language can be tricky and my choice could very have a significant consequence in the future.

C#: (& Mono)
Ah! So I finally got around to having a go at this language. I have only tried a couple of things thus far but I am already impressed. First, C# is by no means a scripting language. OK to be clear I have never used C# before, just had some fleeting glimpses at it, but never worked on any project involving C#. It is a full fledge high level language and is very very powerful, but I bet you already knew that. Extending C++ code using the Microsoft compiler is easy, maybe not as trivial as Py++. One thing I can say for certain is C# is faster than Python. I am not so sure about Squirrel but I bet it must be a little bit faster to that as well. I won’t go into too many details just as yet because I still want to do some more testing and extending before I make some claims. So more on C# later.

In my next part of this series I will try and post some timing values. Timing values will allow for better comparisons of languages and binding systems. I will also try and post some binding code. That will just give a better overview of the task and effort required to have a binding for a language.

Cg 2.0 Beta.

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NVIDIA has released Cg 2.0 beta a few days back. I downloaded the new version including the docs and was browsing through them. What particularly interested me was the sentence “New OpenGL profiles (gp4vp, gp4gp, and gp4fp) for GeForce 8 extensions” in the features list. It’s a little bit confusing though, because the docs don’t go into how exactly to do that, or is it just some extensions. One another thing that seems a miss is how exactly to access new DirectX 10 features from Cg, or am I missing something? I don’t have a DirectX 10 compatible card so can’t test anything really, but I checked out the examples provided with the SDK and there seems to be no examples for DirectX 10.

The docs mention 2.0 is compatible with 1.5 so  I tried out some of my older test shaders written with previous versions (1.5) and they worked OK. But then again those weren’t pretty extensive.

Soft body physics with FastLSM.

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I have always been interested in soft-body physics, but this is one of those algorithms which promises to stand out of the crowd. While soft body simulations have been under considerable research, their applications to the games in general have been limited. That is due to the fact that such simulations are complex and time consuming. Simulating a lot of soft bodies at a time can be punishing to the frame rate. Th FastLSM algorithm appears to be pretty impressive in term of speed and accuracy even for a fair number of objects in the scene. However I am not so sure how it will scale to an arbitrarily complex world often encountered in a game.

I am particularly interested in soft body physics for simulation of liquids ever since I first saw soft body simulation (and that was a while back). I never got around to really “getting my hands dirty” with this stuff though. Maybe I should give it a try one of these days. I must say the authors have been extremely kind enough to give fully commented source code along with their paper. That will definitely help any aspiring candidates like me who want to implement such simulations.

Silverlight looks promising.

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Recently Microsoft released version 1.0 of it’s “cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web”, called Silverlight. Last week I had a sneak peek at the software and I was presently surprised to see that Microsoft is also developing a Linux version of the plug-in with the help of Novell, codenamed Moonlight.

As such Silverlight is just a plug-in that can deliver interactive .NET content on to your web-pages. It is particularly interesting to see where this leads to with regards to game development. Silverlight is almost certainly a challenger to Flash’s monopoly on web-based games. It offers a flexible programming model that supports javascript, .NET, and other languages, so it will particularly hit a cord with programmers that already know these languages.

Are we going to see more Silverlight based games? I am sure we will. .NET applications are very easy to build now that there are great environments like the Visual Studio, Visual Studio Express and #develop. It just means people are naturally going to build games that run on Silverlight. This software is clearly something to watch out for if you develop web-based games. I hope Microsoft offers graphics hardware acceleration in some form on the Silverlight platform. That will just be amazing.

Does Google “Ad Sense”?

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It seems like when it’s Google, they can find a marketing edge anywhere. Google is all set to take it’s advertisements for website service a step further and actually have “AdSense for Games”. Those annoying ads that fill up a website, well now will appear in your favorite games too. I doubt if major development houses or AAA games will have them, but you can pretty much expect every small indie flash games and casual games to carry some sort of Google ads very soon. Currently Google is targeting web based games, but soon plans to move to console and PC games as well. Go figure! Apparently it will work similar to the current system where developers can basically put AdSense into theirs game and advertisers can then use Google’s system to have advertisements in the game while playing it.

Advertisement in games in not new, but the entry of heavy weights like Google and Microsoft is significant. I remember Coke tried something like this once, but without too much success. However players like Microsoft and Google have the technology engines to do it right. So advertisement in games could be here to stay. If it does become a success then we could well see most game publishers get bit by the money bug sooner rather than later. It would mean a whole new method of generating cash inflow for developers and publishers alike, and that means ads in games could well be the norm of the future.

Games are essentially a interactive entertainment medium so you could see yourself interacting with the ad too. Nothing is preventing developers and designers to have innovative ways to get the player’s attention just so that they can earn an extra buck. Does this mean, our experience with games will soon be marred by ads? Well frankly I don’t know. As a player I wouldn’t want to have nagging ads in an otherwise intense gameplay. But as a developer or a publisher, I could earn an extra buck every time a player interacts with an ad. It’s essentially who wins in the end. I hope sanity prevails.

Hmm… so the next time I am fragging Stroggs on Stroggos I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see a hoarding inside the game saying, “Matrimony Online! Come Find Your Life Partner!” or “Get your degree online! No need to study, just play games!”. Or ..ooh, we could we have a Commercial-Break in a middle of a game, “HappyDent White Chewing-gum. Keeps your teeth shining white so you can see Alien HellSpawn in the Dark!”. Nice, can’t wait to see that day!