Spring Cleaning & Updated Bio

I have been meaning to do this for a while, but never gotten round to it. Well more precisely other projects have always been more interesting so I pursued those instead ;) This Christmas however I decided it was about time that I finally did it.

Anyways I have finally given my bio on the About page abit of a spit shine. I originally wrote it based on my CV a long time ago and thought it deserved a little bit of love considering that it gets quite a few hits. Its all written in the third person, im not entirely sure why I decided to do it like that originally, oh well.

I have also rearranged some of my earlier work so best to give the archive a more accurate timeline.

Hxaria, Infinite Terrain [HaXe, WebGL,dat.GUI]

So I have been working on my “Terraria like Terrain” project “Hxaria” again.

Following on from the last post, I have now made it so that each particle can have its texture changed. This completes the functionality required to render each tile as a point sprite, as talked about in my previous post.

The way it works is that the entire world is recorded in a 2×2 array Tilemap. This 2×2 array holds a single Tile object for every single tile in the world:

  1. class Tile
  2. {
  3. 	public var x : Int;
  4. 	public var y : Int;
  5. 	public var type : Int;
  6.  
  7. 	public function new(x:Int, y:Int, type:Int) { this.x = x; this.y = y; this.type = type; }
  8. }

 

When the TileRenderer needs to render it asks this Tilemap for a Tile that represents that screen coordinate, the Tilemap then offsets the position due to the camera movement and returns a tile. So it looks something like:

The tile type is then passed to the shader in attribute buffers per point sprite / tile along with all the tiles which are stored on a single texture:

The shader then performs the neccessary calculations to work out what the UV coordinate in the texture. The Vertex Shader:

  1. uniform float amplitude;
  2. uniform float tileSize;
  3. uniform float texTilesWide;
  4. uniform float texTilesHigh;
  5. uniform float invTexTilesWide;
  6. uniform float invTexTilesHigh;
  7.  
  8. attribute float size;
  9. attribute vec3 customColor;
  10. attribute float tileType;
  11.  
  12. varying vec3 vColor;
  13. varying vec2 vTilePos;
  14.  
  15. void main()
  16. {
  17. 	vColor = customColor;
  18.  
  19. 	float t = floor(tileType/texTilesWide);
  20. 	vTilePos = vec2(tileType-(t*texTilesWide), t); // +(.5/tileSize)
  21.  
  22. 	gl_PointSize = size;
  23. 	gl_Position = projectionMatrix * modelViewMatrix * vec4( position, 1.0 );
  24. }

 

And the Fragment Shader:

  1. uniform vec3 color;
  2. uniform sampler2D texture;
  3. uniform float invTexTilesWide;
  4. uniform float invTexTilesHigh;
  5.  
  6. varying vec3 vColor;
  7. varying vec2 vTilePos;
  8.  
  9. void main()
  10. {
  11. 	vec2 uv = vec2( gl_PointCoord.x*invTexTilesWide + invTexTilesWide*vTilePos.x, gl_PointCoord.y*invTexTilesHigh + invTexTilesHigh*vTilePos.y);	
  12.  
  13. 	gl_FragColor = texture2D( texture, uv );
  14. }

So it works in a way very much like a raster engine. You only have to render as many particles as the screen can contain.

If the screen area moves beyond the extent of the Tilemap then more tiles are randomly generated:

The new tiles are randomly selected from 4 different types, Dirt, Gold, Diamonds and Rock. I have added some controls to the demo that allow you to tweak these values to demonstrate the random tile generation:

The UI may look familiar to people that have seen any experiments anyone who has worked with Three.js before, its the very popular dat.GUI. Its a really simple library written in javascript for creating controls that can be used to tweak experiments, perfect for me!

To get dat.GUI to work with haxe, I used the awesome Extern feature of HaXe. This means that all I have to do is provide a stub interface to dat.GUI rather than a full implementation in haXe. This is great as it allows me to rapidly begin to use the library but also have the type safety of HaXe. It didnt take long to stub out the bits of the library I needed in an extern:

  1. package dat;
  2.  
  3. /**
  4.  * ...
  5.  * @author Mike Cann
  6.  */
  7.  
  8. extern class GUI
  9. {
  10.  
  11. 	public function new(options:Dynamic) : Void;
  12. 	public function add(options:Dynamic, name:String) : GUI;
  13. 	public function name(value:String) : GUI;
  14. 	public function min(value:Float) : GUI;
  15. 	public function max(value:Float) : GUI;
  16. 	public function step(value:Float) : GUI;
  17. 	public function onFinishChange(f:Void -> Void) : GUI;
  18. 	public function listen() : GUI;
  19. }

Then I used it like:

package ;
import dat.GUI;
 
/**
 * ...
 * @author
 */
 
class GUIManager
{
	public var goldChance : Float;
	public var rockChance : Float;
	public var diamondsChance : Float;
	public var mapWidth : Int;
	public var mapHeight : Int;
 
	private var gui : GUI;
	private var game : Game;
 
	public function new(game:Game)
	{
		this.game = game;
 
		gui = new GUI( { height : 5 * 32 - 1 } );
 
		goldChance = game.tilemap.goldSpawnChance;
		rockChance = game.tilemap.rockSpawnChance;
		diamondsChance = game.tilemap.diamondsSpawnChance;
		game.tilemap.mapResized = onTilemapResized;
		mapWidth = 0;
		mapHeight = 0;
 
		gui.add(this, 'goldChance').name("Gold").min(0).max(1).step(0.001).onFinishChange(function() { game.tilemap.goldSpawnChance = goldChance; } );
		gui.add(this, 'rockChance').name("Rock").min(0).max(1).step(0.001).onFinishChange(function() { game.tilemap.rockSpawnChance = rockChance; } );
		gui.add(this, 'diamondsChance').name("Diamond").min(0).max(1).step(0.001).onFinishChange(function() { game.tilemap.diamondsSpawnChance = diamondsChance; } );
		gui.add(this, 'mapWidth').listen();
		gui.add(this, 'mapHeight').listen();
	}
 
	private function onTilemapResized(mapW:Int, mapH:Int):Void
	{
		mapWidth = mapW;
		mapHeight = mapH;
	}
}

Simples!

Anyways you can check the final result out on this page: http://mikecann.co.uk/projects/hxaria/02/
(Click and drag to move the camera about)

I have also uploaded a quick video too:

I have also uploaded the source again to my github page: https://github.com/mikecann/Hxaria
(I have also created a tag, incase the source changes in the future)

Next up, lighting!

New Blog Host & Face-lift


Just a quick post to say I have finally moved away from my old hosting on WebFusion and now im on the cheaper (and hopefully) more reliable hosting by STRATO.

Its the first time I have had hosting on a windows machine and I must say I really like it. I feel much more at home on a windows machine, I know where everything is and im more familiar in a graphical OS. I had a couple of permissions problems related to uploading new images on wordpress but a quick Google turned up this post:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/weird-permissions-with-iis7-and-uploaded-images

Apparently WordPress sticks new uploads in the c:\windows\temp directory, before it moves them to the usual \wp-content\ folder, so you have to ensure that temporary folder has the correct permissions for IIS_IUSRS too else it wont work correctly when the file is moved to the content folder.

You may also notice that I have decided to give the blog a little face-lift too with a new theme. I decided this time to go for a paid theme, as they aren’t that expensive (compared to hosting costs) and the quality and customization with paid themes are go much better than their free counterparts. I found it on the excellent themeforest site, the theme is called PixelPower.

Anyways if you find any broken links or anything off with the site then let me know!

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