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New Thermite demo available
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Author:  David Williams [ Sun Mar 08, 2009 1:02 pm ]
Post subject:  New Thermite demo available
Hi All,

Today I released a new demo of the Thermite 3D engine. You can get it here: http://www.thermite3d.org/releases/Thermite-March2009.zip

To summerise the changes sine the last demo:
  • New game engine framework based on Qt. I have also released the framework separately here
  • Ability to load scenes from .scene files. Only a few xml node types are currently supported, but there is an additional 'volume' xml node type to place the volumes into your scene. In the previous demo the scene and objects were hard-coded.
  • Support for sky boxes (Credit to Hazel Whorley for the one in the screenshots)
  • Support for dynamic shadows via shadow maps. This is actually turned off in the demo as it needs some work but you can see it in the castle screenshot below.
  • New Level-Of-Detail solution. Move the camera a long way back to see this in action. May still need some work!
  • A heightmap to volume converter for creating destructible lansdscapes from heightmaps.
  • Some very basic gameplay, allowing you to control a cannon and destroy the landscape.

And some new screenshots:
Image
Image
Image
Image

I have now started working with an artist with the aim of actually getting a game built from this. Some kind of turn based strategy (to keep things simple) which will hopefully be finished by the end of the year. I'll post more details on this soon...

My attention now really has to turn to the quality of the graphics. There is a lot I can do here, and I'll probably start by increasing the resolution of the volumes. They are currently 256x256x256, and my aim to to support 1024x104x1024. Also need to add VSM shadows, displacement mapping, PN-Triangles, etc...

Let me know if you have any questions or problems.
Author:  joschka12 [ Mon Mar 09, 2009 7:49 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New Thermite demo available
Hello David, and team?

is there a team, or are you the team?

Congratulations. I have downloaded the new version and started to tunnel using long distance shells. Very nice. Thank you for doing all this effort in pioneering to encounter this area of game engines.

There is a little shadow on my joy. I do not see any textures just white mountains. I'll add a screen shot to show what I am telling about.

And a brave question, maybe embarrassing me totally. What does the funny counter mean in the top left corner of the screen?

Thanks. Cheers

Attachments:
thermite 20090309 001.jpg
thermite 20090309 001.jpg [ 29.22 KiB | Viewed 7748 times ]
Author:  milliams [ Mon Mar 09, 2009 11:53 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New Thermite demo available
joschka12 wrote:
Hello David, and team?

is there a team, or are you the team?

David is the lead/only programmer on the team. There is also an artist working with him for working on Thermite itself.
I'm responsible for much of the buildsystem and Linux stuff, though at the moment Thermite doesn't build on Linux due to dependency finding issues. PolyVox works perfectly on Linux though, as should the QtOgre Framework.

joschka12 wrote:
And a brave question, maybe embarrassing me totally. What does the funny counter mean in the top left corner of the screen?

I'm fairly sure that that is a Frames Per Second counter
Author:  David Williams [ Mon Mar 09, 2009 7:48 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New Thermite demo available
milliams wrote:
I'm responsible for much of the buildsystem and Linux stuff, though at the moment Thermite doesn't build on Linux due to dependency finding issues. PolyVox works perfectly on Linux though, as should the QtOgre Framework.


Yeah, milliams does a great job on the Linux build system but I don't make it easy sometimes! As he says, PolyVox is pretty easy to build because it is a small library and has no external dependancies. Thermite is more complex because it has several dependancies (and the Ogre-Bullet I have manually tweaked) and also needs many resources (textures, shaders, etc).

Getting Thermite on Linux is probably a lot of effort for the time being, but I intend to polish PolyVox a bit over the new month and clean it up. The buld system will also be part of that.

milliams wrote:
joschka12 wrote:
And a brave question, maybe embarrassing me totally. What does the funny counter mean in the top left corner of the screen?

I'm fairly sure that that is a Frames Per Second counter


It is indeed. I'd be curious what perfomance you get and what specification your system is?

joschka12 wrote:
There is a little shadow on my joy. I do not see any textures just white mountains. I'll add a screen shot to show what I am telling about.


Did the textures show up on the previous demo here: http://www.thermite3d.org/releases/ThermitePhysicsDemo.zip ?
Author:  joschka12 [ Mon Mar 09, 2009 8:04 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New Thermite demo available
Thanks for the kind reply

I) fps
Well, ahem, the fps counter on my laptop, intel, solo T1300, 1.66Ghz, with a built in intel graphics card has five to twelve fps. (I do not dare to write the figures explicitly) nevertheless it WORKS :-).

II) Textures
No I do not even see the castle, just a few coloured balls and boxes are bouncing around.

Cheers
j
Author:  David Williams [ Mon Mar 09, 2009 8:14 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New Thermite demo available
Hmmm... I see. But 5-12 FPS is pretty painful to work with! Unfortuantly you machine is pretty low spec. I believe the shaders are simply too complex for your graphics card and are there fore unable to be used - hence a whiite material is used instead.

In the future I need to do lots of optimisations, and I will try to create simpler shaders (even just using plain colours instead of textures). In the mean time you can Open settings.ini and try a couple of things:

Create a smaller window, such as 640x480:

Code:
WindowModes=640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1360x768, FullScreen


You can also resize the window as you are using the engine.

Also, you can bring the level-of-detail distance much closer. For example:

Lod0ToLod1Boundary=64
Lod1ToLod2Boundary=128

Once you get further away than those distances, a lower resolution mesh will be used instead. this still has some issues though (you might see cracks appear).
Author:  David Williams [ Mon Mar 09, 2009 8:15 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New Thermite demo available
Oh, and can you run the really old demo? : http://www.david-williams.info/VoxelSce ... -0.0.1.zip

It's a different structure so you can't use the terrain volumes but I'm curious if the materials work...
Author:  joschka12 [ Mon Mar 09, 2009 8:27 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New Thermite demo available
Hello and thank you again for all the suggestions.

I spplied all the changes you suggested to Settings.ini file

and there are improvements
my FPS count increased to 90-120fps
my sceen is now tiny (320x240
but textures do not appear (might be the shadders)
But I am happy to learn about the engine.

Thanks again
Cheers J

Attachments:
Thermite320240.png
Thermite320240.png [ 108.57 KiB | Viewed 7719 times ]
Author:  joschka12 [ Mon Mar 09, 2009 8:33 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New Thermite demo available
Related to your other question regarding the old demo.
It runs!
I can see a room tilled green and white an two walls of bricks (brownish).

Funny enough the image displayed its turned 90° counterclockwise.

I hope this is what you expected.

Cheers
J.
Author:  David Williams [ Mon Mar 09, 2009 8:43 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New Thermite demo available
That's a much better framerate :-) But now you can try increasing LOD boundary away again, something like:

Lod0ToLod1Boundary=128
Lod1ToLod2Boundary=256

And also adjusting the resolution until you get a compromise between speed and quality. The texture issue will have to wait a while though until I get a chance to work on the material system. It's not so high on my list of priorities...

Oh, and your description of the old demo sounds about right - I was just curious is the materials worked back then. Should have looked something like this:

Image
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